Dec 13, 2022

Rain World - [AG] riv otter

Hey, slugcats!

Yesterday, w- wait, Gourmand check first. Gourmand pushed over the whole fridge just to get the cookie jar on top of the fridge. I still have to come up with a way to explain this to the boss…

Yesterday, we revealed that Expedition Mode will be coming to Rain World: Downpour! If you missed the trailer, you can watch it here!
https://youtu.be/H7tVAwwmHaE
Expedition mode brings a new and exciting way to play Rain World! Each campaign you can set up different challenges, difficulty, slugcats and more! Complete the challenges to gain points to unlock perks, burdens, music for the jukebox and more!

Meet the Developer

Expedition Mode was developed by the amazing, talented LeeMoriya! He also developed some exceptional Rain World mods like Forecast and In-Game Warp Menu. And for other mod developers out there, he has been super helpful in the modding scene by helping players that are having trouble with modding their game. Here is a message from LeeMoriya himself!

“Hey Everyone,

I hope you've enjoyed what you've seen of Expedition so far, I'm excited to see your reactions once you get your hands on it. While the new mode is tailored more towards hardcore players and completionists, I hope everyone can find something about Expedition they enjoy.

Rain World's modding community is the first one I've ever become really invested in, and without their help and support, Expedition and many of my other mods may never have been made. So If I've ever bugged you for help, or you've enjoyed something I've made, then I'd like to thank you!

-LeeMoriya”

Selecting a Slugcat

Your first decision in Expedition Mode will always be what slugcat you’d like to play. If you have More Slugcats expansion enabled, then you’ll be able to use them as well! You must have beaten the slugcat's campaign before you can select them in Expedition Mode! Selecting a slugcat will have their special spawns and abilities! So Rivulet still rockets across the map and the Artificer explodes with their jumps.

You can have one expedition save for each slugcat per save file.

Selecting Challenges

Once you have your slugcat selected, you then be able to select your challenges! You may have up to 5 challenges active in an expedition. The more challenges you face and complete the more points you will earn at the end of the run which will help you unlock stuff.

Here are the different types of challenges you can face:

Passage
Echo
Score
Hunting
Item collecting
Pearl delivery / hoarding
Neuron gifting
Spear pinning
Vista visiting

You may filter these so you only get the challenges you like!

The difficulty of the challenges can be selected with the slider bar over the challenges. The more difficult the challenges are, the more points you may earn at the end of the expedition. You may make the expedition even more challenging by hiding the challenges so you don’t know what your challenges are while in your expedition by clicking the eye button next to the challenges. Hidden challenges give you double the points!

Clicking the dice button will randomize all the challenges in the list even if the challenge is hidden. If you click one of the challenges, it will randomize only that one challenge. So if you like two challenges but not the third challenge you may choose to only change that one challenge.

Perks and Burdens

Perks and burdens are unlocked through points you earned from expeditions! Use the perks to help aid your expedition and apply burdens to increase the amount of points you will earn while making the expedition more difficult.

Perks come in many forms
Start with item in shelter
Start with neuron glow
Start with karma flower
Make passages useable
Temporarily slow down time
Have different slugcats abilities

There are three perks that I will not reveal, so it’s time to theorycraft on what those three perks are!

There are four burdens you can apply to increase the amount of points you’ll receive.

Blinded shrouds the world in endless nights making dangers harder to see.
Doomed removes the safety net of karma. Any death ends the expedition.
Hunted shows all hostile creatures your location all the time.
Pursued has something stalking you through the world, endlessly searching for you.

Progression

There are 75 milestones that you can complete to earn rewards. The rewards can be perks, perk slots, burdens, or music tracks from Rain World: Downpour to listen to in the Jukebox.

Each milestone has different requirements to complete and can be unlocked out of order. For example, you can unlock milestone 2 (complete 1 challenge) before milestone 1 (Reach level 3). These milestones can be challenges you do in one expedition, like complete an expedition as the Spearmaster, or challenges you do over multiple expeditions, like complete 5 hunting challenges. You may also preview the awards and requirements to complete each milestone by hovering your cursor over each milestone. This can help decide on which rewards you want to go for and how to unlock each milestone to gain those rewards.

