The slugcat may be cute, but the world it has to survive in isn't it's dreary, dark, and constantly threatening. In it, you play as an adorable part-slug, part-cat creature. The GIFs communicate a lot about Rain World, too. "But I guess at the time it really wasn't all that common." Rain World's devlog actually began before that period, way back in 2012, complete with GIFs posted by Primate's co-developer Joar Jakobsson. "I guess at the time when we were kind of in midway of development of Rain World-it was like 2013, 2014 I guess-and now GIFs are like, developers always are sharing GIFs, right? Like every game comes out, you a million GIFs," says Primate. The pixelated detail of Hyper Light Drifter, the adorable art of Night in the Woods, and so on-for many of the biggest indies in recent years, a striking art style that looks great in motion helped propel it. As a consequence, a lot of the successful indie games we've seen in recent years fall in either two categories: either they stream well (prime for Twitch and YouTube fodder), or they GIF well. The point is: GIFs are everywhere, and if a game isn't GIF-friendly, it suffers the pressure of being lost in the crowd of the hundreds of daily releases across Steam, GOG, itch.io, and more. If a game GIFs well, people will undoubtedly pay attention. And for potential fans, it takes a lot less effort to watch a GIF on its infinite loop than to click on a video. They're used as reactions to respond to friends. And the popularity of GIFs is no small feat. As it's not screenshots people are sharing anymore: it's mostly GIFs. The hashtag #ScreenshotSaturday on Twitter has bent to the trend too. On TIGsource, you'll still find an active forum thread that started in 2013 simply entitled, "GIFs of games being worked on." Five years and 280 pages later, developers still post GIFs of their in-progress games on there. It almost makes more sense in GIF format than it does in game format because games are like this big complicated world where like a million things are going on, but a GIF you could just capture like a couple of seconds and you can see this, like, story take place."
I think honestly it was probably the main reason the game got as successful as it did. "We started posting little snippets of character movement and stuff like that and it kinda just got into our brand I guess.
It's all about seeing the movement of the character," says James Primate, half of the development team behind Rain World, Videocult. "Rain World specifically is like all about procedural animation so it doesn't really make sense if you just see a still shot. In recent years, it's drifted to Twitter, where likes and retweets spread interest for games far and wide, making it not only a way to share progress in dev circles-but has morphed into a promotional tool for those without PR studios at their behest too. Others will point to the development forums TIGsource (The Independent Gaming source), where devlogs live and die by screenshots and GIFs of progress. Some may argue the trend started with Tumblr, with its once-horrific 1mb limitations. Since the early 2010s, the image format known as GIFs (or, "Graphics Interchange Format") have become the way to show video games off. And what better way to be seen than with what may be best described as an animated image, better known as a GIF? Some, like the 2017 survival-platformer Rain World, have to be seen to be believed. Some games aren't done justice with just a still screencap.
Some content, such as this article, has been migrated to VG247 for posterity after USgamer's closure - but it has not been edited or further vetted by the VG247 team. This article first appeared on USgamer, a partner publication of VG247.
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