RAIN WORLD AUDIO DESIGN STORIES: PART ONE - MAZE RUNNER

By Jerry Jeriaska (The Ongaku).

The independently developed survival platformer Rain World has captured the imagination of a far-flung online community. The concept arose from humble origins, as the solo project of a Swedish developer called Joar Jakobsson.

More recently, the post-apocalyptic landscape traversed by the game's nomadic hero, the slugcat, has expanded in size, as volunteer modders and sound designers were welcomed on board the "Downpour" expansion's team.

In 2012, screenshots of Joar's imagined ecosystem, a ruined industrial landscape populated by carnivorous fauna, made the rounds on the TIGSource forums. Among the readership perusing these early renderings of the sprite-based game, tentatively dubbed "Maze Runner," was a chiptune-influenced performer known as James Primate, part of a music act doing tours and live shows in the Cambridge, Massachusetts area.

Intrigued by the unique aesthetic, James found himself roused from sleep at night by the unsettling notion that something was about to go terribly wrong.



BRIGHT PRIMATE

Prior to discovering early glimpses of the "Maze Runner" prototype, James' ambitions as a touring musician met with a stroke of bad luck.

Just as the collaboration with his bandmates was beginning to gel, his drummer had a sudden epiphany, realizing that his true calling was to perform magic tricks. Soon after, his bass player quit, moving to Los Angeles to become a bartender.

"Before that we had been in a rock band, doing shows and touring," James recalls. "We put in a bunch of money and got a big name producer. We recorded albums. It was on college radio and doing well. Then the band broke up for literally no reason... That was it."

The only holdout was vocalist Lydia Esrig. Whittled down to half their former headcount, James and Lydia were left with the choice of either calling it quits, or coming up with some out-of-the-box solution to their sudden predicament.

"We had put in so much effort, so much money, blood, sweat and tears," he says of the crisis that summoned the band Bright Primate into existence. "It was just going to be me and Lydia. We trusted each other, so we set out as a duo."

James had been experimenting with notating tunes on a Nintendo Game Boy console, utilizing Nanoloop software, LSDJ, and other more obscure sequencing apps. There was a certain quality to the archaic brick-like hardware, out of place and repurposed, that fit the desperate tenor of the occasion.

"To give you a sense of it, our first show was at this little club that would have a Talk-Like-A-Pirate Day open mic night," he recalls. "That performer's set would end and someone from the audience would jump out of the pit, on stage, and they would be the next act. And the person on stage would get right back down into the audience. I think that informed how I view the artist and audience relationship."


Bright Primate at CNB Summer Tour 2010 (photo by Marjorie Becker - Chiptography)

TIGSOURCE

Bright Primate's disarming combination of live vocals and chiptune music gradually drew a crowd. It was an anarchic environment feeding on unpredictability.

The key factor that distinguished James and Lydia's act was their experience. They had toured and performing live shows, having hosted concert series in Boston with top artists. Bright Primate had both the appeal of an underdog, and the resilience of battle-tested pros.

"For me, I grew up with that form factor of a Game Boy in my hands," James says. "It was nice to be able to have that combination of playing videogames and making music at the same time. It was a very comfortable feeling for me."

In an environment where game-inspired music was becoming increasingly recognized as an established genre, communities were forming between game developers and live performers. On TIGSource, James read threads posted by Derek Yu in the leadup to Spelunky's release and progress updates by Notch on the making of Minecraft. Jay Tholen posted an EP of conceptual pieces for a point-and-click adventure game he called "Dropsy."

The back-and-forth online was bleeding over into meatspace as well. "You're doing chiptune? We're doing a game. Let's talk about it," was the gist of many conversations, struck up at concert venues. Between them, James and Lydia were scoring dozens of indie game soundtracks. "We were like, 'We can do this on the side.'"


James Primate in 2017 (photo by Marjorie Becker - Chiptography)

It was around that time that James encountered Joar's pitch for the platformer "Maze Runner," where the player controlled a scavenging elastic mammal. The protagonist progressed through the world, evading predators and seeking out rare sources of nourishment. A ticking clock required the slugcat to make haste to the next available hibernating chamber, before the poor creature was swept up in a deluge of rain.

