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Rain World - Hunt prey, evade predators, survive as a Slugcat (March 28th, PS4/PC)

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Pachimari

Member
At first I didn't understand the whole deal with this game, but ever since the new year, this has quickly jumped to becoming one of my most anticipated games of the year. It looks so good!
 
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More_Badass

Member
Approaching a scavenger pack: the annoying jerk way vs the calm friendly way
FatalSplendidCamel.gif
ZestySlimGoldeneye.gif
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They now have some basic ability to interpret player behavior and react to it. If you're cool, they will also play it cool - if you antagonize them, they'll respond in kind. In that first gif, they go into a behavior where they're threatening me (they're pointing spears at me, but that animation might need a little work to bring the spear out of the body's silhouette), and by not moving, I show that I've given up. If I would've continued jumping around, harassing them, they would probably have given me a spear to the gut.

Their behavior is not always the same - it's influenced by their personality stats, the group, and the group leader. As the group leader has an influence on all the others, coming across a squad with an unsympathetic or aggressive leader might end up worse than one which has a nice chieftain.

They each track an individual relationship to you, and there also exists a number which is sort of your general reputation among the scavengers. If you commit violence against them or throw spears in their general direction, they will start disliking you - the specific individuals that saw you do it at first, but down the line all scavengers you come across. On the other hand, if you save the life of a scavenger, they'll start liking you more - especially that particular individual. If they're very fond of you, you can hang out as one of the pack.
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Crispy75

Member
This is getting ridiculous :D

I'm very interested to know what gameplay/narrative purpose this will all have. Cool, I can hang out with the pack, but why would I want to?
 
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More_Badass

Member
Here's an interesting post from the developers about their thought process behind the environments
Suburban and some of the earlier regions were initially intended to be more overtly understandable as the remains of some previous civilizations dwellings, but for a number of reasons, we opted for a more vague approach.

First and foremost is that we wanted to create a world as seen through the eyes of something slightly below human intelligence. The slugcat is smart enough to recognize that there is probably some purpose to the structures around it, but not comprehend their meaning. same with the use of "language", letters and characters, etc. The idea is to create a kind of dreamlike atmosphere where the player projects meaning into the structures they see, creating their own expectations about what they might be for and where they might lead, and we play with resolving those expectations quite a bit in the region / world map layout.

Similarly, we wanted any specifics about the previous cultures of rain world to remain vague; the player might assume "human" by default, but that's not necessarily the case and we don't want to feed into that reading too much. What's important is that they were there, they built these structures, and now they're gone.

Also important is that the slugcat operates among the in-between spaces of these industrial ruins, like a rat in the subway or a squirrel on a rooftop. You'll sometimes see those overtly designed I.M. Pei vistas, where the structures seem to line up in some grand plan, but most of the time, it's a ditch filled with garbage and a pipe sticking out, or the crumbling basement of a building. So even if it weren't some fantasy alien world we were working in, i think we'd still keep the overtly human signifiers to a minimum
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M

More_Badass

Member
A very exciting update
Rain World is now a 100% playable game, with a (gorgeous) menu, saving, progression. First round of polish is done for all 12 regions. Gates are functional and spiffed up with some new visual effects, UI is looking surprisingly good, in-game map is complete and has had some nice polish. ITS HAPPENING GUYS
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NoFaceNico

Member
Holy shit. More_Badass is a mod now?? Congrats!

Nice update on Rail World, can't wait for it to release when ready. I'm looking forward to reviews as it seems like the kind of game I can really get into.
 
M

More_Badass

Member
ChosenPredator said:
The guy doing AI for this game is gonna get awards

I feel like this game is going to be a May 2016 release.
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I think the guy who did the FEAR AI left gaming to work on AI tech, wrote a paper on it and everything

Can you imagine if the Rain World AI systems could be applied to robotics and drones? Being able to dynamically react to changes in the environment, other beings in the world, personality that adjust over time, understanding of threats, etc.
 
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More_Badass

Member
Oh, this is going to be cool
http://schedule.gdconf.com/session/animation-bootcamp-rainworld-animation-process
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!
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C

ChosenPredator

Banned
More_Badass said:
I think the guy who did the FEAR AI left gaming to work on AI tech, wrote a paper on it and everything

Can you imagine if the Rain World AI systems could be applied to robotics and drones? Being able to dynamically react to changes in the environment, other beings in the world, personality that adjust over time, understanding of threats, etc.
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Yeah, it's super fascinating stuff one I wish would show up more for other games, the cross over into robotics would be even more interesting.

I think it's what Steve Grand is doing, to me he's like the Guru of AI. The way he made norns, how they have highly evolved artificial intelligence and realistic genetic code that is close to humans. (they can adapt, sleep, eat, teach their young how to speak, carry devastating disease from Grendel's that can kill the rest of their kind, or learn the terrible habits of the Grendel)

thats why im also interested in Grandroids which doesn't get alot of shine yet but it will when its closer to releasing, but what rain world is doing is fantastic.
 
M

More_Badass

Member
ChosenPredator said:
Yeah, it's super fascinating stuff one I wish would show up more for other games, the cross over into robotics would be even more interesting.

I think it's what Steve Grand is doing, to me he's like the Guru of AI. The way he made norns, how they have highly evolved artificial intelligence and realistic genetic code that is close to humans. (they can adapt, sleep, eat, teach their young how to speak, carry devastating disease from Grendel's that can kill the rest of their kind, or learn the terrible habits of the Grendel)

thats why im also interested in Grandroids which doesn't get alot of shine yet but it will when its closer to releasing, but what rain world is doing is fantastic.
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I find it funny how you see threads here asking about AI and why AI hasn't advanced in games, and people list stuff like Shadow of Mordor, while this indie game is making such cool advances in AI
 
D

DireStr8s

Member
Super interested in this but I can't figure out the structure. Is it more akin to a linear stage based game like Shovel Night, an open world game, or is it a rogue-lite? Could someone clue me in becuase this looks fantastic!
 
