JLJac on September 10, 2015, 10:50:49 PM:

Or introduced a few!

JLJac on September 15, 2015, 08:55:56 AM:

Hi everybody! Yesterday and today I'm working on a creature that I won't announce here - because it's a fairly quick one (not to say it's not cool though ) I felt that this way you guys would get the most surprise per day of devlog silence, if you get me.

There are a few creatures in the game now that haven't made it to the internet - not very many at all, but hopefully enough to make the actual game a bit exciting even for you most veteran devlog readers come release.

Normal posts start again tomorrow!

JLJac on September 16, 2015, 12:20:07 PM:

Update 476

And so we're getting started on the next creature! I've made a bunch of sketches today, but I think it's more fun for you guys to see it develop from the good old red dots, so here we go:



More red dots attached tomorrow!

In other news, James has been able to assemble the current region, and it's looking good! This one will be sort of the final stretch in the game, and because of that we've decided to go more linear - instead of the standard sprawling rooms it's supposed to be more of an epic journey where you push through and have to fight for every step along the way. The Daddy Long Legs have proven to put up a bit of a too rough fight though it seems, so that's going to need a little tuning. James tells me they eat everything and clear the rooms - I haven't seen it myself but I can certainly believe it! This is standard stuff after getting a region together though, and we'll be able to sort it out pretty quickly.

jamesprimate on September 17, 2015, 03:16:56 AM:

a good part of the nerfing will just be making it unable to go through shortcuts, limiting the trouble it can get into a bit. also doing this region in a more linear fashion really brought into focus one of the key aspects of the game, the inherently chaotic nature of the open world ecosystem model. creatures can go anywhere and do anything they want to. it can be both the main strength of the game if handled well, and completely destroy all your well-laid plans if not.

Underhang region sort of skirts that line a bit. its playable, but the linearity combined with the HUGE reach of the daddy makes it insanely hard at times. basically, if a daddy decides to camp in the middle of a key room, there is just nothing you can do. so i think rather than nerf the daddy TOO much, adding a couple of strategic alternate route paths, allowing you (or the daddy) to go around, will definitely help make this more playable without removing the "teeth" so to speak.

I was hesitant to do this earlier, as the region is already insanely huge (takes me 4 rain cycles and 24 minutes to speed run from one side to the other with no creatures), but ive identified a few key spots where i could add a single 2-screen room to each and it would both keep the structure of the region and should solve the daddy bottlenecks.

off to it then!

jamesprimate on September 17, 2015, 09:41:28 AM:

hah! yes, we are very good at feature creep. very very good at feature creep

Speaking of which, the secondary paths around the underhang bottlenecks and that little bit of daddy nerfing worked out very well! The updated version of the Daddy acts like a scary creature rather than a giant impassible scrub brush of death. Joar fixed their movement, added a very cool "thunder-blindness" disruption, and some tweaking to the ecosystem interactions helped out quite a bit. With these chaotic systems its such an odd balance. One seemingly minor tweak has huge implications for play. In this case, Joar made the the Tube Worms quieter, which completely affected how the sound-hunting Daddies behaved in large rooms.

Sort of along those lines, one of my favorite emergent encounters yet happened in this region. Of course I had planned plenty of "set-piece" style encounters in this region, hives of yellows, death-defying platform swinging around daddies, etc., and all that went off really well, but the one ive been having the most fun is of course the one that happened completely by accident:

In the first few Underhang rooms are a sub-region called "the legs", where you climb the interior of a large support column. The platforming is pretty tricky, its where you first encounter the tube worm grappling mechanic, so i kept is fairly free of predators, but since its a decent stretch of the map, just for fun a threw in 2 white lizards to spice it up a little. The geometry here is ideal for them, but i didnt realize how good it was going to be. It basically turns into a 10 screen climbing duel with the whites, fighting to climb from platform to platform and swinging around their tongues, knocking them off platforms with rocks, only to have them scramble back up after you. Then all the noise attracts a daddy of course, and it turns into complete mayhem just as the rains start to fall...

