Hello everyone! 👋

In my last post, back when RAR Islands 1.0.0 landed, I said I would soon write about something I was getting very excited about, and that many of you would probably guess it right away.

Well… the time to talk about it has come:

RAR III is back in development. And this time it’s real. 🎉

A little bit of history#

Some of you have been around long enough to remember. I announced RAR III back in December 2021, showed a few screenshots of a very rough prototype… and then, in July 2024, I announced I was pausing it.

The reason was simple and a bit painful: the project had grown far beyond what I could handle while working on my main job. So I stepped back and built something smaller and more focused instead. That something became RAR Islands.

I want to say this clearly, because I think it matters: pausing RAR III was the right call. RAR Islands taught me an enormous amount, it reached some people I didn’t expect I’d reach, and it gave me the confidence (and the tools!) to come back to the big one properly prepared.

So, what happened after RAR Islands?#

Shortly after publishing RAR Islands, I started working on a small “library” which I call RAR Foundations, with the goal of having a set of visual components (Buttons, Texts, Progress Bars, etc.) that I could reuse for RAR III, and to do it in a Kotlin Multiplatform / Compose Multiplatform tech stack, which would allow me to even run the game on iOS and other platforms as well (and not only Android, as I did with the previous RAR entries).

Soon after, I started writing a ton of lore, ideas and scope of what I envision for RAR III, and after a few weeks/months, I started working on RAR III again. I didn’t want to mention anything on the community or with a post until I was confident enough that the game could become a reality.

That was many months ago now (as @MrDaGrover / Zeke knows), and I’ve kept it to myself precisely because I didn’t want to repeat 2021: announce something huge on day one and then have to walk it back…

But today is the day, I want to share it publicly: RAR III is happening 💪

Where the game is right now#

Here’s the honest status, because I’d rather set expectations correctly than hype you up.

What exists

  • A huge amount of design work: lore, world, races, magic, some factions, many systems, mechanics… documents and documents of it, and some of them already developed or quite advanced as systems. This is by far the most thought-through RAR I’ve ever attempted… you can’t imagine!
  • A running prototype. You can create a character, explore, fight, and see the world take shape.
  • The foundations to ship it on multiple platforms.

What doesn’t exist yet

  • Anything I’d be comfortable putting in your hands. Not even in the hands of close friends. It’s still a prototype, and it looks and feels like one, although there’s a ton of things already.

So please, do not expect a beta, a demo, or a date any time soon… 🤓

A new timeline#

Now the part I’ve been wanting to talk about for a long time…

RAR III does not take place in the same timeline as RAR I and RAR II.

It takes place in an alternate one. A timeline that branches directly off the events of RAR Islands (if you’ve played RAR Islands until the end and have completed certain things on it, you probably know what I’m talking about).

Same universe, different outcome. In this timeline, RAR I and RAR II never happened.

⚠️ Spoiler (click to reveal)

In the original timeline, the Explorer took the Artifact, and everything that followed (the Cloud of darkness, the monsters, The Wise searching for a Hero, the events of RAR I and RAR II…) came from that single choice.

In RAR III’s timeline, the Explorer sealed it instead.

As it was written in Echo Script:

BA - DE - MI - ZO - SHO - TO

“The Seed was sealed, and time split like flame across still water.”

Centuries have passed since then. And a sealed world grows very differently from a broken one…

The mechanics will feel familiar to anyone who played RAR I and RAR II.

The world, on the other hand, is entirely new: new races, new civilizations, new magic, new monsters…

I’ve rebuilt it from the ground up, and I’m genuinely in love with where it’s going!

What’s coming next#

This post is just an announcement… The fun stuff comes in the next posts!

In upcoming posts I’ll share more about:

  • 🧬 The new races, what shaped them…
  • ✨ The new magic types…
  • 🗺️ The world, its islands…
  • 👹 The monsters…
  • And more…!

I honestly can’t wait to start sharing these!

Afterword#

I know some of you have been waiting for this for almost five years.

Thank you for your patience, and thank you for sticking around through a pause, a whole other game, and a lot of silence.

RAR III is going to take a long while. I want to be very clear about that.

But it is happening, it has real foundations (pun intended) under it now, and for the first time I feel confident saying it out loud.

Share your thoughts on Discord or Reddit!

Thanks, as always, for being here! ❤️

Archison (Luis)