Game development is protean thing. A good concept can be sabotaged through a series of ill-advised iterative add-ons, resulting in an end product that a grotesque caricature of the foundational concept. Having previously found himself blindsided by a torrent of bad luck, James became preoccupied with the fear that outside of his control this game prototype would meet a similar fate.

The notion that "Maze Runner" was doomed troubled James' sleep, as if among the forums' members there lurked an evil doppelgänger, determined to sneak into Joar's private messages and infiltrate the project, wrecking the audio at every devious opportunity.

In his mind's eye, James saw slugcat leaping into the air, accompanied by the sound of a cartoonish "SPROING," flinging a spear into a hill of debris with a thunderous "BOINK."

"On the forum, I had been talking with Joar off and on," James says, "and I thought 'I have to do this myself!' I whipped up a ton of music. I think it was twelve tracks. I had the whole vision in my head immediately."

"I sent it to him, and he said, 'This is a lot of work. Why are you doing all this for free?'"



SOURCE CODE

By the time Rain World secured funding through a successful Kickstarter campaign, Bright Primate's role had expanded beyond music composition. In contributing to the sound design, Lydia recorded snarls and squeaks for the carnivorous lizards and subterranean lantern mice. For the voice of Looks to the Moon, James designed an audio patch that he applied to her recordings, then sliced them up to give the audio recordings an uncanny robotic quality.

James also pitched in with level design with Joar's blessings—a decision that presaged a broader collaboration involving volunteer modders that would transpire further down the road. The game's punishing difficulty tended to divide prospective players into two camps. Those prone to complaints opted out, rage-quitting in frustration. However, those who were willing to soldier on, won over by the mystique of the world, began populating the fanbase.

"The things that wound up being the most contentious were people wanting plushies in a certain color," James says. "Those were the kind of criticisms on the Kickstarter forums."


One product of the close collaboration between the Swedish programmer and American audio designer was the integration of what came to be known as "threat music." "You were in the character's head," James says of the concept, "and as threats increased you would build that tension with audio somehow." What Joar came up with was a responsive audio system that correlated directly with the complex enemy AI.

For each region of the world, there were layers of sounds forming an alarming music composition that would be triggered selectively based on the imminence of danger. "It has its own system of weights and desires," James says of the enemy AI. "You can encounter a creature and it might just not be into you. It might be into doing something else, in which case the threat music would not build up to the degree that it otherwise would."

For a game where players could be expected to traverse the same maps dozens of times, the responsiveness of the AI and corresponding threat music made each cycle wholly unpredictable. The placement of creatures, for instance, was determined by a random seed, generated as slugcat awakened from a hibernating chamber at the start of each new cycle.

Blue fruit that was previously plucked would vanish, a region formerly empty was now populated with creatures. In the spot where the slugcat was captured by a lizard, a karma flower had sprouted. Upon entering any given map, the player was confronted with any number of shifting variables. Players could trade rare items with scavengers to get rare equipment and build rapport. Worms were inedible, but if fed to deadly predators they could be distracted or even befriended.

When Rain World was at last ready for launch on Steam, Joar deleted all the files that were not required to run the base game, and slugcat was now officially in the wild. "Steam has this funny thing where if you delete a folder but you don't do it in a certain way the files that aren't replaced stay there," notes James. "We cleared out the files we were using for testing, so we thought, and we pushed the game out."

As fate would have it, Joar soon found his inbox showered with praise for having included the entirety of the source code with the Steam release. "People were like, 'It's so awesome that you included the source code,'" James says. "'We can figure it out and make our own stuff.'"



This article has been reprinted from Laced Records Blog. James Primate is a video game composer – brightprimate.bandcamp.com | Twitter @BRIGHTPRIMATE | Spotify artist page.

RAIN WORLD AUDIO DESIGN STORIES: PART TWO - SIDE HOUSE

Initially codenamed "Maze Runner," the prototype was announced on the TIGSource forums, generating buzz within the burgeoning indie gaming scene. Chiptune-inspired band Bright Primate joined development, with James composing the soundtrack, mapping out additional levels, and crafting the adaptive "threat music." Lydia collaborated on the music score and gave voice to iconic characters, from ferocious lizards to reclusive lantern mice.

