Rain World: Arcade Mode - SquaredPancake

This is best read with good knowledge about the game Rain World, such as the broad story and general gameplay.

A Rain World mod which adds a more traditional campaign with worlds and levels. Each level would be a few screens large, have an entrance and exit and have different set goals (eat x of food, survive x time, kill x creatures), limits (time until rain comes) and (optional) challenges (collect collectible, bring collectible to place x). Completing all or a certain amount of goal criteria would unlock the exit. Every "region" would be an overworld or hub, from which you could access at least around 20 levels, and the gates between regions could be locked by the amount of levels beaten in the region / in total throughout all regions.

Story

Warning: Very heavy story spoilers for Rain World!

While I was brain-storming and fantasizing about this absolutely overambitious mod, a story - probably flawed - slowly formed itself in my mind.

The reason the world is set up so arbitrarily into neatly ordered levels was because the world is a simulation created by an iterator (No Significant Harassmant, to be specific - The one who sent the Hunter and is also kind of jolly and joking and not really looking for the answer of the Great Problem) as an attempt to train/create creatures that are capable of living in the real world. The reason for this is partly because of fun (Because it fits NSH's personality; I think he would be interested to see if he could create his own species that can sustain itself just out of fun) and partly because it would be practical to have creatures that are trained to be messengers or upkeepers of the can (I think one of the transmissions in Spearmaster's campaign specifically mentioned something about "What should we do when our communcation arrays decay so much to the point that we can't communicate anymore?").

Once you'd beat arcade mode, you're able to get out of the simulation and get to talk to the iterator which would give a temporary mark of communication to then communicate with the player.

If you managed to beat Arcade Mode as the Hunter (Hard mode), the gialogue with NSH would be about surprise and fascination since the Hunter is the first one to break out of the simulation (Logical by the fact that he's tougher than the other vanilla scugs) and after a bit of dialogue, it would hint that he sends the Hunter into the vanilla game campaign (which would also make sense since in vanilla game, the Hunter is the first one in the timeline).

I am very pleased that this story that just kind of came from out of nowhere fits so well with at least part of the official lore (I'm not that well versed in Downpour lore). I think it might contradict something somewhere, but eh.

Music

One fun thing to think about is the music system. The idea is that since arcade mode is more fast paced, music would play constantly in the form of very layered music, similar to threat music. However, unlike threat music, there would be more layers, with some being in different styles like being ambient/ambience, emotional or calming to give a bit more variation to a track. Each level could have a configurable base set of these layers (that might be able to be changed mid-level through completing a certain goal criteria, for example), along with per-level threat layers that could get added on top through the same way normal threat layers work.

Since people will probably be spending hours inside a world, it should be important to make the music able to be listened to for a long time. Ideas to accomplish this are:

Create up and downtime by playing action-rich and calming music
Make multiple, different sounding melodies/parts/song that fit weirdly well together, but still have a different mood
Include some randomization of what layers to play when entering a level/dying a certain amount of time/spending 5 minutes on a level/have the music loop once

Other music-related notes/ideas:

Having two different leitmotifs in a world as you explore a mechanic/enemy/environment, and having these leitmotifs play together once both mechanics/enemies/environments are there at the same time
It feels like having longer tracks (~5 minute-ish) is better for loopability, but harder to make work since it requires more care put into each layer so that every section of every layer fits well together.

Random Notes!

One region's idea I especially like is the idea of an iterator who's inner place is designed to look like outer space since iterators generally have zero gravity inside them. It's just a cool visual idea.