jamesprimate on January 31, 2016, 11:24:28 PM:

thank you! and yes we seriously need to update the site, jeez 

JLJac on February 04, 2016, 07:34:47 AM:

Hi everyone! Really sorry, but I definitely spoke too soon about getting back to regular updates. It was deadline inferno there for a while, and once through we took a look at the schedule and... there's like 5 big secret things on there! So, very exciting stuff, but sadly I can't share it. You'll get to see it later!

James on the other hand has a weeeeeeeell earned month completely off from levels, instead doing what he's actually all about - music and sound. He says he has written several tracks already, though I haven't heard them yet. Pretty sure they're amazing though, as he claimed his artistic direction was More Weirder, which we can all endorse.

So, I'm getting back at my mystery tasks. Will check in with you guys from time to time though!

jamesprimate on February 06, 2016, 12:16:13 AM:

Just popping in! Joar is working on some really cool new setpiece stuff, and im sifting through the old music and audio to see whats salvageable from the past few years of on and off Rain World audio work.

There is kind of a lot of music laying around in various stages of completion (around 70 tracks), some gems, but also a good deal of stuff thats either unusable for one reason or another, such as the game moving on stylistically, other later tracks doing a better job of capturing that mood, and of course some i just dont like any more. Pretty glad to do some housecleaning with this, as it will open space for new music! Im also using this time to remix and remaster the older tracks that *do* make the cut, and with that establishing a baseline for consistent volume levels, compression, saturation, etc etc., going forward.  Exciting, I know!

jamesprimate on February 06, 2016, 11:36:47 AM (Last Edit: February 06, 2016, 12:20:56 PM):

yes to all of the above! the planned system has a few different music tiers. there will be a selection of music and atmospheric audio for each region, specific tracks that will be attached to significant rooms for "narrative movements", and also music that can be attached directly to physical objects or structures in the game, so say as you approach a tower in a wide room the music for that tower fades in as you approach and fades out as you pass, etc. Its going to be the interaction of a couple of different systems, so making it all smooth will probably take some fussing with. Pretty excited though! ive been waiting to do this for a looooong time 

And heck yeah joars already got that cool lowpass filter effect for going in and out of the water: https://youtu.be/ernPmYEg0k0?t=3m56s


Edit: hey speaking of starbound, do you guys have any other open world-ish games where the music implementation really speaks to you? obviously fez is a big one, and probably one of my biggest influences (talking implementation here) is dark souls.

Rain World has a lot of unique structural limitations as far as how the music will be used (the periodicity of the rain cycle, the need for sonic "space" to build apprehension, etc), but i could def use to see how other sound designers have solved these problems.

jamesprimate on February 10, 2016, 06:06:28 PM (Last Edit: February 10, 2016, 06:13:03 PM):

If any of you guys will be going to GDC, Joar and I will be there giving a talk on Rain World procedural animation. Or, he will and ill be up there for moral support! Anyway, if any of you are going to GDC and want to check it, heres some details: http://schedule.gdconf.com/session/animation-bootcamp-rainworld-animation-process

Joar has plans to make an example creature LIVE during the presentation, so that should be pretty fun. And please say hi i you do, we love hanging with tigs peeps! :D

And thanks thanks for the music suggestions everybody, they were all good! I either played or watched playthroughs of pretty much everything.

right now im in ear-bleed nightmare zone auditioning, filtering and EQing 1000s of ambient audio clips, but all that is going really well. yesterday we tested a dynamic audio system which ill explain a bit more in later posts, but its something we've wanted to include for a while were pretty excited with how its all coming together. tonight ill be doing the first region with complete ambiance audio, dynamic audio and maybe some music triggers as well, so definitely on track to get audio done by the end of the month... which is pretty insane, but hey nothing new there!


ill see if i can get Joar to hop in the thread soon and drop some tipz. You can tell we are in maximum crunch mode when even HE isnt able to post vague updates, haha.

JLJac on February 12, 2016, 07:44:27 AM:

I have one that's very simple and might be useful!

 If you have something where you want to compare many different options (such as where to go on the map) - write a function that can grade each option with a score.

