jamesprimate on July 31, 2016, 06:51:48 PM:

Hallo friends! Doing pretty well, thanks for asking~

It's been intense on top of intense the past few weeks, but extremely productive. 2 weeks ago Lydia and I flew down to Adult Swim HQ in Atlanta for a solid week of testing, which was very enlightening.



The way it worked was that we had 2 sessions a day with groups of players who hadn't played the game before, and we observed how they handled the first 40 or so minutes of gameplay. They'd fill out questionnaires before hand about their experience as a gamer and then afterwards about what they liked / didnt like about the game, what was challenging, what didnt make sense, etc., and then we'd sit around and talk about it for a bit. Then at night, I would take the feedback to Joar (who was still in Sweden naturally) and we'd attempt to iterate a new build that solved some of the problems to test for the NEXT day, etc etc.

In early testing people always liked the art, mood, characters and sound, but generally found themselves frustrated by aspects or didn't understand what was going on, or often felt like the game was unfair. Even after playing the tutorial, it seemed to be an issue of the players not understanding how the various mechanics of the game fit together.

This was a little surprising and humbling for us because we have been showing the game for a long time, both among friends and with new players at conventions like PAX, E3, etc etc., (for years!) and observed people to generally pick it up pretty well. But what seemed to be the X factor at work here was that in those contexts for new players we'd always be standing right there chatting with the player beforehand, and just giving a super brief description when handing them the controller ("its a survival game where you play as this lost creature, have to catch food to survive, rain cycles, etc etc") was enough to give them the tools to piece together the various mechanics. And obviously a person playing the game blind in a test or downloading it from Steam or whatever, wouldn't have that.

And most importantly we had to realize that it wasn't that "its just not a game for everybody" (as we'd sometimes let ourselves off the hook with), it was actually that we were failing to give players the tools they needed to play the game. NOTHING is worse than watching in front of you someone who is really excited and enthusiastic about your game become frustrated and disillusioned, when 2 seconds worth of text hints or a controller diagram pop up would clarify everything.

So we had to fix all that. It was intense and stressful! I was working practically 24hrs a day for a good part of the week. But the results were nothing less than paradigm shifting and improved the new player experience (and i'd say the game in general) tremendously. Over the course of the week the tester surveys went from "looks beautiful, but is frustrating or i dont understand" to "i love this, can i play more, when does it come out, let me know if you need deeper testing", which is *extremely rewarding*



And after getting back from that we've been applying all that we learned from the testing sessions and sprinting to our upcoming gold date! Joar has been heroically slaying bugs, polishing gameplay and UI stuff, adding in new features to tie everything up; Del is somehow slogging through an impossible list of illustrations, and im tidying up levels, music, audio and organizing some last bits of deeper testing this week.

Anyway, we *really really* appreciate you guys still posting and checking in, staying enthusiastic even as we have been mute codeslaves for the past months, too exhausted from the pixel mines to make posts. This will change soon though! The light at the end of the tunnel is so bright I almost feel like Im outside!!!

jamesprimate on August 01, 2016, 12:53:57 PM:

Yeah and it's not like an "either or" sort of thing, this was just a blind spot we had that's been corrected somewhat, so one doesn't take away from the other. Don't worry, it's still the same overly complicated, obtuse and confusing old Rain World, we've just workshopped the tutorial aspects so that it might now be actually be playable by people that aren't Joar and myself, lol!

Basically, long story short: issues that we thought were inherent to the game design turned out to just be a lack of communication to the player. Fixed! 

jamesprimate on August 15, 2016, 09:02:03 AM:

aha i cant seem to see them! idk if thats an amusing ironic truism or not 


much like the olypmics, we are "sprinting" towards deadlines and counting down to "gold" over here!  As you can tell im getting like 3hr of sleep a night.

anyway, have some gross glowing slime molds!

jamesprimate on August 16, 2016, 01:01:16 AM:

ha! i think joar has a proper viking beard going. i find them too annoyingly itchy to suffer for too long, so i just look like ive been in a cave for 500 years and forgotten the taste of bread

jamesprimate on August 16, 2016, 04:15:03 AM:

basically! i know it SEEMS like i have murdered Joar and completely taken over the project, i assure you thats not the case. hes just trying to keep distractions down to a bare minimum for this last "sprint" / deathmarch.