The runaway success of the base game, coinciding with the accidental leakage of the source code, prompted a passionate band of volunteer modders and sound designers to reverse engineer their own customized maps and redesigned slugcats. Among these unauthorized devs was AndrewFM, a coder capable of delving into the inner workings of his favorite software.

However, as weeks of innovating on Rain World mods stretched into years of commitment, and a ragtag band of devs expanded into dozens of contributors, the question of whether this was time well spent became impossible for Andrew to ignore. Was the Rain World modding community stuck in a Sisyphean loop, akin to that of the in-game player character? Was this journey prompted by curiosity predestined to end in disappointment?

Rain World Release Promo by Del Northern

UNIQUE DATA PEARLS

While the origins of Rain World can be attributed to a single individual toiling away at a desk in Sweden, the moment Joar took to TIGSource a daisy-chain of collaborators began unfolding, magnifying the scope of the graphic designer's vision.

James began searching the internet for an illustration style that could complement Joar's crumbling vistas and properly capture the personality of the enigmatic protagonist. He happened upon the DeviantArt page of an illustrator named Allegra "Del" Northern posting Pokemon fan art.

"She had a bunch of these cat creatures with weird, big open eyes," James recalls. "This was so obviously related to the character that we were making—Perfect."

Songs and Rhythms by James Therrien & Lydia Esrig feat. artwork by Del

Del's renderings of the slugcats were featured in the intro to the game, and pop up as flashbacks while hibernating. These momentary story sequences help draw the player into the deep lore underlying the mysterious post-industrial landscape.

Because the crowdfunded budget was finite and only so much information could be conveyed through static images, Videocult required a complementary method of lore-building. To broaden the narrative, the devs came up with the innovative solution of presenting the player with rare collectible items termed "unique data pearls."

"The lore bits are distributed through these pearls that you find throughout the game," James says, "and you can bring them to one of the characters in the endgame. She will tell you what is on these pearls."

Valuing the teamwork that made Rain World's creation a success, it only made sense that the developers should seek to encourage players to form their own social communities organized around the game. Collecting data pearls would incentivize players to pool their collective knowledge and foster discussions on why the Ancients abandoned the grounds the player forages for sustenance.

"The pearls themselves are somewhat randomized," James explains. "You can't really get all of the lore in one playthough. We never had the idea that anyone would ever be going through and collecting all the pearls."

As it turned out, quite a few players went about collecting all the pearls.

"We definitely never thought of it as this completionist thing, where people would spend a thousand hours in the game getting every bit of lore through multiple playthroughs," James says. "That wound up happening, which is mind-blowing to me."

Monk attempts to rescue Survivor, illustration by Del Northern

SIDE HOUSE

The first custom region mod for Rain World was undertaken by programmer AndrewFM, a recent Masters degree graduate in the field of computer science, with a focus in artificial intelligence.

"I was lucky to get into Rain World very shortly after the game came out," AndrewFM recalls. "I started playing a couple weeks after it first released and joined the Discord server not too long after that... At that point, it was so early on that we didn't have access to a level editor or anything."

Modding the Rain World base game was the programmer's first sustained effort developing in Unity, and what he found was that the leaked source code turned out to be something of a red herring. Upon being compiled and exported, assets are typically packaged in a single compressed file, leaving you with an inscrutable nugget comparable to an encrypted zip file.

"The way that Rain World packaged their game that was very useful for modding is all of the assets, images, music, sound effects were included as raw files in the game folder. That, more than the source code, was useful in picking apart the game."


Described as a tech demo for manifesting a custom region, the "Side House" mod was the first to stitch together unused maps included in the base game's deliverables. It also broke new ground by introducing a custom iteration of threat music, composed in layers just as Joar and James had pioneered in the source material.

To achieve these ends, Side House needed its own audio engineer. Volunteering for the task was Connor Skidmore, a modder with a background in producing dance music, techno, and other drum-focused styles. Contributing under the handle "12LBS," Connor set about reverse engineering the percussive threat music feature. It helped that AndrewFM appreciated the role of music in game design, as evidenced by the programmer's piano covers of Super Mario World and EarthBound themes, uploaded to his YouTube account.

"Rain World's threat music was always interesting to me, because the way it's structured is like variations on a theme," Connor explains. "They're all unique, but they share a lot of similarities as well, in a way. It tickled my logic brain to try to break them down and understand how they worked."