So for the where to go thing, say that you want them to not get stuck in corners, you want them to stay close to their mates and you want them to stay away from the player. Then in your ScoreOfThisPosition method you add to the score the distance to the closest wall, subtract from the score the distance to the school buddies, and then add the distance to the player x 10 (naturally the different factors need manual tuning).

A position that's inside a wall or otherwise unreachable should just return a float.minValue or something, you never want those.

Next step, you have the fish save a goal position. Now, every frame you pick a random position in the room (or a random position reasonably close to the fish) and compare the score of that position to the score of the saved goal position. If the score of the random test position is better, set that as the new goal!

This system is cool because it spreads the comparing out over many frames, contrary to comparing every alternative every frame which would be super slow. Also because it has a random element to it you'll get something that's a bit unpredictable, but because the goal position can only swap to a better position you know that given some time it will reliably gravitate towards the right behavior.

Hope that gets you inspired! Lycka till!

jamesprimate on February 12, 2016, 08:23:51 AM:

sneak peek at some of the audio devtools on twitter: https://twitter.com/RainWorldGame/status/698109778137124864

jamesprimate on February 15, 2016, 06:39:15 AM:

Todo for initial release: audio and music, some narrative stuff, some set piece, some art stuff, a few more creatures, a few more systems and some general "getting it all to work nicely" stuff. Sounds like a lot, but comparatively speaking we are on the home stretch and feeling very pretty dang good about things! 

jamesprimate on February 15, 2016, 09:51:09 AM:

yes sir! def say hi to our illustrator Del at MAGfest, she may have some slugcatty stuff at her booth

jamesprimate on February 18, 2016, 08:27:05 PM (Last Edit: February 18, 2016, 08:32:44 PM):

sorry!! not to be a tease, but the stuff being worked on now is AMAZING devlog content, but its all massive spoilers, so... 

well... except what im working on, but nobody wants to hear a million clips of subtly different background audio. "heres a blend of filtered white noise and a field recording of mountain air that im using for the "Grid" subregion of Sky Islands. I use a subtle lowpass filter and pitch shift to create a sense of the winds increasing in strength as the player climbs higher" etc etc.

jamesprimate on February 20, 2016, 06:39:25 AM:

totally! im taking an ear break, so let me tell you a little about the ambiance audio engine Joar has assembled.

Here is a snip of it in action. For the sake of clarity, its a super simple one i just put together from the Underhang region:


larger: https://i.imgur.com/nqSniyS.png

Might look a bit busy even so, but the concepts are pretty simple. Basically, there are 3 main types of sound objects that can be spawned: Omnidirectional, which applies a sound to the entire room; Directional, which pans a sound to the right or left side of the stereo field; and Spot which places a sound object along an X,Y coordinate. All of these are selected out of that large box on the right, which holds all the ambiance audio loops ive been creating over the past month or so, and any loop can be used as any type of sound object,

For Spot the player acts as a kind of microphone moving through 2d space, so the nested circles you see represents the area that a sound can be heard in. The inner circle is where the sound is at its peak volume (as chosen by the sliders in that objects option boxes that you can see on the left), and then fading out until the outer circle.

So between these 3 tools quite a lot of things can be accomplished, even in a simple form like here. Because you can spawn and blend multiple omnidirectional sounds, you can create a sense of shifting scenery as the player moves from room to room through the regions, giving a cohesive sense of space and aural geography; for instance winds growing stronger as you climb a huge structure, and the ground ambiance slowly fading away. By adding spot sounds to that you can bring to life the background environment: the hum of an old machine, bugs buzzing around a pile of rubble, howling winds on a little hilltop, etc.