Each slugcat has a mission to complete in order to unlock a milestone. Each mission is a set of challenges that a specific slugcat must complete. Choosing a mission will change the slugcat you selected.

Playing the Expedition

The very first thing you’ll notice is that you spawn in a random shelter from any region. If you have any perks that spawn in items, they will be in that shelter with you. Each slugcat will also spawn at karma 2

Normal karma rules apply. If you die, your karma goes down one tier and if you survive the cycle, your karma goes up a tier. Echos will increase your karma cap as usual. However, if the slugcat dies while at karma 1, then the expedition is over. You may play the same challenges if you fail the expedition from the game over screen.

You can keep track of your challenge progress by looking at your map. In the top left corner while you are looking at the map, the lists of the challenges will appear with your progression on each one. Once you complete a challenge, it will be strikethrough from the list. You must survive the cycle, without starving, in order for your progress to be saved. If the slugcat dies, then you lose any challenge progress gained in that cycle.

Once you finish all the challenges, you must survive the cycle to win.

Ending of Expedition

Once you complete the expedition, you will gain points based on how difficult the challenges you completed, how many challenges you completed, and any burdens you have active. Creatures killed, cycles, story events, and time taken do not affect the final score.

Once your points are counted, if you complete any milestones you’ll gain your rewards here.

Thank you for reading! 37 days until Downpour is released and I am super excited! I still have more to announce this week so keep an eye out! My good friend Buddy, who is still learning how to be a slugcat, will be streaming Rain World: Downpour on Friday 12pm PST / 3pm EST at https://www.twitch.tv/akuparagames

- Riv Otter

Aug 31, 2022

Announcing Rain World Remix

Rain World - [AG] riv otter

Hello slugcats!

I am excited to announce a free update called Rain World Remix. This update will add accessibility options, customization options, fix many bugs present in the current version of the game, and improve on some of the things that annoyed players, like the rain deer interactions. Those who don’t buy the Downpour DLC will still get this update when Downpour releases.

I won’t go through all the options as this announcement will turn into a dictionary if I tried, but if you have any questions about ones that I don’t go into feel free to ask and I’ll answer with the best of my ability. Any of these options can be toggled for your best individual experience.

Loading screen tips and extra tutorials will be added to help newer players with the mechanics that the game doesn’t normally teach you in game - like how to drop items or how to tell how much time is left in a cycle. Loading screen tips will occasionally give tips when the slugcat dies or when the slugcat survives the cycle. Extended tutorials will give in-game tutorial messages for certain mechanics and scenarios.

Music is an important part of telling if there is danger nearby in Rain World. However, those that have a hard time hearing do have a major disadvantage. Threat music visual pulse will give a visual indicator of incoming danger. In addition to the music going more intense as the slugcat gets closer to danger, the threat music visual pulse shows a heartbeat of red dots on the bottom of the screen. There are up to five red dots that can appear and the more red dots that show up the closer the slugcat is to danger.

If you ever feel that a creature killing the slugcat just off screen is unfair, then Slug Senses is a way to counter that. Checking the map with this option active will show the creatures that are near the slugcat in the room, including those creatures that are just off screen. On the map it will show the creature symbol and will differentiate if they are alive or dead. However, camouflaged creatures, creatures in darkness, or those underwater, will still obscure themselves from the map.

Karma gates are a big barrier that many players reach. Sometimes it can be super discouraging for players to reach the needed karma to cross to the next region only to die and then not have the required karma to cross the karma gate again. Rain World Remix will have two options that will help players cross those karma gates. The first option is that karma gates will have Monk style gates for all campaigns. Once you cross through the gate, that gate will continue to be unlocked and not require karma again. The second option will disable all karma gate requirements - so even if you are struggling you can continue to go through the karma gates at the lowest karma.

For speedrunners of the game, there will be a togglable in-game speedrun timer that can be used. Now a lot of speedrunners may be distraught to hear that Rain World Remix does fix a lot of speedrunning exploits like karma caching and guardian skips. We don’t want to hurt the speedrun community and make speedruns less consistent so we have put in a toggleable option that can be used to keep exploits and advantageous glitches that speedrunners use to get the fastest times. For those interested in speedrunning for the current version of Rain World the Rain World Discord has a meta-and-tech channel that you can discuss with other speedrunners on strategies.

