How One Programmer Created Gaming's Most Complex Ecosystem
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This Rain World documentary details the development of indie 2D pixel art survival platformer Rain World and goes behind the scenes of its creation. Discover more about developer Videocult and its two founders, Joar Jakobsson and James Primate. The very first prototype of Rain World was made in 2011, back when Joar was still studying graphic design in Sweden. The initial idea was to make a platformer character that wasn’t standing upright, like Mario for instance, and instead create something that could fall, tumble and crawl. Moreover, he wanted to create a small ecosystem by placing three types of creatures in the same level. The documentary also explores all the design decisions that Videocult made and shows how Joar had difficulties deciding between making a linear game or an open world game.
It also takes a close look at all the hurdles the team had to go through. Creating an ecosystem that perpetually exists, combined with numerous complicated AI systems, proved challenging for Joar, who was doing all the programming by himself. He created a system called “the abstract creature framework” to make sure off-screen creatures could still move around and interact with each other. Additionally, in the middle of development, the team switched from using the programming language Lingo to using C#, as well as moving all the code and assets over to Unity. This whole process took over a year to complete. Furthermore, James had to discard over 50 audio tracks when he decided to completely overhaul the soundtrack after the game had gone through multiple changes and now no longer matched the initial chiptune inspired music. Lastly, Joar and James share some advice for aspiring indie developers and the documentary takes a look at what’s next for Videocult.
Article sources:
https://1drv.ms/b/s!AtL-iav41hYanU0P-YOAAz1pDkVq?e=8xT63u
Video sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVntwsrjNe4&ab_channel=GDC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2r7bfaJmYc&ab_channel=AnimState
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpGb42-6svI&ab_channel=Sup%2CHolmes%3F
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlMTnuGGNxM&ab_channel=IGDATurin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3yd2sBj0x4&ab_channel=GamerHubTV
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw7t04Aqbic&ab_channel=PCGamer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYevkZXedak&ab_channel=TekSyndicate
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJcMVRDGsvU&ab_channel=GAUStudios
Script written by Anine Van de Ryck.
Outro song: Thank You R.G.E. - Joe Bagale
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