that said, it cant have been pleasant though as the past few weeks most of the communication has just been bug reports and various re-phrasings of "WE NEED THIS DONE IN 2HRS BEFORE THE NEXT TEST BUILD LAUNCHES" etc. there is going to be some PTSD

jamesprimate on August 22, 2016, 05:25:29 PM:

ah that video is from a while back! i just realized most of our vids were set to private so ive been turning them public. this was an early version of the system just showing the functionality, and the "threat ramp up" was juiced a bit for the purposes of demonstration. its been polished quite a bit since then ofc.

yeah spot on! the "pulse" idea was the inception of this system. initially the concept was that it would *just* be the pulse, as if you were hearing the slugcats heart beating louder and the adrenaline rushing, but that got boring quickly. also at that same time we were having an issue with the world feeling a bit too quiet generally (despite having 120+ music tracks, its just so large!) so we used this to solve both problems in an appropriately rain world way

each region has tiered system of 8 to 12 layers of "threat music" that can stack up depending on how dire the situation is for little sluggie. to avoid becoming repetitive, each tier of audio pulls from a pool of possible tracks, with many many possible combinations. the pool for the early layers (first to come in) is generally pretty simple and subtle: a pulse beat or white noise elements but as the layers stack up it becomes more recognizably "music", with the final layers being a melody or lead line.

at this point it works pretty well! there are certain situations where the threat level ramps up too quickly for my taste, such as when vultures drop down from above, and there are some track layer combinations that work better than others ofc, so i might give it a bit more polish soon.

jamesprimate on August 29, 2016, 09:09:49 PM:

HEY FRIENDS! Busy week coming up for the slugcat crew. We're going to be showing the game at 3 difference events. I have like 2 seconds to devote to this post, but gotta make some sort of announcement


PAX West, Seattle Sept 2-5: As usual! You can find me and the freshest build of Rain World at the Adult Swim Games room, and other playable versions will be at the Sanshee Games corner and the SONY indie games booth. Maybe I'll be 3 places at once, who knows. http://west.paxsite.com/

XOXO Fest, Portland Sept 8-11: Lydia and I will be showing Rain World at the XOXO Arcade on a huge projector screen, should be pretty sweet. I'm kind of stoked to see XOXO Fest, I've heard really good things. https://xoxofest.com/

Busan Indie Connect, Busan South Korea Sept 9-11: Joar is going to be showing Rain World at Busan Indie connect and I'm *maximum jealous*, it looks super super cool. http://eng.bicfest.org/


But anyway, if you are at any of these def come say hi! I'll tell you 1000 secrets that I can't post here  

jamesprimate on September 03, 2016, 11:36:03 AM:

Most certainly! The soundtrack at this point is absurdly long, like 3.5hr+, a good deal of which is music that is setup in layers for dynamic audio, or other game context dependent format. So after everything is settled with development  i really want to take some time and get everything cleaned up, organized or arranged into proper listenable tracks (so it sounds like a song rather than 12 layers of loops that interact etc), and see how it can be grouped into a few albums worth of music.

We've had a few companies come to us with concepts for doing nice vinyl editions and I'd really like to pursue that as well, though 3.5 hours of vinyl is a LOT of vinyl, so might break it down into a few different self contained volumes or something. But yes I'm going to go all out with the music, its going to be fun!

jamesprimate on September 07, 2016, 11:44:22 AM:

yes, mostly! most of the audio is in fact, including sound effects and all of that

jamesprimate on September 11, 2016, 09:30:52 AM (Last Edit: September 11, 2016, 09:41:58 AM):

Yeah it's definitely not intentional, believe me 

Basically we're in the process of porting the code to PS4 and that's a tedious time consuming thing, plus scheduling a simultaneous release on steam and PSN with our publisher adult swim... there's only certain windows of time when everything works out for all the pieces that are in motion. We had one if we would have had all the code wrapped a few months ago, but we weren't happy with where things were at, so had to wait for the next one.

Even now, we *pretty much* have the code wrapped, but we're still polishing art and fixing bugs, so... yeah it's definitely going to be a much better, tighter game as a result of the extra time. It's not like it's just sitting around.