Now thats in there permanently and im taking full credit for it

Anyway, Underhang is a wrap for now, so on to region 11!

JLJac on September 17, 2015, 11:02:24 AM:

Been playing this new region a bit, and I've been having a lot of fun! By this point James is way past black belt in level design, and the rooms have super fun platforming challenges that work really really well with the creatures. The rooms having multiple paths through them has been standard for some time, but for this region he's taken it to the next level by building the rooms to be dual purpose, each is essentially a level for rain world and a level for whatever game it becomes when you pick up a grappling hook - with the ability to switch between the two at any point. And most of them have multiple routes even within those 

To sort of give you an idea there's this room that has daddy long legs crawling about, a bunch of tube worms, and a pretty big pack of yellow lizards. Daddies like large open spaces, the yellow lizards like maze like structures where they can do a lot of flanking and surrounding their prey. Standard slugcat likes platforms and poles, slugcat with grappling hook likes smaller floating pieces of terrain to grapple and swing from. The room is 10 screens large, with all of these environments flowing in and out of each other, here and there with overlaps that force the creatures to encounters. Throughout the entire thing are multiple grappling hook routes and routes for when you're without the hook, some of them sharing certain passages and then diverging again. All of them however come together at a bottleneck in the middle of the room, forcing you to move through all the different little sub-environments and be subjected to their critters. This means that you're sort of forced to go through most of the room, but you can still shape your experience depending on your resources and preferences. Amazing level design!

JLJac on September 18, 2015, 07:29:19 AM:

Something like that could be fun! Extra multiplayer modes etc are probably going to end up happening post release though, we're on a pretty tight schedule here!

Update 477

After making a bunch of creatures that slowly and careful place their long shaky legs in thought out positions, I've tired of that and want to do something that just paddles along and couldn't care less where its legs end up:



Running locomotion still needs a bunch of work though, as you can see, and it will also need to be able to place its feet more "rain world classic" (ie lots of raytracing, giving potential feet positions scores and comparing them, etc etc) for when it's still or moving at a slower speed.

JLJac on September 21, 2015, 12:11:59 PM:

Hi! Welcome 

Update 478

This one has been surprisingly troublesome for not being very large. Now I think I have it to the point where I can smooth stuff over a bit in the skinning phase and have it look okay, and the locomotion is also reliable enough to always get the creature from A to B.



I've been tuning numbers all day... And still ... not ... quite ... there. But, I'll move on for now, maybe the later stuff I add will magically make it work.

As you can see from the gif it has two modes, one when staying still or moving short distances, and then a sprint. Transitioning between the two certainly isn't flawless, but I think the skin phase can do quite a lot to cover that up.

JLJac on September 22, 2015, 12:18:01 PM:

Oh man robotics seem like so much fun!

Update 479

Visual illustration of me trying to keep an even pace with James on the dev schedule:



(If you imagine the bird responding to 50 emails in that stretch as well)

JLJac on September 24, 2015, 05:00:45 AM:

Hi there 

Update 480

The goose chase continues!



Still a bit of details to go, but we're getting there. The pixelly plumage is WIP (the idea is that there'll be a bit of variation there as with the lizards/jet fish etc), and the legs will need some more work as well, along with the eye, so... basically a little bit of work on everything until this beast is done.

The environment in the gif is brightened to help you see, this is actually a sub-region of Shadow Urban, meaning that it's supposed to be too dark to navigate unless you have a light source.

jamesprimate on September 24, 2015, 02:10:55 PM:

yeah the glowing trail is siiiiiiiiick. now just imagine a pack of them running through the dark 

JLJac on September 25, 2015, 12:53:28 PM:

Thank you thank you thank you all!

Actually it's very nice to know that there are still people out there who are excited... Been at it for a loooong time now 


Thanks! Yeah, this one has some pretty obvious machine parts on it!

JLJac on September 25, 2015, 01:01:49 PM:

Update 481

Some cosmetic individualization and a bit more work on the behavior. Just because you're a pack doesn't mean you're friends...



