Introducing: PATOU! Since this year we are working on a new game about family, nostalgia and a big dog that helps you digging out mysterious ruins.
PATOU is a narrative adventure with puzzle elements. Our focus is on exploring surreal dreamscapes and understanding your fluff companion. In the upcoming months we want to share development news and other stories on Patou's own blog.
The game is funded by EFRE and the MDM.
By the way - if you're wondering what happened to the stealth game we were planning last year, don't give your hopes up yet!
(TL;DR) We’re working on a Thief-inspired stealth game and want people to fill out a survey!
We already talked on this blog about how we put Behind Stars and Under Hills on ice (with a big sad sigh), and that our next game project will be a Thief-like (1998 Thief, not 2014 Thief), but we didn’t get into much detail here. Instead we did a livestream about the current state of our new project, so have a look if you want to catch up. Now, the sandbox demo we showed in the video is finally available to selected testers!
(YouTube videos try to set cookies and contact Third Party servers!)
While the difference to the version from the stream isn’t that vast, the playground level now has an individually created mission (with simple quests like “Steal 700 loot”) and offers a few coherent gameplay elements and situations. The geometry overall is super simple, with a lot of placeholder textures and models. Especially the enemy is still the skeleton from the Asset Store, which Friedrich has been using for nearly a year now, just because it’s so nice to look at and has a lot of personality. The level was built quickly with RealtimeCSG, a tool we will also use for the final missions, as it keeps the level creation inside Unity (in TRI, we made all the levels in 3dsmax) and its limitations work well with our chosen settings. Also, the lighting is all real-time for now (which results in a pretty high number of draw calls), as the pipeline for baking and integrating lightmaps is not ready yet.
For us it was important to create a level that demonstrates the “game feel”, and of course the basic gameplay. The sandbox-y nature is clear from the beginning as each room has more than one entrance and the mission does not enforce to do things in a certain order. Of course the whole level is pretty weird. Most jarring: the buildings were put on a big floating block. And the rooms don’t make much sense in their architecture. But we hope this also creates its own atmosphere; and at least with this demo, we put gameplay far before realism anyway.
While the AI will be “under construction” until the beta or even the final version of the game, the enemies already are dangerous and behave in sometimes unexpected ways, which is the heart of a stealth game: it only works well as a game if the danger is big (and preferably constant), but always manageable. Thanks to the players’ powers to hide inside shadows and use various tools (like projectiles or a hacking device) the latter should already be the case in our playground demo.
As we’re still trying to find out if the character controller’s programming is going the right direction and if the AI actually feels natural in its reactions towards the players, we decided against doing a full vertical slice. Which mostly means we’re trying to make sure we appeal to stealth fans for now, and not to publishers. This is obvious in how many things are missing, with the graphics assets already mentioned. But also the sounds are much too sparse for now, with a skeleton only generating footstep sounds, and sometimes a scream that should alarm other enemies. And we’re working on the plot and story in parallel to graphics and tech, but are still not satisfied with those yet, so they are also not part of the playground demo (only hinted a bit).
It goes without saying that a lot of the game’s gameplay mechanics are not yet implemented or even planned. For this and other reasons we created a questionnaire that we’d like to have filled out by stealth enthusiasts and gamers in general, mostly to see how other people see the genre and how important certain elements are. So please, dear reader, fill out the surveyand maybe even forward it to others. And if you’re even more interested, you might want to become a part of our Discord server! See you soon!
The Global Game Jam 2020 marks the seventh time the Rat King participated in this world-wide event of game-making and game-playing; and it is the second time we hosted the event in our home town; in the Designhaus Halle to be exact. (Before that, we took part at and/or organized the location in Leipzig.) So this is a sacred tradition for us, as game developers and as creative people in Central Germany, where unfortunately not a lot of other game studios reside. But maybe, peu à peu, we can change that this way.
Our own game, Spheroneers, is a local co-op multiplayer game where the players control two to four engineers; they have the task to find a sphere which contains an (embryonic) alien creature. Then they have to roll the sphere through the rooms, protect it from holes in the floor and from dangerous robots, and also use it for door switches. To ultimately win the game the group of spheroneers need to get to the final teleporter that sends the sphere home. We created a video that showcases the full gameplay of our GGJ prototype:
(YouTube videos try to set cookies and contact Third Party servers!)
As usual, not everything we envisioned got implemented (only 48 hours, after all!) - still, we are pretty proud of the end result. In fact, we think we want this to become a full game, as it was fun not only to play, but also to make. It became a very dynamic experience, as the players have to destroy and repair things (like walls, floor tiles, and of course the robots) all the time. The GGJ theme really upgraded the concept by adding a lot of interactivity and hilarity.
So if you have some time, and friends, we would be grateful if you could have a look at the game over at itch.io, and give it a test-drive. We eagerly await any kind of feedback, either here in the comments section (if this one is closed, use itch.io), or in our Discord. (If you don’t have friends, Spheroneers can also be played alone, but it might diminish the experience a bit. Find some friends!)