Thanks for patience!

jamesprimate on September 12, 2016, 06:51:43 AM:

Things have been *extremely* busy for us the past few months. In addition to continuing to wrap up the dev work, right now Joar is moving to Seoul, South Korea (after spending a week showing RW at Busan Indie Connect, where it was nominated for excellence in Art, Sound and the Grand Prixe prize!) while I've been showing the game at PAX West in Seattle (where it was shown at 3 locations: Adult Swim, Sony and Sanshee) and then the XOXO Fest Arcade in Portland for the past 2 weeks.

I think something that's lost on these boards and even in documentaries like indie game the movie etc is just how many roles you have to take up as an indie developer. There may have been a time when someone could code a game in their basement and release it on steam the next day and that would do well, but it is definitely not the case now. Pretty much every indie budget game that I've seen succeed the past few years has been accompanied by tireless promotional work. I was talking about this with Joar yesterday, how there's basically this unspoken under-culture of devs as "marketing nomads" going from convention to convention perpetually, in different states and countries,  exposing a game to new audiences, making journalists aware of it, building support from various communities, etc etc. It's like running a political campaign or something! But if you've spent years of your life and all of your savings account developing a game, you can't take the risk of just throwing it out there and hoping for the best.

Outside of the traveling circus of the industry I don't think anyone is really aware of it. Like, the average person might go to a convention and see a dev there with their game and assume "oh cool, they are at this convention", but the truth is that they are at EVERY convention, and they probably have been for months or years, writing code in the hotel room, sending emails on shitty Starbucks wifi. This goes for the most polished indie darling to the roughest unity asset flip. Kind of fascinating, really. Even devs that are considered to be "reclusive" by the online gaming  community I see regularly at these events, working hard. Phil Fish was at XOXO, Tarn Adams was at BIC, etc etc

And as an indie you are doing this with a very small team of course, so long story short sometimes we're not reading too deeply into the TIGS comments, or will forego responding to questions that are answered elsewhere in the thread 




As for the alpha that's on humble, the link is legit but it is **OLD** and not in any way representative of the current game, so I personally would only recommend it to people who might be interested in following the development process in some depth. It might be interesting for people like Christian and Chris Early who have played the Lingo alpha years ago, then this early C# build and then get to see how the mechanics evolve into the final game, but likely not to the average player.

And lastly: shoutout to the TIGS fam for holding down the threads while we've been away, answering questions, etc. Y'all are the best 

jamesprimate on September 15, 2016, 12:28:06 AM:

oh hey wow, i take a plane and this thread blows up again! since im getting flak for NOT doing this, i guess ill try to answer some questions now that im home...


that is the plan! though there are some gameplay problems to solve with that, so were going to wait until we can focus on it before making any big announcements. actually, basic functional co-op multiplayer is already in the alpha (i think? its been a while), just go into setup.txt and change 'player 2 active: 0' to 'player 2 active: 1'




there is none. we really didnt want to extend the kickstarter or anything like that, and would prefer people to see the game when its complete, but had so many requests for the alpha that we put up the $25 one as a "if you REALLY want it" sort of thing. you'll notice that we dont advertise it at all and poor christian has to be the one to post it when people ask. sorry! its just how we feel on the matter




Debatable! In our minds Rainworld has been pretty overhyped and media saturated, so we have been consciously making an effort to downplay things the past months until we do the official release date / trailer and all of that (hence the lack of new footage, etc etc.) We dont want the game to come out and people to be like "ah yes, its rainworld, which looks like it has for the past 5 years". 

But that said we are still obligated to show the game and be present for conventions and events, which carries its own natural hype. Similarly, if a journalist gets in touch and wants to do a thing of course we're not going to tell them "no", that would be idiotic. But we also havent been actively seeking it out, if that makes sense. Though soon enough we will be! And we have 8 months of flashy progress to show, so im pretty excited for that.




yes! though probably only on Steam. Sony has its own rules for that stuff, and we are like bugs to them.


not sure yet, actually!