Also I implemented a blinding effect from the flare fruit. It should theoretically work on all creatures, though not all of them have custom animation to convey it as clearly as this one - yet, at least.

JLJac on September 28, 2015, 02:35:04 AM:

Thank you thank you thank you 

Maybe? A complete blindness might be a bit too much, but something is not out of the question.

Well, at least we wear our inspirations on the sleeve! You could tell straight away!

That is art by accident - the flies were made before we started thinking about the birds, but when was working with the birds I noticed it as well and did play along with it a bit. Pretty representative for the process we have actually - as we're both designers and devs we can freely pick up stuff like that when we come across it.

Yeah, they basically don't coordinate. These guys are no geniuses, they rely more on snapping constantly and hope that somthing will end up between their jaws. Their interaction with any other creature is just snapping at them a lot, haha!

Yep, A*! The trick is actually that it's not a ragdoll, so it doesn't need to find balance etc. To clarify - if I was using the "animate a ragdoll" method, I would start out with a thing that was limp on the ground, but behaving correctly in terms of physics. Then I'd have to make forces pull at this thing, and I'd have to worry about a million things such as balance.

Instead I work backwards - I start out with a pretty typical "game" movement, a thing that just swishes through the air following the A*. Then I put legs on it, then I make the legs seek contact with the ground. Then I make it so that when the legs are not in contact with the ground, the body is affected by a bit of gravity. Basically I start out with a movement that has nothing to do with physical correctness but which works, and then I add cosmetic details that makes it appear more physically correct. But it's all fake - the legs of these birds for example doesn't consist of the same "matter" as their bodies but are just 2D vectors with no weight etc.

A lot of the behaviors look really sloppy! That's why it's cool to be in this fantasy world with these fantasy creatures. If I were to animate a human looking figure like this I wouldn't get away with it for 2 seconds, but as no-one knows what these creatures are supposed to move like their sloppy scrambling might pass for correct.

Oh yeah I love oddworld! Never owned one myself but I played them at a friend's. Good stuff!

JLJac on September 28, 2015, 01:26:08 PM:

Actually not for this one, but some other creatures have stuff like that - such as rain deer antler size depending in their internal ranking. This is sort of what we're going for though ... by not giving away much information in the game about what's going on except from what you see on the screen, we can get the player to project their own ideas onto the world, and you'll end up with a nice blurry line between what the game can do and what you think the game can do  

Update 482

UI for placing ambient sounds.



Just UI so far ~ no, you know... sounds.

jamesprimate on September 28, 2015, 02:05:14 PM:

^ FINALLY MY TIME AS COME. mega mega stoked about this









for those who dont know, i was originally only here to do the audio...   

jamesprimate on September 28, 2015, 02:23:36 PM (Last Edit: September 28, 2015, 04:59:55 PM):

there is a system of inheritability in there, so it wont be all that bad! Like with the lighting and palette tools, Joar has it set so ill be able to set audio templates for regions/subreigons. though... if my workflow with the lighting and palette is any indication, ill likely wind up doing most of it by hand because i am a fuss. The 1% lighting blend difference between rooms matters to me! XD

really looking forward to it. my only sadness is that i cant dive right in just yet. Sooooooon!

JLJac on September 29, 2015, 12:26:25 PM:

Update 483

Made the ambient sound engine load and play sounds, and made the inheritance stuff work. Ambient sounds ready to go!

jamesprimate on September 29, 2015, 07:48:37 PM:

yes, what Christian said!

also were not showing any of the narrative / story stuff in the devlog, for obvious spoiler reasons, so WHO KNOWS what sorts of things you'll find when you venture out into rain world proper

JLJac on September 30, 2015, 08:55:05 AM:

Update 484

Making tiles! The next region is going to be really mazy. With a few lizards in there I think we'll be able to squeeze out a decent pac-man clone from the engine!



The slanted walls of the tunnels enables you to see the creatures in them, even at the edges of the screen where the slight depth effect will otherwise tilt the geometry so the tunnel becomes obscured.