When the Rain World modders migrated from Discord to a community-driven portal dubbed "RainDB," more volunteers began hacking and playtesting each others' uploads.


GRAPECAT

"Side House" served as a proof of concept for modding a custom region and proved popular among the RainDB community. The next logical step was to pad out the roster of player characters. AndrewFM proposed the idea of "More Slugcats," a mod seeking to add five new breeds, each with their own save slots and custom campaigns.

The first slugcat attempted levied the color scheme and unique abilities of a RainDB mod called "Grapecat," a purple-furred combatant capable of wielding three spears.

The Grapecat mod could be loaded into the original campaign, but at the cost of losing access to the Survivor player character. Receiving permission to port Grapecat's design, Andrew's task was to code for a discrete save slot and leverage the critter's spear-wielding capabilities. Thus, "Spearmaster" was born.

Spearmaster art by character portrait illustrator AnnoyingFlower

The initial "More Slugcats" mod allowed for alternate avatars. "Other than that," AndrewFM says, "it was exactly the same game."

Connor adds, "We didn't have any level editor, so most content additions were out of the question. This led to my [first full] project with Andrew, where he and I worked together to try to reverse engineer the game's level format, with the end goal of making our own unofficial level editor."

Connor already had ideas in mind for a mod called "Eastward Expansion" that would incorporate custom-built areas. RainDB was making gradual inroads, but not without frustrating setbacks in turn. When Videocult caught wind of it, the developers realized the modders were in need of assistance. They intervened by packaging the Rain World 1.5 update, released in late 2017, with an official level editor.

The introduction of this tool represented a critical step forward in bootstrapping the proliferation of user-generated content housed on RainDB. According to Conner, "Suddenly a lot of the ideas we had that seemed super far-fetched became much more feasible."

Alphas, Gems and Junk offers a glimpse of early Rain World audio experiments

The 1.5 update added two new slugcats, called The Monk and the Hunter, providing a wider array of difficulty settings. The new characters also expanded on the lore by revealing events taking place before and after the Survivor campaign.

"With the release of that new version of Rain World, a lot of the mods broke," AndrewFM recalls. "Everyone had to port their mods to this new version." Modders were delving back into their code at the same time that new maps were possible, and the content update was providing a blueprint for how to situate newcomers like Spearmaster within their own campaigns.

"Let's make maps that are purpose-built for these different slugcats," became the driver. The "More Slugcats" prototype had already gained traction. The concept of a more elaborate expansion resonated with users on RainDB.


MORE SLUGCATS

Behind the scenes, the publisher that had picked up the rights to the IP following the Kickstarter campaign was falling out of contact with Videocult, leaving no clear protocol in place for publicizing user-generated content. Del's final contribution to Rain World would be encapsulated in the 1.5 update, jeopardizing the future of development.

Despite official development on Rain World seemingly drawing to a close, the gravitational pull of "More Slugcats" attracted a wider array of collaborators.

"One of the main artists who did a lot of the hibernation and character selection screen art was someone named AnnoyingFlower," says AndrewFM. The contributor studied Del's art, eventually publishing a style guide. "All the other artists that we brought on, we gave them that style guide. That was to keep as many of the illustrations as visually consistent as we could, despite having a lot of different artists working on it."

Much of the Eastward Expansion's team soon joined development on "More Slugcats," while Connor revised and implemented his music track "Onto A New Dawn," repurposed from his own mod.

"Andrew's plans were well-organized and he had a strong vision for the project," Connor says. "I poured over the TIGSource devlog thread to try to understand where James and Joar were coming from when they originally made the game, and try to reflect that spirit as authentically as possible."


Inspired by Videocult's Hunter and Monk characters, the modded slugcats would also explore the world at different points in the timeline. In the earliest time period, the structures built by the Ancients have yet to collapse into disrepair, revealing painted frescoes on the brick walls approaching the Shoreline.

The waste disposal system, fueled by pools of corrosive liquid, introduce perilous new platforming challenges. The reason for these structures' collapse becomes apparent upon the completion of Spearmaster's campaign. Broadcast satellite dishes remain standing, though inbound messages go unanswered by the inhabitants of the Iterator superstructures.

