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Risk of Rain

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Risk of Rain
Developer(s)Hopoo Games
Publisher(s)Chucklefish
Producer(s)Duncan Drummond
Paul Morse
Designer(s)Matthew Griffin
Duncan Drummond
Paul Morse
Programmer(s)
  • Duncan Drummond Edit this on Wikidata
Artist(s)Duncan Drummond
Composer(s)Chris Christodoulou
EngineGame Maker
Platform(s)Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita
ReleaseWindows
  • WW: November 8, 2013
OS X, Linux
  • WW: October 28, 2014
PS4, PS Vita
  • WW: April 12, 2016 (digital)
  • NA: April 26, 2017 (physical)
Genre(s)Metroidvania[1]
Mode(s)Single-player, multiplayer

Risk of Rain is a Metroidvania video game incorporating roguelike elements, developed by a two-student team from the University of Washington under the name Hopoo Games. The game, initially a student project, was funded through a Kickstarter campaign to improve the title, and was published by Chucklefish to Microsoft Windows in November 2013. OS X and Linux versions premiered as part of a Humble Bundle in October 28, 2014. Ports for the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita, developed with assistance from Code Mystics, were released on April 12, 2016.

The player controls the survivor of a space freighter crash on a strange planet. As the player progresses through levels, selected randomly and with some procedural placement of objects within the level, they attempt to survive by killing monsters and collecting items that can boost their offensive and defensive abilities. The game features a difficulty scale that increases with time, requiring the player to choose between spending time building experience and completing levels quickly before the monsters become more difficult. By discovering various hidden locations, players can discover artifacts which can alter gameplay. The game supports up to four cooperative players in online play and up to two players in local play.

Gameplay

A player in the midst of a boss battle in Risk of Rain. The player's stats and abilities are shown at the bottom center, with the collection of passive items they've collected running along the bottom, while the time-based difficulty scale is shown at the top right.

At the start of the game, each player selects one of twelve characters. Initially, only one character is available, Commando, but as the player completes various in-game objectives, more characters become available. Each character has various statistics and a set of unique moves; for example, the sniper has the ability to hit creatures from a long distance for large, piercing damage but their firing rate is slow, while the commando can do rapid, moderate damage at close range.

Within all but the last level of the game, the goal is to locate a teleporter, placed in a random location. As the players hunt for it, they will encounter monsters; upon death, the monsters will drop in-game money and will also provide the players experience. As the players gain experience they will increase the player level, gaining more hit points and stronger attacks. Money can be used to open various chests, buy items at stores, activate attack drones that aid in combat, or pray at shrines that have a random chance of dropping items, described by game lore as the space freighter's cargo. There are over 110 items in the game, and these provide benefits such as passive bonuses that improve offensive or defensive capabilities, or a special usable with a cooldown.[2] Players can only hold one useable at any time, but they can collect many passive items, including multiple versions of the same item, stacking the benefits of these items. The location of these items is randomly determined through roguelike procedural generation.

Once the players have found the teleporter, they activate it, starting a 90-second countdown on Drizzle (easy) and Rainstorm (medium) difficulty and a 120-second one on Monsoon (hard) and the players have to survive. During this time, many more monsters, including at least one boss character (if the Kin artifact is not active), will appear. After the countdown is over, no new monsters will appear but the players will have to defeat all remaining monsters before they can use the teleporter and proceed to the next level. At this time, any remaining money the players have is converted to experience points. At the penultimate level, the players have the option of taking the teleporter to the final level (the crashed ship), or to use the teleporter to run through much higher difficulties of previous levels so as to gain more experience and items; when this latter option is taken, the teleporter on these levels will allow the same choice to either proceed to the final level or continue through additional levels. On the final level, the player must fight a final boss character; if they survive, they are able to escape the planet and win the game.

The difficulty of the game is determined by a timer. The difficulty level increases every 5 minutes up through 10 levels, with newly spawned monsters having more health and stronger attacks.[2] Additionally, boss characters may spawn before the players have found teleporters on higher difficulties. If playing alone, the game is over when the player dies. In multiplayer mode, a player that dies must wait until the other players survive to the next level, upon which they are brought back into play.

The item drops are based on the various progress the player has made in the meta-game through repeated playthroughs. For example, defeating certain boss characters for the first time will unlock an item that can then drop in future playthroughs. Other items are based on completing certain goals, such as winning the game a number of times, or performing specific goals with each of the characters. In Rainstorm or Monsoon modes, monsters will also rarely drop log books that describe the monsters; this itself is used to unlock more items and a playable character.

The last level, Providence is the boss and once he is beaten, the character of Sniper is unlocked and Mercenary can be unlocked if Providence is killed 4 times.

