Channeling calm and creating new ways to play in Rain World: Downpour
Rain World: Downpour returns to a harsh, beautiful world, giving players an array of soft, cute creatures called slugcats and tasking them with trying to survive in a world that’s extremely hostile to them.
Game Developer spoke with the team at VIDEOCULT to talk about how they designed the abilities of their new playable slugcats (and how they changed over six years of development), what thoughts went into the world design to incorporate those new powers, and the ideas that went into creating a calming mode so you can appreciate the flora and fauna of a game that is usually fraught with danger.
It's been almost six years since the original Rain World came out. What got you interested in creating DLC for the game after so much time?
Andrew Marrero, lead programmer: Development of Downpour’s content actually started only months after the release of the original Rain World, and it was clear that there was a lot of eagerness from the community to see the world, story, and ideas that Rain World presented be expanded upon. This DLC adds a tremendous amount of new content, more than doubling the size of the original game’s world, so its development cycle was quite a long and involved ordeal. So, in the end, it’s not surprising that it wound up taking close to as long to develop as the original game took to make.
What thoughts were going through your head when you set out to create this DLC? How did you want to build upon the ruthless world of the original game?
Marrero: A big goal of this DLC was to explore the passage of time. The original game’s world covered a lot of ground and felt sufficiently “complete,” so a big worry was that expanding upon it too much would cause it to feel bloated or disorganized or cause it to lose
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