jamesprimate on July 28, 2015, 03:14:15 PM:

^ i think at this point it'll take that long just to explore all the rooms 

@tortoiseandcrow: i love that strip sooooo much. spot on 

JLJac on July 29, 2015, 02:09:07 PM:

Yeah the idea is that it will usually lay around sort of like a walrus, but if you get too close it shoots up on its legs

Update 460

Working on antlers... At first I tried to draw them by hand, but that looked kind of meh... Also it wouldn't allow for individual antlers for each rain deer.



So I decided to take the most difficult path possible and randomize a 3D tree shape and rotate it, hahaha 



Pretty happy with the result though! There is a few problems with disconnected branches, but the general impression is cool and it does allow for each rain deer to have a unique set of antlers

JLJac on July 29, 2015, 02:50:18 PM:

@Chromanoid, Oh that's a nice idea! I'll think about possible implementations!

@Teod, to me it seems to fit pretty well! Maybe I'll tone down the general rotation and keep it to a brief moment when it's actually turning around, but right now I'm just really happy to see it working so I'd like to look at it for a bit longer ~

Some more messing around and I found out that a bit of color difference goes a long way in conveying which horn is which, and also enables you to see that the two antlers are slightly different:

jamesprimate on July 29, 2015, 03:36:03 PM:

RW has always been 3d, or at least faux 3d:





im deeply in love with this raindeer btw. in context its going to look stunning.

jamesprimate on July 30, 2015, 12:01:04 PM:

parallax was never considered, because a key the look of the game is the forced perspective and vanishing points of the faux 3d terrain and objects. Early into the port from the old programming language, Joar considered using an effect similar to the one above to "snap to" camera points when moving from screen to screen, but it would have made level files literally 30x larger and caused all sorts of other problems for what was essentially just a 1-time "hey coooool" eye candy transition effect, so we dropped it.

But that said, all of this is perspective is actually in every level screen now, subtly transitionings to other perspectives when going through multi-screen rooms. i just choose how its framed when its rendered to give specific effects to highlight aspects of the gameplay of terrain.

its pretty hard to communicate this without seeing, so i think even a lot of long time thread readers get thrown off when we talk about it, so let me see if this helps.


detail: https://i.imgur.com/3082xt7.png

notice how you can see the tops of the platforms here, especially the square-ish ones? and the pipes with the grating on the bottom left and right point down and outwards? Thats a top down perspective to highlight the surfaces that you can jump on and set some "im on some tall precarious thing surrounded by a big fall" mood.


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

here in the bottom part of that room, everything is facing upwards to show scale: "now things are towering above me". you can see it in those same sorts of grates mid screen, but facing outward and slightly upwards. etc etc. its a subtle thing, but a totally essential aspect of the rain world look. so thats what we talk about with all this 30 layers / diorama /  perspective stuff.

JLJac on July 30, 2015, 02:02:40 PM:

Yeah I thought so too! Turns out that even in modern 3D games, you usually don't seem to run that many high-res textures where the color of each pixel down to the 256 color values must be maintained and conveyed - they do other tricks such as repeating the same texture in clever ways by for example re-coloring it. A lot of stuff happens in shaders. When researching this I came across a pretty amazing little community that made an art out of rendering super good looking 3D scenes using only shaders, basically no textures. Either they'd use some little 10*10 noise texture or something, or just generate perlin noise in the GPU. Really cool stuff!

But yep, moving about 30 (larger than) screen sized pixel perfect textures turned out to be too much for even my modern computer, at least through unity's rendering pipe line (which I have no reason to believe to be particularly bad) so we had to scrap the parallax effect. Basically everything else that is cool looking in the game since making that decision is based on our current setup (pre rendered screen per screen textures that have the depth coded into them) though , so I'm pretty happy with the trade-off!

jamesprimate on July 30, 2015, 05:33:57 PM:

@Charliecarlo: thanks!! yes for a while it was quasi-randomized, so occasionally you'd get more extreme angles, but now that i am the master of perspective  i use it sparingly for effect and keep the angles fairly consistent per region.



most certainly! working on a *huge* one right this moment actually.


it *can* be escaped, but basically a death trap.

in some of the early regions, we used the occasional "fall out of the screen pit death" for platforming challenges. but many people found this frustrating, considering that in other situations where the screen was open you could move through it. So that room above was a test of using "soft death pits", where the death is shown either due to the fall or to some gross creature lurking at the bottom. seems to work just fine, so when we get into the polish pass of the levels ill go back and turn every one of the terrestrial off-screen death pits into something like this.

note: that wont apply to sky regions such as Chimney Canopy and Sky Islands, which are supposed to be very high up

JLJac on August 02, 2015, 01:00:10 PM:

Thank you

Update 461

Big worm grass!



Contrary to the small stuff, this is not just a sticky nuisance, it's instant death 

The main difficulty here was performance - originally I thought the worm grass was just going to be here and there in small patches, but James picked up a liking for it and wanted to use it in much larger quantities, which did cause a lot of framerate issues. Also it wasn't quite dangerous enough for the huge fearsome fields he was making. The two birds with one stone solution was to make the worm grass transition to this super worm grass in larger patches, which also works a bit differently than the original worm grass - rather than tracking the pull of each worm it works tile by tile, creating a more classic gamey "lava" effect; basically if you fall down there you die.