Development

Duncan Drummond (left), Paul Morse, and Matthew Griffin of Yeti Trunk, receiving the Best Student Game award at the 2014 Independent Games Festival

Risk of Rain was developed by two students at the University of Washington, Duncan Drummond and Paul Morse, later releasing the game under the name Hopoo Games. The two took inspiration from their favorite games in the past and combined them into a single package, focusing primarily on the platformer and roguelike genres.[3] They also wanted to add the idea of a game that scales in difficulty that "puts the player in a sense of urgency and makes them make tough choices often".[3] Risk of Rain was developed using the GameMaker: Studio tool.[4] The title Risk of Rain was selected not only to allow the game to be easily searchable via the Internet, but came to allude to the concept of a single protagonist in the large game world always worried about "a risk of failure or bad things happening".[3]

The original idea Drummond and Morse had for their game, which they started developing as sophomores, was a tower defense where the difficulty of the attacking creatures would rise with the distance that they were from the defense point, but they found that players would opt to avoid venturing from that point.[2] They sought to find a means to force the player to keep moving and came to the idea of "difficulty = time" concept.[2] Though this is implemented so that it appears that the difficulty increases every five minutes to the player, internally, a difficulty counter is incremented every minute as to create an apparently smoother transition to the player. This counter translates into a semi-exponential growth in newly-created enemies' attack strength, a semi-logarithmic growth in these enemies' health points, and a logarithmic growth in the rate that the player's health increases with character level. Drummond and Morse found this created favorable gameplay that created moments of "highs and lows" and keep the player on edge, having times where the player may feel overpowered to the enemies and moments later find themselves in a struggle to stay alive.[2] Another mechanic they had explored with the "difficulty = time" approach was to incorporate the speed at which the player defeated enemies into the difficulty counter, but found this removed the "highs and lows" in the game.[2]

Another element of the difficulty approach was the rate which enemies are generated. The game uses an artificial intelligence (AI) system that "buys" enemies to spawn at random intervals using a point system; this AI is given points at a rate that scales with the difficulty counter. Enemies have point values, with more difficult enemies costing more points, and the AI will buy as many as it can. Due to limitations with GameMaker, Drummond and Morse found that having too many enemies spawn in stressed the game, so created a means for the AI to buy an "elite" enemy if it were to otherwise buy five of a single type; these elite enemies have additional attributes, such as higher attack values, and present a harder challenge to kill. They found this workaround created extra dynamism for the game, which Drummond called as "a merge of game functionality and game design".[2] Risk of Rain was tested primarily to balance the difficulty system, and Drummon and Morse were aware that with all the available items to collect in the game, it is possible to "break the game" by acquiring specific combinations of item drops which would make the player overpowered or invincible. They believe this was still acceptable since this was highly tied to the game's random generator.[2]

The game is presented in 8-bit-like two-dimensional graphics. This economy of graphics allowed them to both develop sprites for new enemies easily, but also allowed them to give a sense of scale to the larger bosses compared to the player's character.[3] Character designs were made to provide enough differences between classes, and to give abilities that relied on the player's skill to give the player satisfaction of playing well, such as introducing a damage boost on the sniper's gun if the player times their reload appropriately.[3]

After completing most of the core game on their college budgets, the Hopoo Games team turned to Kickstarter to gain additional funds to update the game to the latest version of GameMaker, obtain a musician to provide music for the game, and additional quality control. The Kickstarter was launched in April 2013 seeking $7,000, and ended up with more than $30,000 in backers. This allowed them to get Chris Christodoulou to compose the game's soundtrack and add several additional gameplay features to the title.[4] The success of the Kickstarter led to a publishing partnership with Chucklefish, providing them server space and forums for the game's players. They would later gain help of Matthew Griffin, from Yeti Trunk, another developer that has worked with Chucklefish, to help improve the game's multiplayer code.[5]

The Hopoo team announced in February 2014 that they were working with Sony Computer Entertainment America to bring the game to the PlayStation Vita.[6] With assistance from Code Mystics, Hopoo announced that the game will also come to the PlayStation 4 alongside the Vita version; these versions will support an online matchmaking system and the ability for two local players to join with other online players. The PlayStation versions also support cross-platform play, enabling both PlayStation 4 and Vita players to play together.[7]

