jamesprimate on June 03, 2015, 05:53:03 AM (Last Edit: June 03, 2015, 06:36:47 AM):

thx thx thx we very much appreciate the encouragement! yep, its the alpha (or one of the many many alphas at least). if you bought it a while ago, might be worth using the humble key resender to see if there is a new version up: https://www.humblebundle.com/resender

one of the reasons we've been pretty quiet about posting pre-order links, etc, is that doing all the customer service stuff associated with it is a HUGE time sink, and we just dont have time to do it properly right now. So sorry if thats a nuisance for anyone!

that build was done for pax east, so is around 3 months old. i did a playtesting event with it last night (since its still the most stable), and man is it weird to demo old builds! all i wanted to do was show off the buggy new stuff, but alas its not ready for public consumption yet. E3 build is going to be quite a quantum leap of advancement. Joar is on a dev rampage!

Oh and just to spice things up a *tiny bit* from our boring text posts, Joar did a bunch of new procedural plants recently to give the region flora some diversity. These climbing vines from shadow urban are some of my favorites:


detail: https://i.imgur.com/WFIDwTg.png

jamesprimate on June 03, 2015, 05:58:42 PM:

i think were just showing at the adult swim booth and indiemix? idk, ive been so busy with dev i havent been keeping up on the business end tbh.  similarly, neither Joar or myself will be *actually physically* going to E3. too much work to do and we're saving our budget for actually finishing this thing rather than flights to LA and hotels!

yeah were boring, i know

JLJac on June 03, 2015, 11:44:15 PM:

Check out this weird plant!

JLJac on June 04, 2015, 01:23:42 PM:

Update 433

Working on visuals. How do you guys feel about this? Better?

JLJac on June 05, 2015, 12:00:32 AM:

Thanks for the feedback guys! The darker palette is because I'm doing a thing where "inside" or "underground" rooms have an alternative darker palette, but I might have gone a bit too far with that. When it comes to how "clean" it is, that's a weird balance; obviously I want it to be an image of a dirty place, but it should be a visually clean image of a dirty place haha!

I tried taking your comments into consideration and came up with this, what do you think?

JLJac on June 05, 2015, 12:31:09 AM:

Slightly subtler still:

JLJac on June 05, 2015, 12:54:45 PM:

Thanks tortoiseandcrow for the very well thought through and argued opinion. When you make the comparisons like that I actually get a bit of cold feet. I really do want some dirt and stuff though, and the graffiti was an important world building aspect to me. I wanted to use it to set a tone and to tell little bits about the world, perhaps. Your input makes me realize that I have to think about it more though, I can't just slap it on top or I risk ruining what I already have.

Maybe placement could play a part? Maybe it's preferable for decals (be it dirt or graffiti or rust or other) to be confined to some sort of definable geometrical object rather than existing everywhere as an ambient?

jamesprimate on June 05, 2015, 02:43:41 PM (Last Edit: June 05, 2015, 02:54:11 PM):

i havent been posting because tortiseandcrow keeps making all my points for me XD

we've been discussing this all in depth the past few days and i think a good part of the problem is that the layout and structure of the test room just isnt really suitable for what joar wants to do with the large graffiti. when i did these rooms originally i wasnt taking into consideration the yet-to-be-built decal editor, so i saturated them with interesting visual elements so they could stand on their own. trying to just slap a decal on now isnt going to work, as its just competing for attention with the structure, lighting, effects, depth, tile work, etc etc. Its not the graffiti itself, its how its used in this context that looks off. I think everybody would agree this looks awesome:



the obvious solution from my perspective is to work in some new rooms that take into consideration the graffiti visual element so we can nail that look, and then add a bunch of smaller graf element details to surrounding rooms to tie it all together. The suburban region specifically has a lot of re-working to be done, and even an entire sub-region to add, so this is all part of the visual polish plan really! And this doesnt mean "here is a randomly convenient wall for graffiti", but more just some rooms that aren't already so visually saturated so we can get the look for the graf elements nice and tight without 30 layers of clutter getting in the way.


We both agree that this is something worth spending some time to fuss with and get right, so considering the rush were in to get an E3 build put together, were thinking that now is probably not the right time to dive too deep into all that. so... TO BE CONTINUED! next posts will be all about boring technical things like getting slugcats to stand on poles better, soooorry

JLJac on June 06, 2015, 10:37:27 AM:

Placing sound triggers, placing sound triggers, placing sound triggers...

@hypedupdawg, nah, not really possible, the level images are created by the level editor and then rendered to a static texture. One of the big technical hold backs we're constantly fighting with!

@Jimym GIMBERT, whatever built this place had two distinct alphabets, as you can see in the neon signs. The graffiti generally uses stylized versions of the same alphabets. I'm going to include some typographic graffiti because I like the look of it, but there'll also be some graffiti that is more "out there", such as the big spleen or whatever in that picture James posted. I want to explore that direction more, to create that sense of "why the hell would someone draw this!?" in order to further make you empathize with the slugcat's semi-animal nature; it can understand that the signs and images convey some sort of meaning, but can only have a very dim and confused grasp of what that meaning would be.

jamesprimate on June 06, 2015, 11:37:57 AM (Last Edit: June 06, 2015, 12:10:41 PM):

YES. the "techno mayan / aztec" design influence is something weve discussed a lot, and have plans to go more explicitly in that direction for future regions. good catch and gooooood glyphs!





OH WOW, good link, that game looks incredible O_O im getting it immediately

JLJac on June 07, 2015, 12:40:11 AM:

Remember this?



