How It Came Together

Pat gets all stressed about the state of the game industry, and he vents that stress by making really cool game prototypes, often in a single night of frenzied coding. This is not a skill I have, so I find it pretty remarkable. So Pat made a super rapid prototype based on a greybox roguelike vampire-survivors-like game he had made previously, and was ready to drop it and call it a day.

But I saw potential in it for something cool. And, apparently my hobby is keeping Pat inspired. I bet him that we could add a cute stupid story and some art to the game, and it would become “real.”

The idea of a rat shooting its fleas at bubbles was shouted out in a half-assed brainstorming call, and the rest is history.

Development

Dave did SO much work on this game. Dave is our unwilling engineer. He’s very good at this. We appreciate you, Dave.

This is the phase in which I was making wireframes in Figma, sketching characters, creating backgrounds, and going back and forth a lot with Dave on how to optimize art assets for this game.

Creating game-ready art assets is still very new to me, but I’m learning. This game certainly taught me a lot and made me more confident about pivoting one of our other projects to pixel art. This is our specialty and I want us to lean into it.

Design Pitfalls

Pat and I work together often at our primary jobs, collaborating daily as a game designer (Pat) and a UX designer (me). I also have a background in game content design. Needless to say, we argue constantly. Don’t worry; it’s productive arguing and we are better for it.

At work, we have the discipline to document everything so that things don’t get out of hand. In this game, we did a lot of the arguing right on discord, right with Dave in the conversation, and Dave is such a rapid developer that our ideas became real faster than we could prove or disprove them. I think this put a lot of strain on Dave and made the game bloat for a bit before Dave set some boundaries around what minimum viable meant for this project. We all supported that! Pat and I made an effort to tighten up the design and do some prioritization of our ideas, locking it down so that Dave could be done.

I love what we made! We have a giant pile of hopes and dreams that we’ve written down in case we ever come back to this game.

And, more importantly, we learned to try to do a better job of designing and documenting for each milestone in future games. We’re trying to get ahead for Rombo. We’ve even adopted Jira instead of our messy Nuclino board.

Gross Art

My favorite part of development for this game was coming up with disgusting little concepts and making gross art for them.

Notable gross things that I enjoyed making:

• Greasy pizza plate
• Rat nipples
• Flea projectiles
• Sewer farts
• Street grime

Balance

Pat did all of the game balancing. My role here was to whine about Foamy or the Dishwasher Pod being way too hard. Pat was pushing and pulling on those numbers constantly as we ran into every balance issue you can imagine – upgrades too slow, upgrades too fast, game too slow, game too boring, game too hard, game too easy, Foamy too rude, etc. 

The full team (including Jenna and  Brian) did a big playtest at the end of development and we spent a final week polishing based on everyone’s helpful feedback. We also had our kids and parents play (people in their 70s) to see how accessible and friendly the game really was. We found that people who were less familiar with gaming had a hard time navigating the game, but still really enjoyed it. That was a big win!

Next Steps

Our studio’s next step is to support our other two games sort of simultaneously for a short while. Rombo is our primary focus, and Archaeology is our side quest. But as we shift to pixel art focus, we think we can bring Archaeology to a better, more sustainable place and unblock Jenna and Brian on it. For this milestone of Rombo, we’ll be writing design documentation, firming up our long term feature plans, and planning harder for the next Milestone, which is like an expanded vertical slice. This milestone is all about polishing the art and starting to get ready to pitch the game, maybe.

For the Rat Game, everyone (except me) needs a break from it. I love this game so much. Our plan is: if we get 10 followers or fans across our social media accounts who want to see more content in this game, we’ll come back to it. Heck, we might come back to it anyways. But while it’s quiet in the post-launch world, we’re focusing on expanding our portfolio.