jamesprimate on October 20, 2015, 04:04:58 PM:

i know i keep cryptically hyping things and its probably annoying, but O M G the stuff joar has got going on right now is *unreal*

JLJac on October 22, 2015, 07:50:54 AM:

Yeah, there are certain qualities of the alpha that are lost, but I think that's pretty much to be expected when you re-build from the ground up! However there are quite a lot of things that are significantly better with this new build, so it evens out haha ~

That framerate thing you mentioned I've noticed as well. The lingo build was supposed to run at 40 fps, but was in fact closer to 20, which was a much more forgiving environment to animate in. Have you ever been drawing a sketch, and it looks great, and then you add color and stuff and it doesn't look as good any more? The brain has a tendency to fill in missing information, actually it's often so good at it that the filler material is better than something an artist can come up with. I'd say that the reason some people think the lingo alpha had more animal-like animation is because it had a loooot lower framerate, and because you know it's supposed to be animals you fill in that missing info with your own animal stuff (one example is that many people have mentioned seeing the slugcat claw at a ledge to get up - a behavior I have in fact never specifically implemented).

All the creatures in the new build have more sophisticated animation than any critter in the lingo alpha, but the framerate is also way higher which makes any imperfect movement more obvious. Another thing that plays into this is that the slugcat itself was the very first creature I animated for the unity build, and is also the one you look at all the time. So the slugcat will definitely get some polish before release. I have been contemplating capping the frame rate, but at the end of the day I don't think it would be worth it. Obscuring the art to make mistakes less obvious feels wrong, and is generally not very effective at the end of the day, as any illustrator who has tried to save a bad drawing with filters or blur knows. The higher framerate creates a more professional and smooth presentation for the entire game, and it keeps me on edge as an animator!

As for the shelters, the original concept was that the region gates and the shelters would be one and the same - but as the regions got absurdly huge that idea had to go. However, the "art idea" still lives on in the current region gates:

JLJac on October 22, 2015, 10:19:31 AM:

#local frame cap, this idea is quite strange to me So basically you're talking about that the movement of the sprite on the screen should be smooth, but the movement within the sprite should be framy? I guess it would sort of make sense coming from a classical animation pipeline where you draw each pose for a character - just having it switch image every second frame but updating the position of the sprite every frame. For me though I doubt it would be possible, as at the end of the day my animations are basically only positions, no image swapping... Like, most of my creatures consist of 2-10 "chunks" with a position each, and sometimes hundreds of cosmetic little details each with a position and velocity, so there'd be no way to pick one of them and decide that "this one is the real position of the creature".

There is like, 4 times the content of a standard region in there, and there's more to come! Though we are admittedly getting a bit carried away with this, I have to say I'm really excited to have a grand prize in there for those who complete the game

The physics tick at 40 fps, but the graphics are interpolated between those key frames at whatever framerate the computer can do.

JLJac on October 24, 2015, 09:23:07 AM:

Thanks and welcome!

Yo eigen, cool to have you check by! Moonman's looking like it's coming along great!

Update 490

Basically everything I'm up to these days is secret stuff, but at least here's something I can share:



This is a second food source for slugcat - there will probably be one or two more edible things/creatures in the game as it looks now. Having bats as the only food source in the entire game became sort of a liability in terms of what we can do in the later regions especially, so we will throw in a few other things as well for variation.

jamesprimate on October 24, 2015, 09:36:38 AM:

haaaaaaang fruuuuuuuuits

looks delicious 

jamesprimate on October 24, 2015, 11:33:26 AM:

bingo! were getting to the point where a lot of our decisions factor in possible endgame content and replayability, so we think vegan/carnivorous runs will be easy to implement on our end, plus will be super challenging (and hopefully fun) for the player! you'll really have to know the map to accomplish either

jamesprimate on October 25, 2015, 06:56:27 AM:

nah, it doesnt affect the "narrative" or anything. more like achievement that gets you a nice illustration and possibly unlocks content for multiplayer. by "endgame content" i meant things that encourage replayability, but i guess it might be more clearly called "post-endgame content"

JLJac on October 25, 2015, 10:54:15 AM:

It's not necessarily a fruit though, I just named it fruit because it like, works like a fruit. What it actually canonically is I'll leave to your speculation 

JLJac on October 26, 2015, 08:25:28 AM:

Update 491

New critter coming up!



