Thanks for checking out the Prologue, hope you're enjoying it  :) As you might have noticed, we do not let "realism" get in the way of Great Gameplay Experiences™. This sometimes leads us to try, ehkem, unusual ways of creating chaos. Such as...

RAINING BREAD

Yes, you read that right.

RAINING BREAD

Do not believe us? Here's a video:

Yess....

Origin of the Bread Idea

Why is it that you rain bread? Well, if I wanted to bring up a meaningful and relatable story, I would explain how I (the Creative Director behind the game) grew up in Poland. Bread is our daily staple - no morning can begin without a hearty slice of a thick bread and butter, perhaps with and a handful of simple but delicious toppings. We do not close our sandwiches in Poland, by the way - they're open-faced, like our creativity for the game. Indeed, Bread has been the staple of human diet for centuries, nay, millennia! From ancient Egypt till present day, bread has fed billions. It is, by some accounts, a symbol of our agricultural achievement, a victory over forces of nature. Of course, we had to include it in the game.

Or perhaps, a more plausible solution is that I simply woke up at 2:43 am one night and randomly thought "hmm, what if you could rain bread?" And the rest followed. 

But I will let you choose the story you like to believe. Our blogs, much like our games, are interactive, after all. 

Design Lessons - So Dumb It's Good!

I knew from the start I wanted the bread to attract pigeons, but how should pigeons behave? Surely they should fly towards the bread. So I coded a simple physical RigidBody that simply calculated the direction towards the bread, and applied a physical impulse in that direction combined with an upward lift. Do this every half of a second and you have a rough simulation of flapping wings! Needless to say, it was a gross over-simplification that looked.... well, I'll let you judge:

It was... not very smart. I started thinking that I'll need to do some serious AI work on the bird. Add some kind of a variable flapping strength, add a stopping distance so the birds slow themselves down as they get closer to the bread, account for vertical difference and try to dive down if bread was below them, have birds flock or avoid each other and follow a height-mesh, etc. etc. etc.

Needless to say, this was sounding like a lot of work to make the idea work. But for the heck of it, I decided to just spawn 10 birds at once and see what happens. 

Oh my God, it was SO DUMB it was FANTASTIC. The idiotic physics behavior went form being "broken" to hilarious when multiplied x10. And when you throw in a whole horde of pigeons (upwards of 50 in the original video), it just becomes complete, hilarious, physics-based CHAOS. 

Aim for the LOL (literally)

And this, at the core, is what Rain on Your Parade is all about - creating unexpected scenarios that surprise the player and result in hilarious mayhem! Yes, we have challenging levels to test your dexterity, slow exploration for fans of discovery, little puzzles for those who like to stress their mental abilities, and plenty of interesting mechanics and abilities to play around with. But at the end of the day, if we can create something, no matter how dumb, that makes the player laugh out loud, I feel we're on the right track  :) 

Thanks for reading the first devblog, it's kind of an impromptu idea that came up today. If you'd like to read more about our design process, please leave a comment! 

And if you like the prologue, please Wishlist the FULL GAME on Steam!