The two-person team creating the complex ecosystem simulator and survival platformer Rain World has released a new video showcasing the game’s impressive AI and dynamic sidescrolling play. (The game’s sound system isn’t in place yet hence the music in the video.)
In Rain World, you play as a slugcat as it tries to hunt for food and avoid becoming something else’s next meal. It’s set in an abandoned industrial environment that sees bone-crushing rain pouring over it for most of the year. But for a few days the creatures that have survived come out of hibernation when the rain has stopped in order to feed.
This is when the game takes place, allowing you to navigate various terrariums, gathering weapons and tools to hunt and defend yourself with. You can eat bats, get attacked by large lizard creatures, and suckered on by leeches in the drainage systems. You’re even able to mate and have babies that you’ll need to look after and feed. The idea behind the game’s design is to offer a proper, working ecosystem that thrives by itself without player input.
You can sneak and climb around these alien landscapes, discovering secrets and dangers, with movement feeling especially nimble and dynamic due to the physics-and-code based animation. According to the developers it “gives characters a natural fluidity of movement and intuitive weight, for lighting quick high-wire action.”
Development on Rain World is approaching four years, but the team recently switched everything over to the Unity Engine and had to rebuild some major elements into it. Despite that workload, the first playable alpha versions of Rain World have been released to those who backed the game’s successful Kickstarter.
Rain World should hopefully be released for PC in 2015. You can see its development progress in the TIGSource forums.