We plan on making large swaying seas of this, with the rain deer striding across it. I think it's gonna look really cool!

JLJac on August 03, 2015, 10:20:54 AM:

Thank you! I really like your pixel art

Mostly by culling them if off screen, and by having the interaction be tile based rather than worm-by-worm.

Update 462

Puffball spore bombs!



Let me know how horrible an art style breach you guys consider this. The low color count is maintained - it only uses 2 colors, but it uses dithering which I haven't been messing with before.

jamesprimate on August 03, 2015, 11:27:46 AM:

what fun would it be if we explained everything on the threads?

JLJac on August 05, 2015, 01:25:47 AM (Last Edit: August 05, 2015, 01:39:48 AM):

Yeah, the puffballs can be used as a smoke screen:



It's sort of doubtful how useful that'd be though, as they make a sound when they pop so a lizard that isn't aware of you would be made aware by you throwing it. Maybe in some situation when hunted by a lizard you could plant one and take to a side corridor to confuse it, but that's a pretty specific situation. Any little advantage you can get, though!

However, that's not their main purpose  Sorry about being secretive, but we're down to the last 3 regions and want to keep some stuff for you to find out by yourselves!

JLJac on August 05, 2015, 08:18:57 AM:

Thanks thanks! Backer creature list is looking good too, 60%-ish with some of the worst ones behind us



Hahaha yeah, me too! It was modeled after that species ~ in swedish we call them "smoke mushroom", but puffball is definitely better! I suspect this is a case of co-evolution where the mushroom has adapted to the adolescent homo sapiens' scientifically proven preference for kicking things that are round and white on grassy fields. Seems to be a european thing though, James claims not to have been massacring these when he was 10, and if you're 10 and not massacring these that means they don't exist on your continent.

JLJac on August 06, 2015, 10:15:25 AM:

Nah, they generally use textures. I've been looking but couldn't find it Can't remember if it was some tesselation technique they used... Something in my memory is about fractals, but that might just be because I don't know how tesselation works haha!

Aside, sorry about the slow devlogging pace lately! James hit me with a put together version of the new region, and now I'm working on getting the Rain Deer to path properly between rooms, and as always when doing this inter-room movement it's a total mess and I have to spend basically a day bug hunting. After this one there will only be one more creature like that though, the rest will use the trusty old shortcut system! In other news the region is AMAZING, definitely the best one yet as for basically everything! Really stoked about this one!

JLJac on August 07, 2015, 07:05:33 AM:

For all you  out there, just in case anyone knows - I'm hunting an infinite loop somewhere in my code (or at least something that behaves as an infinite loop, whatever it is) and it should be really simple to find with visual studio because I should be able to just hit pause and see the current call stack. Instead I get this:

http://imgwiz.com/images/2015/08/07/RSE74.png

 

Anyone has any idea what that might be? Or alternately if there is some other clever way to force the application to display its current call stack?

JLJac on August 07, 2015, 10:57:07 AM:

Yeah, at the end of the day I managed to solve it by placing console logs before and after where I believed the freeze to be, and then moving those closer to slowly pin down the problem. But, it should be a 30 second problem rather than a 3 hour one, haha T__T


Yeah, this is the idea I've gotten after some research too - and last time I had similar problems it also showed to be about this. Problem is that I basically don't know what "symbols" are, this is where some kind of education could have come in handy I guess haha :S Is there some simple explanation? What I understood last time was that it was some kind of registry keeping track of where each point in the compiled code was coming from in the uncompiled code, so that if something went wrong it could show where and why and launch the debugger ... is that about right?

When the symbols are missing for a piece of code, how can you like, tell it to add that code in then? Or why doesn't it do that automatically?

For your more practical idea - in VS all the windows are empty, I only get that message and that's it. In mono develop I can pause and it shows a call stack and a thread, named something that makes me think it has to do with waiting (as in some kind of framerate cap) but no code, and there's nothing I can recognize as written by me. 

Well, at least I solved the problem by now, good old manual way ~ 

jamesprimate on August 11, 2015, 04:23:28 PM:

hey peeps! pardon the quiet, we've been putting polish on the Linear Farms region and discussing plans for THE FINAL THREE REGIONS. That and preparing for PAX Prime, where (as usual) Rain World will be showing the newest build at the adult swim games booth. None of which is terribly exciting to post to the devlog about. But we'll return to the regularly scheduled program shortly! 

JLJac on August 12, 2015, 09:37:22 AM:

So sorry about the silence! Lot's of tying up loose ends for this latest region, but it feels like we are more or less there now. Because you waited so long, here's a little taste of what the region will have to offer:



Back to regular update frequency very soon!

jamesprimate on August 12, 2015, 10:12:33 PM:

ship it!

jamesprimate on August 13, 2015, 02:28:51 AM:

^ TRUE ART.

seriously though, thanks for some good suggestions and we'll take them into consideration when we get to the polish phase. but for now... were off to The Wall!




* here being region 10 of course.



you might remember this early early sketch i did for it way back when we were starting on Chimney Canopy:


detail: https://i.imgur.com/NoV05Ka.png

Joar is working on some custom tiles for it right now, so me thinks it will probably change from there quite a bit, but the idea is the same: a mega huge wall that you scale. got some clever ideas for mechanics for it, so we are pretty excited to get going on it (and out of linear farms)