If red lizards weren’t scary enough there is an Alpha Red Lizards option to make them stronger. This option gives them tongues to pull you close, and if you think that stashing a bunch of spears is a good idea, their tongue can snatch your spear and break it in half with their bite.

The rain deer is one of the most annoying creatures for the community. In the current build the rain deer behavior cannot be influenced by the player once on the antlers. If they go a different direction then what the player wants then there is no way to change that other then jump off and wait for the next rain deer and hope they go the correct way. The tweaked deer behavior option adds two ways that players can influence the direction the rain deer goes once on the antlers. Shaking on the antler will encourage them to change directions, or encourage them to move if they are idling in place. If the slugcat is holding a sporepuff while on the antlers, then the position of the slugcat will also influence their movement.

There are many more options that can be toggled to make your campaigns unique to what you like. Rain World Remix as a whole can be enabled or disabled, if you would like to continue playing Rain World unchanged from the way it is now. This free update will be launching alongside Rain World: Downpour.

Feel free to come chat with us in the Akupara Games Discord, or follow us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook for updates!

-[AG] Riv Otter

Jul 21, 2022

Steam Workshop Dev log!

Rain World - [AG] riv otter

Hello, Slugcats!

The modding community has given many players plenty of reasons to put countless additional hours into playing Rain World and it has honestly blown our minds to see the community’s ideas come to life in game. I’ve watched the progress of different mods being developed and have personally worked with different modding projects from the community. To put it in no uncertain terms, we at Akupara Games support the modding community of Rain World.

For this devlog, I’m excited to announce that Steam Workshop support will be coming to Rain World! Modders of Rain World will be able to upload their mods to Steam Workshop to enable more players easy access to their mods. Modders will have an easier time getting updates for their mods to the community.

On the player’s side, Rain World will be updated to include an in-game mod loader! You will not have to purchase Downpour to have access to the mod loader as this will be part of a free patch that will be added to the base game of Rain World! This will allow players to customize the mods they’ve subscribed to from the Steam Workshop in-game without having to manually move or manipulate files. Toggle what mods you want active, click the “Apply Mods” button, and it is as simple as that. You will also use this menu to toggle the More Slugcats Expansion and Jolly Co-Op coming in Rain World: Downpour, when the DLC is installed! If you have mods that might conflict with each other then the mod loader also allows you to adjust load order to configure which mods have priority over the others!

Those who have modded Rain World before, or who have made mods for it, will be familiar with ConfigMachine, a framework created by topicular that allows configuration menus to be made for mods. Rain World’s new in-game mod loader was a joint creation between topicular and Andrew, and all of the same capabilities of ConfigMachine will still be available and built into Rain World for mod creators to make configuration interfaces for their mods, and for players to tweak settings for their installed mods.

Some folks will be worried that this update will break the mods that are currently available, and unfortunately that is the case. However Andrew, the lead developer of Rain World: Downpour, will be working with modders to help them upgrade and transfer their mods to work with Steam Workshop. So once this goes live, many mods will already be ready to be uploaded to Steam Workshop and work with the mod loader. For now, modders can start reading this technical reference to start to learn how to upgrade their mods, and about how the modding landscape will change in the new update.

In the meantime, if you would like to try out some of the mods that work with the current version of Rain World, then I would strongly recommend checking out RainDB created by Andrew and Custom Region Support created by Garrakx! Both of these are websites / databases made to host the different mods made by members of the Rain World community (And now the authors of these sites are working with Akupara to bring Downpour to players!). There are loads of mods available to play right now, including different slugcats, regions, modes, and more made by the community!

Well that is it for the devlogs for Jolly Week of July but tomorrow we will have a live stream! Join us tomorrow at 11 PDT on the Akupara Twitch channel to get an early sneak peek at Co-Op Mode as we try to figure out how to traverse through the world with friends.

Thank you all for an amazing week! Let me know if you have any questions with the Steam Workshop and I’ll be happy to answer anything that I can!

Jul 20, 2022

Local Co-op Dev Log 2

Rain World - [AG] riv otter

Hello, Slugcats!

Welcome to the second devlog of Rain World: Downpour where I’ll talk about the customization options and gameplay details in the new local co-op campaign mode. Longtime players of Rain World might notice that many of these features stem from the Jolly Co-op mod from Garrakx, whom we enlisted to help us craft the Downpour experience for you. If you missed the first dev log, you can view it here!

