Rain World's New Engine Makes Animations Even Cuter

Good morning, friends! Are you looking out upon a blustery Monday morning and listening to the rain pelt against your window? Perhaps what we need to keep our spirits high is a different kind of Rain World. One populated by adorable slugcats, mesmerizing bat swarms, and deadly lizards propelled by physics animation systems. This Rain World has continued its progress onto a new engine and the latest Kickstarter post - titled Mega Bat and Lizard GIF update! - is worth the time it takes for these lovely animations to load.

I'll only embed a couple of them here, to spare your bandwidth lest you choose to click through to the post itself. First off, the new bat animations, in which they alternately swarm and act independently:

Second, the main character - the white slugcat - fleeing from some pursuing lizards:

Rain World was originally being made within Game Maker, miraculously using the accessible 2D game creation tool for the same physics-y animation you see above. After the game's Kickstarter project was successful, more than doubling its target, the small development team decided to transition to a new engine. The post linked above from which these GIFs (or technically HTML5 animations) come shows the difference in smoothness and detail this change allows for, while also showing some debug-style views of AI and animation systems at work.

I find all this fascinating, and beautiful, and the perfect antidote to a grey Monday morning. I played an earlier version of the game, and although it was extremely difficult and a little fiddly at that early stage, I liked its art, its melancholy, and the ecosystem that it sets up between its bats, lizards and the slugcat looking for food for his or her pups.