This guy has a bunch of strange quirks. First of all it can see out of both ends, which is why the vision cone visualization is so flickery - easiest technical implementation was just switching every second frame. Don't worry though, no way to notice this once the vision cone visualization is turned off.

Then there are a few other things, such as movement based vision (can only see moving targets, as can be seen from the (player specific) vision visualization varying in size with player velocity) and its weird opposite, greatly inhabited vision when it's moving. It also has hearing, but only when standing still.

To compensate for this it has that start and stop behavior, where it switches between sensory awareness and movement. Hope for this to turn out an interesting gameplay challenge!

Behavior and locomotion are wrapping up here, so I expect to get to skinning tomorrow.

JLJac on October 27, 2015, 11:35:54 AM:

Update 492

Work still in progress, but now we're starting to see where it's going!



The very variable size is fun, but I'm unsure about whether it will stay - just too little control for James when he places them if they can vary like that. Maybe they could be split into a large and a small one, and we basically get two creatures for free. First though, the skin needs to be finished. As is the entire creature is just square sprites - now I need to do some art work for the shells, legs etc.

JLJac on October 28, 2015, 01:06:02 PM:

Thank you thank you thank you 

I agree with your input - square back plates and synchronized movement is now part of the design.

Update 493

Rare rain world action gif!



Didn't really plan on it, but RNG threw down two spears in the room and then survival instinct kicked in. This is the sort of violence I's ideally like for the game to have - short bursts of action, and the violence never being a goal in itself but slugcat also not hesitating to use it if it's the only way to survive a situation.

As you can see that medium sized centipede manages to attach itself to my lower body for a little while there (will be less confusing with a sound cue), which brings up a detail about how the creature works. They kill you with electricity, and need to attach both ends to form a full circuit. The bigger ones are more effective at it, and can use their weight to restrain you more during this phase. With the smaller ones you have a little bit more of a window to do something, as can be seen in the gif.

James and I had a talk and decided that further on as we do some brushing up on the damage system there might be a few more factors making them more dangerous the larger they are - maybe the smaller ones will have to zap you multiple times, for example. With wildly varying sizes like this the danger should vary with the size, so that those huge buggers are just as dangerous as they look!

JLJac on October 28, 2015, 01:31:43 PM:

Ahahahahaha the grossness is officially out of control! 

jamesprimate on October 28, 2015, 04:32:37 PM (Last Edit: October 28, 2015, 04:40:26 PM):

playin this centipede build, and WOOOOOOW it is seriously something else. i have a high grossness threshold (from playing years of this game), but running through a dark hallway with 7 of those beasties skittering around is straight up shudder-inducing. from a design perspective its super effective, because you *REALLY* dont want to see the slugcat get grabbed by one of those nasty things, if just for purely emotional reasons 

also, i know the bar is set pretty high but... im thinking this thing might be the best animated creature in the game. Which is pretty impressive considering everything else. What do you guys think? Amazing work Joar!




oh most definitely. we are going to buzzword the *hell* out of the pr stuff. Expect to see such classics such as: "Lifelike Procedural animation", "dynamic social ecosystem" and "adaptive creature AI" - as well as possibly new hits like "emergent open-world narrative". In fact, if you guys want to take a hack at throwing down some "sexy tech jargon" to inform the marketing "experience", please be my guest!

