Queen Scarlet Of The SkyWings

☺

you turn into L I G M A

this is what im choosing to do with my free time before i start my first job

i have yet to see a single person notice the fact that saints forehead dots are the same as the math/logic symbol for "therefore"

💚💙

The Abandoned Children of The Watcher DLC (a ramble)

(Spoilers ahead, obviously, but this is just a quiet sort of pondering I've been having with myself, feeling an ache so profound where the child in me - lost and afraid and so, so cold - resides.)

I love the thematic change that the Watcher DLC presents us with. I know it's been a point of complaint for many, and to each their own, but I can't help but feel that throwing aside these painful, heartfelt themes, writing them off as rushed design is doing the beauty of the tale that we've been given a disservice.

Rain World - the base game - felt primal. You are an animal, wandering the world - eating, fighting, running and dying, thinking and moving like a rat in a maze, the maze being a god you could never truly hope to understand. And why would you? You have a family to find, and even they are soon forgotten in the pressure of the cycle, drowned out by the rain and the echoing, burning call of the Void.

The Downpour DLC was much more narrative-driven. It was character-based and iterator-focused, putting emphasis on these dying gods that feel less like gods and more like abandoned children, growing in their lonesome and their bitterness, losing themselves in their self-destructive tendencies until there's nothing left but metal slag and somewhat-organic rubble. That seems to be a repeated theme, here.

The Watcher DLC feels much more... personal.

A tale of two children, abandoned, never made to grow up. The Watcher themselves, so plagued by naiveté, busying themselves with toys instead of confronting what the little lost echo tried to tell them.

Spinning Top searching endlessly with a tragic sort of fervor for any evidence that anyone ever missed them, never having been taught the weight of what they were supposed to do, only doing what others did, what they were taught was right, and nothing more. A child, a little girl playing with spinning tops and plushies, made to ascend through that "white door" and leave the reality that they had just barely begun to set foot in behind.

The Prince, even, simply… learning. Growing. A toddler, smashing and breaking and rotting all in its path with delight, seeing what he's doing as something so wonderful. The tragic part about it is that he truly does - for all that he represents, he means well, but the Cycle is callous and omnipotent and cares not for the wishes of a mere child.

A cold, golden hand, marked with an X and sprouting flowers from its palm.

An endless repeating pattern that will consume you utterly if it so wishes.

this but i stole it from twitter

tumblr stop recommending me unrebloggable posts. Do you know how sad I got cuz I realized I couldn't reblog this

the reason theres no voidspawn in pebbles is because the rot is basically bug repellent to them

Voidspawn and the Hunter

Recently, @iteratorsex and I discovered that Voidspawn behave somewhat differently for the Hunter compared to other slugs. I decided to do some digging to figure out exactly what the differences are, and thought I'd present them here. There are a few different ways you can encounter Voidspawn in Rain World:

First of all, there are a number of rooms in Shaded Citadel where free-swimming Voidspawn spawn naturally. Specifically, they swim towards SH_D02 (the room with Monster Kelp and a karma flower at the bottom of the region) and mill about there. These Voidspawn do not appear at all for the Hunter.

Next, In the caverns beneath the Depths, Voidspawn are seen swimming towards and down into the Void Sea. These Voidspawn behave identically on all slugs, with some slight adjustments due to the state of Subterranean in the Saint's campaign.

Finally, there are the Voidspawn Eggs, small, round objects that can appear at specific locations throughout Shaded Citadel, Subterranean, and Shoreline. These locations are fixed across all campaigns, but for the Hunter, each individual egg only has a 6% (~1/17) chance of actually appearing. This is compared to a 100% chance on all other slugs. When the player touches a Voidspawn Egg, its Voidspawn is released and slowly wanders offscreen.

Normally, the Voidspawn released from eggs make their way out of the room through a designated exit, one chosen by Rain World's developers when they placed that particular Voidspawn Egg. However, for the Hunter all Voidspawn released from eggs are aimless: each one swims offscreen in a different, completely random direction. In the screenshots above, I artificially added many Voidspawn Eggs to a shelter. As you can see, for the Survivor they all swim in generally the same direction, while for the Hunter they each have a different heading, and far fewer Voidspawn spawned overall.

So, what does any of this mean?

I'm not sure, though it's all clearly very intentional. I can think of two general ways to explain the differences, at least. Either:

There is something special about the Hunter that makes it more difficult for them to see Voidspawn. It could be their disease, or related to whatever prevents them from encountering Karma Flowers.

Voidspawn are simply rarer outside of Subterranean prior to the Hunter's campaign. Perhaps the reactivation of Looks to the Moon drew more Voidspawn to the adjacent regions.

What do you all think? Which sort of explanation do you lean towards? Any ideas why the Hunter's Voidspawn should be so aimless compared to other campaigns?

revisiting a peril design i made some time ago

new lizards