Another cue taken from the 1.5 update was the modification of enemy AI. The base game's Hunter protagonist presented players with a more challenging difficulty option, populating maps with aggressive predators. In designing "More Slugcats," the devs contextualized this gameplay challenge. From the get-go, Spearmaster encounters hostile lizards leaping at the player and spewing projectiles from their mouths. Taken together, the two campaigns suggest that the Shoreline's predators become pacified as the timeline progresses.

Rain World's "More Slugcats" expansion was taking on its own creative identity. However, whether it would ever reach an audience was thrown into question the more time elapsed.


Andrew says of the expansion, "The original plan was for this to be a little mod that we released on RainDB and probably no one would see it outside of the people who frequented the Rain World Discord. It was almost like the further we got into development, the more it started to bother me."

"It was like the project increased in scope so much and the number of people getting involved in it was getting so big, it started feeling disappointing that we spent five years of our lives with forty different people working on this project and barely anyone was going to see it. It would be this obscure little mod that gets released on this website that no one really knows about."

The publisher sitting on Rain World's intellectual property eventually severed ties with Videocult, as the former was acquired by a separate corporate entity. The murky legal status of the IP suggested that the acquisition signaled the terminus of the franchise.

"Our [original publisher] basically got eaten by another company and we were in legal limbo for years," says James. "We thought Rain World was over."



This article has been reprinted from Laced Records Blog. James Primate is a video game composer – brightprimate.bandcamp.com | Twitter @BRIGHTPRIMATE | Spotify artist page: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3hnNFBVerLqoj6p252UniW

AndrewFM is a video game developer - https://ko-fi.com/andrewfm |Twitter @AndrewFM

Connor Skidmore is a video game composer - https://soundcloud.com/12lbs

RAIN WORLD AUDIO DESIGN STORIES: PART THREE - MORE SLUGCATS

By Jerry Jeriaska (The Ongaku) and Eric Bratcher.

Rain World's modding scene took off shortly after the launch of the base game, leading to the establishment of a user-generated contents hub dubbed "RainDB."

One ambitious, unauthorized add-on was "Side House," a mod undertaken by programmer AndrewFM and sound designer Connor Skidmore. Gathering up unused maps located in the Steam deliverables and integrating custom threat music, the demo served as a proof of concept for building out the in-game environment.

Designer Joar Jakobsson and music composer James Primate at Videocult gave a boost to the RainDB community by bundling an official map editor with the 1.5 update. However, behind the scenes the intellectual property was tied up in legal red tape, tying the hands of the game studio and jeopardizing prospects for further development.

As weeks of innovating on Rain World mods stretched into years of commitment, AndrewFM came to wonder if the collaborative journey of the "More Slugcats" mod was predestined to end in disappointment. Here, we are afforded a glimpse into the challenges entailed in this off-the-beaten-path endeavor.

More Slugcats depicted by James B Barrow

Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy

On the heels of Connor's involvement in the Side House project, additional audio designers began volunteering to contribute background music to the "More Slugcats" expansion's soundtrack.

Composer Andy Robison, known on RainDB as Progfox recalls, "[AndrewFM] already had this huge, elaborate plan for expanding on the earlier modding project that he made into this full-blown fan-made campaign. At the time, I was so enamored by the game that I wanted to be involved in any way possible."

AndrewFM began by sharing a Google doc, detailing the plans for each of the custom regions planned for the expansion. "We also created a mood board," he relates, "where we grabbed a bunch of reference images with what we wanted to do and the aesthetics of these regions. A lot of the music tracks were produced based on these mood boards and written descriptions."

To satiate the appetite of the playtesters, Progfox uploaded a preliminary track titled "Bloom" to SoundCloud. "Every now and then we would drop little things to show that something's happening," he says, "because in these kinds of projects things get picked up and dropped all the time."


Progfox observed of the base game's score by James and Lydia of the band Bright Primate, "There are so many times where you enter a new area and there's a part of the soundtrack that was created to represent what's going on, to help push you forward a little, or give some color to the scene going on. I think that Rain World isn't afraid to use silence. It pushes these big, emphatic moments when they really matter. It was cool to be able to create something that acts as a moment, and not necessarily an ongoing vibe."