Don't really know, the mayan stuff was pretty cool but doing a switch would mean replacing a looooooot of assets. I think James' enthusiasm would be curbed  by the outlook of having to re-render every room with a neon sign in it (which amounts to... every room) >__<

I already have two fictional alphabets going, and I absolutely won't introduce a third without cutting one or both of the old ones out. They were however made sort of quickly, a long time ago, for a game I imagined would be a month long side project... So maybe it is actually time to switch them up. It wouldn't need to be too harrowing, as I could just replace the neon sign assets but have the same names for them, and then they'll be naturally replaced as the rooms are re-rendered for touchups without us really having to do anything manually. That assumes that we'll re-render every room at least once more, which I think is probably the case. Otherwise there's a mass render function in the editor. So, it'd be annoying, but it's not entirely out.

Here are the current two alphabets:



And here's a piece of graffiti with the letters clarified:



One thing I could do to get a tribal/mayan vibe going without replacing the alphabets, is to work more with the pictographical "proto-comic" sort of layout many ancient cultures seem to have employed. Like, images that are in some sort of chronological sequence with small bits of text flowing in and out of it. That could be really interesting to mix up with a graffiti aesthetic!

JLJac on June 07, 2015, 03:02:56 AM:

Update 434

I got tired of water in dark areas just being a black blob, so I got started on some darkness+water+light source interactions. First, a surface reflection:



And an underwater light source shader. This one is probably gonna get its fair share of tuning, just like the ordinary light source shader already has.



I'm digging the "beaming" quality of it, but it's a little too blurry and fuzzy to go with RW's art style, that will have to be straightened up somehow. But a good start :D

Yay shaders!

jamesprimate on June 07, 2015, 08:53:56 AM:

LOL, I didn't mean REPLACE ALL CURRENT ASSETS, just move in that direction for new assets when we do the stone heads subregion 

Love the new darkness water shader though!!!

jamesprimate on June 07, 2015, 12:11:25 PM (Last Edit: June 07, 2015, 12:17:08 PM):

Joar has mentioned the palette fades a few times, so i figured its time to show a bit of whats going on with that. this is a first pass at the transition into the shadow urban region:





this example could still use some work to the blends, the sunlit rooms could use to be toned down a bit (there is a whole little subregion devoted to that look), but it seems like the palette toolset is going to have a big impact! in polish phase i plan on going back and adding subtle touches of this through all the regions to indicate things like depth/height, inside/outside, and blend the palette transitions between the regions a little. im really looking forward to it!


edit: ehhhh, youtube image compression is totally borking the fades and introducing weird colors / artifacts. they are WAYYYY more subtle than that in game. but you get the idea.

jamesprimate on June 07, 2015, 02:43:19 PM:

these are both some of the fascinating mysteries to be solved in the upcoming new game Rain World™!

sorry, I forgot there was an embargo on SH region stuff for a reason 

jamesprimate on June 08, 2015, 09:51:23 AM:

i love this, especially the descriptions. cheers hypeupdawg

JLJac on June 09, 2015, 02:26:37 AM:

@adge hi, welcome! Yeah those pillars are perfect  Protruding spirals is such a horribly complex shape, though... I might give it a try :D

Update 435

Secondary light and light oversaturation:



Quite happy with how the bounce-off light brings out the depth in the room 

Also, have I mentioned that I've been developing this snazzy dev interface?





The bounce-off light works by placing ambient light sources where the light hits. You can see that the lights are "environment" - this means that they will pick up their color from the environment they're placed on, and "Sun", this means that they understand to fade in and out with the sun.

Some lights are the same as the old light sources you've already seen, but some lights are "flat", which means that they're basically just a radial gradient rendered on top of everything looking a bit like a lens flare or a bloom effect. However they're rendered below the sunlight oversaturation shader, which makes for some interesting interactions.

jamesprimate on June 09, 2015, 11:26:44 PM:

ah! yeah the rain world email has been going nuts because of it. as far as we (and adult swim) know, its just randomly there?

not entirely incorrect though; it is "coming soon", relatively speaking, for instance, compared to the heat death of the universe etc etc. gabe is just playing the long game

JLJac on June 10, 2015, 09:59:28 AM:

Update 436

A flare ... fruit? thing that you might get your hands on in the dark regions.



These have the benefit of allowing you to get a split second of vision on a frustrating dark room, and can also be used offensively. Deep dwellers that are shy of light are obviously not going to be big fans, and also I think it could be fun if ordinary creatures such as lizards could be rendered blind temporarily or permanently.

JLJac on June 11, 2015, 01:22:23 PM:

@adge, thanks a lot :D I'll try to make something inspired by that next time I get around to making assets. The resolution will be a problem so I'll probably have to go pretty big. We have a region planned with some more tribal stuff, where I think some big columns etc would fit right in.

@Teod, I think of it as a chemical fire/light emission, similar to when you put flame to magnesium or something. But again, cartoon world 

@tortoiseandcrow, when I implement enemy hearing I will also give their vision some tuning and combine those into a little Stealth Push. Right now vision is entirely binary - for a creature with a limited cone of vision it does that dot product check, some creatures have a distance cap, and then it checks if there's terrain in the way - but all of these are either YES or NO and it needs all YES's to get a visual. My idea for what I want to happen in the future is that a bunch of conditions will be considered as floats and combined. Such conditions could be camouflage, muddy water, and darkness. The factors should be able to interact (by multiplication or subtraction) so that you could stay hidden more easily if you're smart about it.