JLJac on October 29, 2015, 11:11:34 AM:

I have been thinking about it, but no. That would be too much ~ we don't want "gore" for its own sake. I haven't really ever been taking any conscious steps towards making the game violent or brutal, and was initially quite surprised when people were expressing that impression, considering how extremely gory games there are out there. Maybe it's because of the emergent animation giving the action a slightly different flavor than what we're used to seeing? Like, more desperate and fumbling rather than cool and cartoony. Anyway, I'm cool with the game being brutal the way it is - it feels contextual and is a means to the end of supporting the artistic idea - but I don't want to go further. The spears produce a few ambiguous droplets when it hits something, but I think that will be the extent of it for blood!

Also it would be a technical nightmare to try to implement at this point 


Damn, that's really really good, covers basically everything about the game! Would you mind if we drew from this in our own material when promotion times come around?

Update 494

Touching up stuff. We are finalizing the subterranean region, and with that comes the usual polish work - only this time half of it is secret!

JLJac on October 30, 2015, 05:12:26 AM:

It's just kept sort of ambiguous. No-one really knows how much insect and how much machine these things really are after all - as with all RW creatures.

In other news, I just received the new region from James. This region does not joke around 



Sorry about the blur, it feels silly but now when we have gone through all this trouble of secrecy it makes sense ~

As you can see, you could fit several suburban regions inside this one. However, simple area-by-area comparison doesn't nearly do it justice because it has basically only huge rooms, which are denser on the map. The green color is marking 8 screens in suburban vs 8 screens in subterranean, to give you a sense of this. In terms of screens, I'd say that that topmost row (the un-blurred one) is about on par with the entirety of suburban.

On top of this it is also the most content rich region in the game, with by far the most region specific stuff in it. Exciting!

jamesprimate on October 31, 2015, 02:14:20 AM:

whooooo yes this region was absolutely brutal to do within the time-frame we had set. ive never worked so hard on something in my entire life, and that is really saying something. it clocks in at 190 screens!! to further Joar's comparison, suburban was 37 and the next largest region was underhang at 109 T___T

but the results are pretty pretty good. id say visually its without question the best work we've done yet. We're both dying not being able to show it off to you guys, but believe me its worth the wait to see everything in context.

Also Joar and I were excitedly talking earlier about all the crazy unexpected / hilarious creature interactions going on. Subterranean spans most of the width of the game map, and as a result it has a good selection of creatures from all the different regions represented, in many cases together for the first time. Its the best example of the "open ecosystem" feeling yet, and requires knowledge of all of the different creatures hunting behaviors in order to have any chance of survival. Unexpected allies emerge, purely through the fallout of the web of predator-prey chaos roiling around you. Its a very cool experience, if you dont mind me saying it.

jamesprimate on October 31, 2015, 09:07:26 AM:

a bit of that is going to happen too! We have a month planned for "level polish". Mostly it will be cosmetic, but a few of the early regions will get some structural reworking as well. We did this already with a problematic region and had very good results, so I'm kinda looking forward to it!

jamesprimate on October 31, 2015, 02:48:11 PM:

Yep, exactly. Retouch the current ones with the updated tools and tile set that we have now, plus smooth out the transitions between regions, etc. All that stuff!

jamesprimate on November 01, 2015, 12:25:52 PM:

yep! some more than others. Suburban will definitely see some expansions, and probably an entire new subregion. For now the polish pass will be focused on improving whats already there and adding narrative / set-piece stuff rather than expansion per se, but there certainly will be some as a result.

As tedious as it may be on my end, whats nice about the modular room layout system we're using is that once a region map is setup its very easy for me to attach new rooms/paths, and therefore new content. ive setup pretty much every region with the potential for future expansion in mind, and the infrastructure can pretty much support as much additional content as we care to add. i have *LOTS* of ideas for this stuff, so hopefully the game will be successful enough so warrant it post-release.

jamesprimate on November 01, 2015, 05:05:03 PM:

Looool, definitely not something I'm concerned with right now. Lot of actual game yet to do