Meanwhile, AndrewFM and Connor began experimenting with modifying threat music when the player slugcat eats a mushroom. These consumable items introduced to the game by Joar induce subtle psychoactive effects that temporarily increase the slugcat's run speed and jump height. Most noticeably, the visuals undulate hypnotically. AndrewFM relates, "We wanted the threat music to change slightly or use different tracks when you are under the influence of the mushrooms."

Ultimately the developers dropped the mechanic because it would have required creating extra threat layers for every region of the game. As with the unused regions recycled in "Side House," this was a thread the "More Slugcats" team left dangling.

"That implementation is programmed into the game," AndrewFM notes. "Modders, if they wanted to, could make use of that."

Gourmand character portrait by AnnoyingFlower

Rarefaction Cell

As time passes in Rain World there is an overarching theme of survival strategies evolving from offensive to defensive. The slugcat breed known as Rivulet reflects this progression by exhibiting increased maneuverability. The amphibious critter demonstrates the agility of a coiled spring on land and can hold its breath for long durations while plunging underwater. To complement the aquatic theme of the campaign, the devs went back over familiar maps, introducing drizzling rain and overcast skies.

This damp era of Rain World's history adds a speedrunning element to the mix, as the cycles between game-ending torrential downpours are considerably shorter. Rivulet hibernates sooner due to these shorter cycles, and also occasionally wakes up early. These "pre-cyle" showers offer the player a glimpse of the environment before the rain has fully let up. Walls of water cascade, blurring the scenery and obscuring drenched predators, before intermittently subsiding.

Rain World Ambients and Instrumentals debuted on Bandcamp in February of 2019

Rivulet's campaign was the inspiration for the goal of creating one new region for each of the playable slugcats. The submerged iterator superstructure was the first custom region designed from scratch, making unique use of Rivulet's ability to remain underwater.

Upon reaching the decaying iterator complex, the aquatic slugcat gains access to a rarefaction cell capable of producing a spherical low-gravity field. This glowing orb's visual effects were contributed by co-composer Ongomato.

"He was very multifaceted," AndrewFM relates. "He did music, but that was not the thing we brought him on for. He was primarily a technical artist. He created shaders and 3D models: all the cool, fancy effects that you find in the expansion, like the snow and the blizzards."

Several music tracks, such as "Daze" and the "Outer Expanse" threat music, involved collaboration between the composers. "I think that between the three of us, we all sort of filled gaps in each others' skill sets," observes Progfox. Ongomato went as far as to construct a rendering pipeline that allowed the developers to take 3D models and convert them into 2D, embedding them in the scene.

"He made detailed 3D models and then injected that into the 2D scene," says AndrewFM. "He did a lot of cool stuff for the expansion."



Grapple Worm

The Saint by AnnoyingFlower and region art illustrator Tom "Norgad" Starbuck

The Saint's campaign brings certain elements of the story full circle, such as expanding upon the Void Sea location first introduced at the end of Survivor's campaign. "There's this giant ocean of corrosive liquid that exists deep down below the earth," AndrewFM explains. "Saint takes place so far in the future that much of the structure has dissolved away from the Void Sea. That opens up a new area that the other slugcats don't have access to."

Saint is frail and relies on a long tongue to latch on to platforms and flee from predators. To implement this gameplay feature, the developers reverse engineered the grapple worm mechanic. In place of having to seek out and hijack this seldom encountered creature, this slugcat breed has evolved to integrate tongue-slinging into its own anatomy.

While the Saint can maneuver vertically by latching onto ledges and whip across chasms, this campaign features dual hazards of running out of food and falling victim to the harsh environment. A cruel winter has beset the land, requiring the slugcat to seek out lanterns and steam vents to restore body heat. The Saint's head-up display adds a hypothermia bar that will signal the onset of frostbite.

The iterator superstructures' copious heat energy vents are collapsed during the Saint's epilogue, taking place long after the others. Navigating this Ice Age, the player encounters a terrestrial environment that has returned to its desolate appearance predating the terraforming efforts of the Ancients.



DOWNPOUR

In February of 2021, AndrewFM received an email from Akupara Games. "What they had noticed was despite Rain World going this really long length of time without receiving any updates, the community was still more active than it had ever been," he recalls. "It still was escalating in popularity, despite the game not receiving any updates. They immediately saw that as something they wanted to continue fostering."