Sequel

In May 2017, Hopoo Games announced that they had been working on a sequel Risk of Rain 2 over the previous 6 months. The game is expected to maintain the same core loop as the first game.[8] While the game was still at the early stage of development and other features might change, Hopoo affirmed that they were transitioning the game from 2D to 3D, as the 3D option provided "much deeper design spaces and more possibilities for cool gameplay" as well as more ways to artistically express themselves.[9] When they started development on the sequel, Hopoo started with a 2D-based prototype with the player in control of one of the monsters in the first game, as to mix up the formula for the sequel. Part of the addition for this was inspired by Risk of Rain fan art that showed the various objects the player collected shown on the character, and Hopoo wanted to use this approach for the sequel, but the 2D graphic approach did not give them enough visual space to work with. They transitioned the prototype from 2D to 2.5D, representing the character in 3D graphics but otherwise playing as a 2D platformer, but when they completed that, they felt it was better to move the game fully to 3D, with the transition being relatively quick to complete.[8] The sequel will use the Unity engine, which Hopoo had to learn for this, as well as the time in developing the 3D worlds.[8]

The sequel will bring back most of the same classes of characters and monsters from the first game, but with modified or new abilities reflecting differences between 2D and 3D. Hopoo explained that some monsters that were difficult to avoid in the original game due to their size could easily be kited around with the added space of 3D, so they added additional attacks for these monsters to make them more difficult.[8] The 3D maps are anticipated to be large-enough worlds with random placement of the end-goal teleporter and items such that they do not expect to have to add in level permutations as the first game had used, since the large maps will provide enough variety that players will not likely experience the complete level in one playthrough.[8] Hopoo plans to improve the multiplayer options, including using Steam peer-to-peer connectivity, matchmaking including private matches, and split-screen play.[8]

Release

In February 2015, Hopoo Games partnered with IndieBox, a monthly subscription box service, to offer a physical release of Risk of Rain.[10][11] This limited, individually-numbered, collector’s edition included a flash-drive with a DRM-free game file, the official soundtrack, an instruction manual, Steam key, and various custom-designed collectible items.

Reception

Risk of Rain was named one of the Student Showcase winners of the 2014 Independent Games Festival, and subsequently won the Student Prize Award.[17][18]

References

  1. ^ Walker, John (October 7, 2013). "Impressions: Risk Of Rain Beta". Rock Paper Shotgun. Retrieved August 12, 2016. At the very centre of the crossroads between roguelikelike and metroidvania lies Risk Of Rain.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h Wiltshire, Alex (February 5, 2016). "How Risk Of Rain Increases Difficulty Over Time". Rock Paper Shotgun. Retrieved February 5, 2016.
  3. ^ a b c d e Tach, Dave (August 23, 2013). "Risk of Rain hands-on: Retro agoraphobia". Polygon. Retrieved January 23, 2014.
  4. ^ a b Hopoo Games. "Risk of Rain". Kickstarter. Retrieved January 23, 2014.
  5. ^ "Risk of Rain: Online Co-op!". Hopoo Games. July 13, 2013. Retrieved July 13, 2013.
  6. ^ Tach, Dave (February 11, 2014). "Risk of Rain is headed to PlayStation Vita". Polygon. Retrieved February 11, 2014.
  7. ^ Drummand, Duncan (February 23, 2016). "Risk of Rain Heading to PS4, PS Vita". PlayStation.Blog. Sony Computer Entertainment. Retrieved February 23, 2016.
  8. ^ a b c d e f Wood, Austin (December 22, 2017). "We finally get our first look at Risk of Rain 2". PC Gamer. Retrieved December 22, 2017.
  9. ^ Foxall, Sam (May 8, 2017). "Risk of Rain 2 is in development and it is making the jump from 2D to 3D". PCGamesN. Retrieved May 8, 2017.
  10. ^ "IndieBox Unboxing: Risk of Rain - Geek.com". Geek.com. March 19, 2015. Retrieved June 3, 2017.
  11. ^ "IndieBox Announces Risk of Rain: Limited Edition | IndieBox". www.theindiebox.com. Retrieved June 3, 2017.
  12. ^ "Risk of Rain (PC)". Metacritic. Retrieved May 26, 2017.
  13. ^ Smith, Quinton (December 12, 2013). "Risk of Rain review". Eurogamer. Retrieved March 20, 2014.
  14. ^ Reeves, Ben (December 9, 2013). "Risk Of Rain". Game Informer. Retrieved March 20, 2014.
  15. ^ Woolsey, Cameron (November 19, 2013). "Risk of Rain Review". GameSpot. Retrieved November 19, 2013.
  16. ^ Kholar, Philip (December 24, 2013). "Risk of Rain Review". Polygon. Retrieved January 23, 2014.
  17. ^ "Papers, Please takes the grand prize at 16th annual IGF Awards". Gamasutra. March 19, 2014. Retrieved March 19, 2014.
  18. ^ "2014 Independent Games Festival announces Student Showcase winners". Independent Games Festival. January 22, 2014. Retrieved January 22, 2014.
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