The local co-op campaign can be played with up to four players. Choose from any combinations of the eight slugcats, which means you can have more than one of the same slugcat! For example, if you want to explode the whole environment with your friends, for some reason, then multiple slugcats can be Artificer!

This mode also brings customization options for the slugcats where you can change the slugcat’s size and color. With color mode you can select the colors of the each players’ slugcats. Choose the colors of each of the slugcats with “Custom” or have random colors chosen with “Auto.” You can experience the game as a small young slugpup which has a harder time grabbing higher poles or as an adult slugcat which is bigger and can be grabbed by other creatures easier.

Camera Input alters how fast the camera changes when a player requests the camera to be focused on them by the map button in game.

There are three difficulty options which are easy, normal, and hard!

Easy: Only one player needs to make it to the shelter to progress the next cycle
Normal: You can hibernate if all the slugcat’s bodies make it to the shelter. Even if all but one slugcat is dead, as long as all the fallen allies are in the shelter then the world will progress to the next cycle.
Hard: If any players die then it’s game over. All players need to make it to the shelter alive.

The HUD will show an arrow pointing at the slugcat with their name while they are on screen. You can customize the name given to the slugcat and the HUD will show that in game! If a player is off screen, an icon will point at the location of that player.

You can select if there is friendly fire with thrown spears! Thrown spears by slugcats will fly past your friends if spear miss is selected. Don’t tell anyone but you can still hit your companions with rocks even when spear miss is active.

Now with more players that means more mouths to feed right? Well, technically no. All players will share one food bar so if one slugcat eats all the slugcat gets one food pip filled. We decided to go in this direction as the world is built around the idea of only one slugcat existing in the world. If there were four slugcats each with their own food bar, then they could eat all the food in the region within just a few cycles with no way to survive. Spearmaster is still without a mouth and still has to eat through their spears plus those that like to eat other creatures still have the ability to eat them.

The next dev log we will reveal something new that we’ll launch as part of the free Parity Patch for the base game alongside Downpour!

Jul 19, 2022

Local Co-Op Dev Log 1

Rain World - [AG] riv otter

Hello, Slugcats!

Welcome to the first (of two!) devlogs coming out this week for the new local co-op campaign mode coming to Rain World: Downpour! Longtime players of Rain World might notice that many of these features stem from the Jolly Co-op mod from Garrakx, whom we enlisted to help us craft the Downpour experience for you. Later this same week, there’s gonna be a third devlog coming out and let’s just say I’m excited for it! Though, I’m not gonna spoil any of the secrets for that one.

In Downpour, you’ll be able to play with your friends to travel through the dangerous environments while avoiding the deadly creatures that inhabit every different region. You no longer have to try to survive alone in the treacherous world of Rain World.

The local co-op campaign can be played with up to four players with any of the slugcats including the five new slugcats coming in Downpour! The slugcats keep their abilities from their own campaign so you can swing over your friends with Saint, share the explosives you make with Artificer, create spears with Spearmaster, quickly scout out hazards with Rivulet, and craft different items with Gourmand. Finding clever ways to combine the abilities of the different slugcats is half the fun, so experimenting is half the fun! We learned the hard way during capturing footage that the Gourmand is so massive, they can actually kill their slugcat companions with their weight. (We plan to put them on a slight diet so that they won’t be hurting their friends at launch.)

You can select any of the base game campaigns of Monk, Survivor, or Hunter to send your slugcat crew into! You can start with the higher creature reputation of Monk’s campaign, play the first campaign as Survivor, or play with the harder and more vast creature spawns of Hunter.

Wordless communication will be another feature added so slugcats can point at dangers, food, shelter, or even each other.

If one of the slugcats is having some problems getting past an obstacle, then another slugcat can pick them up and give them a piggyback ride! They can even carry Gourmand with little effort! By both slugcats laying down in front of each other, one of the slugcats can grab the other and give them a piggyback ride! The slugcat giving the piggyback ride can still use their abilities to get around the world. Artificer can still explosive jump while giving a piggyback ride or Saint can swing with their tongue while carrying a companion.

I’m excited to reveal more in the next dev log where I’ll talk more about the customization of the campaigns you can play with your friends!