People are weird about this. Knowing how variable, tedious and time-consuming all this stuff is (as well as awareness of the various bureaucracies involved), we *very consciously* never announced any official release date and we only will when everything is locked in and we are 100% confident with being able to hit that date. But hopefully soon!!!!



ok thats as far back as the quote machine goes, so let me know if i missed anything! im going to try to get joar to post too, i know you all miss him.

and hey i really appreciate you guys and gals all sticking up for us on the threads, and just in general. i honestly think of you all as friends and hope we can share a drink or whatever some day. i wont lie: development is lonely and super alienating. for years we've spent locked away in basements working insane hours, separated from the real world, living this weird life of half utter isolation / half 100,000 person conventions and media appearances. its impossible to discuss IRL, friends cant relate, its too weird. for me, twitter and TIGS have been my outlets. not just common interests, but people who are going through the same stuff. so anyway, cheers to you all 

jamesprimate on September 21, 2016, 05:41:52 AM:

a little taste of Del's incredible illustration work

jamesprimate on September 21, 2016, 12:56:29 PM:

Def! This is a little corner of a much bigger, and spoilery, pic. So we're going to wait until the trailer is out at least to release. Del wants to do a whole bunch of proper wallpapers and extended illustrations too, which might fill in some story points and backgrounds of other characters. Looking forward to it!

jamesprimate on October 11, 2016, 06:30:23 PM:

thanks all!!

Tiniest of updates:

The past weeks/months/lifetimes have been spent testing and improving the PS4 build with our porting team, Carbon Games. Things are looking REAL NICE

Its pretty crazy though: Joar is in Seoul right now, Carbon is in London, and Adult Swim is in Atlanta. Im in Boston organizing everything, and never sleeping because as soon as one crew calls it a day another timezone day begins! But everything is moving along quite nicely.

For international peeps, its official that we'll be releasing in a few languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish and Portuguese; which im very very excited about. I never expected things to get this big.

We plan on doing Asian languages eventually, but localization is going to take quite a bit for that and we'll have to redo our text system to accommodate, so it'll be down the line a bit.



Another cool thing now that content production is wrapped up is that I can start focusing on PR/media stuff.

For some that sounds like dirty words I know, but what I mean by it is putting together cool media to tease on the lead up to release. Were planning on a bunch of trailers showcasing different regions, gif campaigns that follow little narratives, "music videos" showcasing some of our favorite tunes in context, wallpapers and teaser art from Del. Super super psyched to get into all of that! (Especially since the last few months have been a tedious bug-testing hellscape, haha!)

But anyway, if anybody has things they'd like to see or suggestions for that let me know and I'll take it into consideration! 

JLJac on October 13, 2016, 06:51:57 PM:

Icelandic Death Cat will be my band name once I'm done with this dang thing.

jamesprimate on October 13, 2016, 11:01:54 PM:

THE PRODIGAL SON HAS RETURNED TO US

jamesprimate on October 14, 2016, 01:38:40 AM:

yessssssss thats the plan! should be soon too. i just dont have a minute to devote to it until we get the PS4 stuff wrapped.

the game is Quite Large, and the only way for me to do a proper test is to "speed run" the game and take notes on performance issues, shader problems, wonkiness. I say "speed run" it in quotes because the fastest I, the person who made every room and region and know all the secrets and shortcuts, have been able to play to the win condition (skipping 3 regions!) is 8hrs. And that is ignoring all the narrative stuff and endgame content ofc.

ASG has people testing as well, but since a lot of this stuff is making sure that some shader effect in room 1367 is the right color and transparency, or this audio layer lines up with 4 others in the right way, its basically only me that can do it. So I run the game over and over every day as they update the builds, taking screenshots and video of the problems and sending it to them to tweak. this is my punishment for ambition!

but yeah as soon as this nightmare is over its time to update the fans and let them know the good news: rain world is coming...

jamesprimate on October 14, 2016, 01:48:16 AM:

thank you friends, i'll need it!

since were here I'll post what Joar is working on right now, which is an options menu for the PS4 build: https://gfycat.com/SentimentalGoodnaturedIndianrockpython

how exciting!

JLJac on October 14, 2016, 03:06:19 AM:

The UI and graphic design is generally pretty terrible hahaha! I hope to be able to go back to it and fix it up a little bit at some point for sure. The game only has like, 3 menu screens though, and in the standard case your only interaction with it will be hitting "continue" in the main menu, so it's a super minor part of the game. The button is big because it's a safety button - you can't click it but need to hold it and a white semi-circle will fill in gradually.