Hi all!
Thank you so much for your interest in Red Rain and for being a part of the Small Loan Studio community! Our teams have been hard at work bringing this game to life, and we are thrilled to share that we are one step closer to doing that by releasing our latest demo!
A few things to note before you jump in:
The Demo is actually just the first 1/3 of the whole game. It will introduce the main cast, world, and premise, as well as it will teach players our three primary mechanics: melee combat, stealth, and interacting with objects. The experience should last about 30 minutes, although some folks may take a bit longer than that.
I also want to note that while we are so excited to share this iteration of the game with you, this demo does not fully reflect what’s going to be in our final build. We are still (and always!) looking for feedback to further refine what will be in the final version of Red Rain, as well as to incorporate any learnings into future games we make here at SLS. If you have anything you’d like to share with us about the demo, you are welcome to fill out this Google form HERE.
With this in mind, here are a few updates that’ll be coming down the line!
Our phenomenal art director Fiona has created some new assets to make our levels and environments feel even more fleshed out and varied. Here’s a sneak peek of what you’ll find in future builds.
Art from our Current Build
Art from our Upcoming Build
You’ll see that in our current demo, Allie is able to “crouch” to hide from incoming enemies, but she’s unable to move while doing so. Based on tester feedback, we will be adding a highly requested “crouch and walk” function to make this stealth mechanic even more fluid and intuitive!
We are aware that this demo may have some pesky bugs that snuck by us in QA, particularly with a few animations pausing mid-movement and a camera bug that occurs if the player gets through our first combat section without dying (what a great reward for being good at the game😂). These have been noted and already addressed in our next build, but we decided that it’s better to release a demo that’s done instead of perfect (or else we’d be delaying forever!).
As I mentioned before, please feel free to share any other bugs you find with us in the above form, and we’ll be sure to get those squashed before our launch this summer!
We are currently in the middle of testing out some pathfinding for our enemies, meaning that they won’t run through bushes, rocks, and logs, etc., to attack. As cool as this is (and s/o to our lead programmer Johnny for implementing this!), as you can imagine, this would add a lot to our scope and potentially push launch back even further.
With this in mind, we are still testing this feature out internally and assessing whether or not it will be a good fit for the game. There are a million different functions and features we could add to Red Rain, but (as I said) a done game is better than a perfect one!
Anyways, thank you all again for being here! We truly appreciate your continued support of the project and hope you enjoy your experience in the world of Red Rain! ❤️
-Haley