I'll do a proper lil video when I hit a stopping point, but here at least is a clip i posted on twitter that shows 10 sec of moving through a sound environment with the audio devtools on so you can see whats happening: https://twitter.com/RainWorldGame/status/698109778137124864




Its super fun, but man did i set myself a huge task, as usual. Initially the idea was going to be to get general ambiance audio per region/subregion and throw in a few Spot objects here and there on certain significant objects to spice it up. But once you've established a certain level of detail by adding the Spot sounds, theres no going back; the ear likes to hear the movement of the player through a dynamic sound world, so rooms / screens without the spot sound detail seem noticeably dull by comparison. So now i find myself having to go through all 1467 screens with laser attuned ears.... all in the span of 2 weeks or so. Absolute madness!!! But, its getting done. After i finish Underhang today, theres just one more to do.

jamesprimate on February 20, 2016, 09:49:46 AM (Last Edit: February 20, 2016, 10:06:11 AM):

splash wouldnt be centered! its spatially attached to the players position in the stereo field. also individual water splash droplets have their own audio triggers, with doppler and a few step velocity, so you might be hearing that stuff flailing about as well. ALSO this was before Joar re-attached the low-pass filter, so we miss that cool underwater effect, but thats back in now.

what were doing is a *little* weird for sure. a bit of a hybrid system between platformer types where diegetic audio is heavily omni, and the fully spatial audio of 3d games, plus then were throwing in all sorts of strange programmatic stuff like the doppler, randomized pitch/etc functions. its very much like the rest of the game in that regard, lol! but in the context of moving through rooms and regions it makes sense

JLJac on February 20, 2016, 02:10:29 PM:

Geez. The game has two regions that could be considered "final" regions, which one is more final depends a bit on your specific playthrough and how you count. They're Subterranean and Superstructure. I have spent significantly more than a month (working about 200%) on superstructure content.  Now I'm there again. James has also spent a month on it, but he says he will be passing over it at least twice again, maybe more. By now, superstructure has an insane amount of content. Not like, half the content of the game, but definitely, say... 6 times the content of a standard region. I hesitate to do the maths, but by the time we finish it we will have spent something like... 4 man-months on that region specifically. None of it has made it to the internet. The region is vast, but the sheer amount of stuff makes it a real problem to fit everything in in a way that doesn't become a complete cacophony and sensory overload from the very entrance room.

Not really sure what this post is about, probably just complaining  But yeah, that region 

jamesprimate on February 22, 2016, 01:53:53 AM:

getting through that ambiance audio. quite a collection going  : https://twitter.com/BRIGHTPRIMATE/status/701396605581271041

JLJac on February 23, 2016, 01:23:01 AM:

@Dinomaniak, would love to give you something, but definitely can't at this point. Many people are involved in and affected by the release date and the release date announcement process, so not really up to me  

@Torchkas, we haven't noticed any trouble so far! The game only loads the sounds as they are actually needed, so they're not all in RAM at once. James has made a crazy amount of ambient sounds, but they're not all in the same room or even in the same region.

jamesprimate on February 24, 2016, 05:10:31 AM:

So far so good on audio RAM stuff? Id be interested to see an audit on it though. Theres a few places (huge rooms with tons of stuff going on) where the audio hangs a bit, but joar is confident thats just loading fussiness and is easily fixable. A similar thing happened with the music loading and was fixed without much fuss, so fingers crossed.

Finally finished with ambience audio! (or at least got it to a reasonable place to move on from...) Didnt take all that long IRL, only 2 weeks, but man in subjective time that was rough stuff. Its the sort of thing thats requires constant steady concentration to fine details over like, hours and hours and thousand screens, so it is *quite* fatiguing both mentally and aurally.

No rest for the wicked though, as im diving right into finishing up the SFX. There is still a ton of SFX triggers to be placed (once Joar gets done with his current project there will be an afternoon and change devoted to that), but for now at least i can catch up on some of the more recent creatures. And by "recent" i mean "Miros bird and lantern mouse" lol.

The slog continues!

JLJac on February 25, 2016, 07:18:00 AM:

Very hesitant to go into detail on that as it's deep spoiler territory, but I can say as much that we have a thing planned out that isn't just a linear story with start, middle, end. From our experience on the convention floor people adopt very different play styles, and we want to encourage that within the actual framework of the game.

jamesprimate on February 26, 2016, 09:34:37 PM:

gentlemen! lets keep it positive in these threads 

jamesprimate on February 28, 2016, 06:56:10 AM:

UPDATE: videogame development is hard 

jamesprimate on February 28, 2016, 09:19:34 PM:

truer words have never been spoken. hopefully we'll have sone proper updates soon, pardon our silence as we crunch for a GDC build