Videocult had finally regained access to the IP from the former owners. Akupara Games' CEO David Logan had spearheaded an official partnership in an effort to greenlight new content for Rain World. AndrewFM wound up submitting a synopsis video, clocking in at just under three hours in duration, introducing "More Slugcats'" new regions, spanning a thousand new maps. The video also outlined the Challenge and Safari modes, building upon the Arena contents.

Based on this synopsis, it was decided that the "More Slugcats" expansion would be included in an official downloadable contents release, dubbed "Downpour."

Downpour soundtrack cover art by character portrait illustrator AnnoyingFlower

Outer Expanse

While reviewing previously designed maps and remixing them with weather elements like rainfall and snowstorms, the team decided to build out the Chimney Canopy region. This smallest self-contained area in the game contains a partially flooded subregion called "The Gutter," which was expanded upon and treated to its own alternate audio layers for threat music.

Artificer and Gourmand were the last slugcat campaigns to wrap up development. Taking place shortly after Spearmaster's timeline, the Artificer is capable of fashioning explosives from rocks and spears at the cost of food. The slugcat can even propel himself forward using a detonation as a makeshift double-jump, gaining access to out-of-the-way ledges.

A bitter feud between this particular slugcat and the tribes of scavengers makes the character's pyrotechnical acumen crucial for survival. As with other campaigns, the backstory behind this chapter's drama slowly unfolds as the player progresses. Uniquely, this story is elucidated over the course of several playable dream sequences.

"Gourmand's campaign is essentially a scavenger hunt for food," AndrewFM explains. The hefty slugcat can weaponize his girth by dropping on predators from above to incapacitate them. While running, Gourmand is winded easily and is required to take a breather to recover full speed.

After visiting Looks to the Moon's crumbling superstructure, Gourmand is allowed to explore the surrounding Outer Expanse region, now reclaimed by nature. "Our idea with the Outer Expanse is that the Ancients built these rail systems and didn't care about the abandoned ruins from past civilizations," says AndrewFM. "You have these train tracks that demolish or plow their way through these old ruins. There's an amalgamation of past civilizations in these barren outskirts."

The developers identified this sanctuary as an appropriate spot to implement a day/night cycle. "The original game does have a very few sections where you are safe from the rain threat, but there are very few," AndrewFM observed. "With the expansion we added more of those types of areas. For those, we wanted to have something special that happens. There is a cycle progression going on, despite the absence of the rain."

For the first time, a character under the player's control can travel back to the location where Survivor's animated intro is situated.

The Artificer character portrait illustration by James B Barrow

Having leant her voice to the base game, Lydia offered to revise the dialog of Looks to the Moon and other speaking parts. These revisions helped to ensure greater thematic continuity across the old and new campaigns. When it came to the lore, AndrewFM was sensitive to the demands of the fanbase not to stray too far from the premise outlined by Videocult.

"There were a lot of people in the Rain World community who are picky about the lore," he relates. "If you go too wild, there are people who will get upset. Anything we include is stuff that is a very direct extension of what is already there."

In the run-up to the release of "Downpour," RainDB member Intikus stitched together several trailers, writing custom music that appears in the soundtrack album release published through Bandcamp. "There was a lot of polishing going on," AndrewFM recalls of the discovery that "More Slugcats" would soon be a commercial product. "Once we did find that out, we had to go back and be like, "Okay, is there anything here we should polish up or improve?"

Progfox, credited as the lead soundtrack producer for the official expansion, remarks, "Back then, it was a bit of a fanfiction, adding in your custom-colored characters and giving them fun abilities. You would not have imagined that being transformed into something official." Connor adds, "Even back then, I dreamed of it one day being taken on as an official expansion, but I never imagined that it could actually happen."


This article has been reprinted from Laced Records Blog. James Primate is a video game composer – brightprimate.bandcamp.com | Twitter @BRIGHTPRIMATE | Spotify artist page: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3hnNFBVerLqoj6p252UniW

AndrewFM is a video game developer - https://ko-fi.com/andrewfm |Twitter @AndrewFM

Connor Skidmore is a video game composer - https://soundcloud.com/12lbs

Progfox is a video game composer - https://progfox.io |Twitter @ProgfoxMusic |Spotify artist page: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6QdbOgezY3MZ0MgrMklaqX