M

More_Badass

Member
DireStr8s said:
Super interested in this but I can't figure out the structure. Is it more akin to a linear stage based game like Shovel Night, an open world game, or is it a rogue-lite? Could someone clue me in becuase this looks fantastic!
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An open world consisting of interconnected regions
 
D

dangeraaron10

Unconfirmed Member
At first I wasn't terribly interested but the more and more I read, it felt less like just your standard death world and that there are many creatures that can react differently to you, and you could even form alliances with the more tribal like creatures? And you can even care for pups?

That, on top of that fluid as hell animation

Sold!
 
M

More_Badass

Member
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!
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"A few more creatures"....damn, this ecosystem is going to be more awesome than it already is
 
M

More_Badass

Member
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.
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Wow
 
R

Raticus79

Seek victory, not fairness
Nice, sounds like they're really going above and beyond with the content. They could have easily gotten by with a smaller world thanks to the novelty of the critter interactions (not that I'm complaining).

I went ahead and picked up the old alpha bundle to get a feel for how it controls. They did a good job with the transitions. Hopefully they allow higher resolutions for the vector-based stuff in the final version.
 
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More_Badass

Member
The dev blog has been relatively quiet lately, as they've been working on a lot of the secret stuff and getting a GDC build ready

There was this tantalizing post yesterday
If you guys think our development is smooth sailing, let me comfort you by sharing that I had a pretty huge set back in one of the "set pieces" we're making - ie special extra cool rooms - and basically had to scrap 3 days of work

Could salvage some of it though and I think that we're on a trajectory to an okay result! If anything, we've got persistence haha
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As someone who's been following this game like a hawk for years, it's awesome that there's so much I don't know about. I know most of the region names, but only what seven or eight actually look like. A bunch of the creatures, but there are a handful that haven't been revealed. Set piece rooms, secrets, story, all unknown
 
M

More_Badass

Member
Cool new clip showing off slugcat, scavenger, and vulture interaction
Here's a recent clip i liked that illustrates the Scavenger's friend/foe system a little bit:

https://twitter.com/RainWorldGame/status/707027795449262080

This Scavenger has never encountered a Slugcat before, so is initially wary and moves to create distance. When Slugcat approaches with a spear, the Scav draws its own spear anticipating a fight, but then as no action is taken by the player, it switches to a less lethal rock.

When the vulture comes into view, it changes things up a bit, as it's considered a much more immediate threat. But you can still see the Scavenger targeting both the slugcat and the vulture with its spear as the moment-to-moment threat level changes. Then the slugcat spears the vulture behind the fleeing Scavenger and you can even see the moment of re-evaluation as the Scavenger decides "eh alright, you're cool" before they both escape underground as comrades.

A lot going on in 22 seconds!
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M

More_Badass

Member
Progress sounds like it's coming along nicely
A surprising amount of work can be done when people are actually in the same room, as opposed to literally the opposite sides of the planet! So far Joar has implemented:
- a "wiggle system" to allow some possibility of escape from non-binary player death scenarios (when caught by sticky white lizard tongues, worm grass, etc etc)
- a "room attractiveness" tool that allows us to specify which rooms a creature might want to be in or avoid, allowing for us to fix problem areas, shape the player experience / difficulty curve a bit more, and setup "soft" creature set-pieces
We've finally put in region gate shelters, making the entire world map Totally Actually Playable, worked on placing the music, fixed SFX issues, solidified progression details, plus a million little improvements and bug-fixes of course. Stuff is really looking good
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R

Rei_Toei

Fclvat sbe Pnanqn, ru?
Nice art. I'm starting to get a bit afraid this will kick my ass really hard but I'm onboard for all the feels it looks to give. Can't wait to go co-op, teach some Slugcat kittens how to survive in this world and try to not get eaten by basically everything out there.
 
CamHostage

CamHostage

Member
Putosaure said:
Is the Vita version still a thing ?
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As I understand it, we shouldn't be talking about a Vita version as being "a thing" alongside the other versions of Rain World. (It is not listed on Adult Swim's release plans or the Rain World site, last we officially heard of the Vita version was I believe 2014 though James Primate did mention Rain World Vita on the devblog in 2015.) But also, we should NOT be seeing it as not-a-thing, as there are plans beyond the public front of Rain World.

(Overheard an AS rep at a GDC event talking about how there will be more to discuss about platforms for all of its games at a later time, and we were standing in front of Rain World at the time, I believe maybe somebody was even asking about the Vita version.)

As with a lot of games, I always take talk of Vita plans as something I'm eager for but not holding my breath over until it's ready for me to play (especially after the Setsuna incident, where the game exists and yet I still can't have it.) I do wish AS/Project Rain World would be more specific about plans (or the end of plans, if it be so) for Rain World, but they seem to be unable to comment on it one way or another at this time.
 
M

More_Badass

Member
Reached out to the devs about the Vita version
A Vita port is still planned, but it'll definitely be something we do after the initial Steam/PS4 release as there will be changes that will inevitably have to be made in order to fit that format and spec. We've kept Vita in mind for much of the development, from the screen aspect ratios we've chosen to making sure that level design, but optimizing the finished rain world for the limitations of vita CPU/GPU/RAM/shaders will be a thing that takes some time and effort for sure and we cant even guess at what it will take until we start the work.
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