Factsheet

Developer:
Rat King
Based in Halle (Saale), Germany

Founding date:
January 4, 2011

Website:
RATKING.DE

Press / Business contact:
jana@ratking.de

Social:
TWITTER Friedrich
TWITTER Jana
FACEBOOK Rat King
YOUTUBE

Releases:
Jam Games
Pitman
TRI - Of Friendship And Madness
Tumblox
Behind Stars And Under Hills

Address:
Robert-Franz-Ring 3
06108 Halle (Saale)

Phone:
+49 345 6141741

Description

Rat King, that is Jana Reinhardt and Friedrich Hanisch. They love to make weird game experiences - most often with first-person perspective - that enable players with more freedom than walking through tubes. Their emphasis lies on mainstream-incompatible designs, atmosphere and characters. This is why they participate in game jams regularly, where one can work quickly and intensely on new ideas with like-minded people. For their creations they often use Photoshop, 3dsmax, Unity, coffee and mild confusion.

History

Beginnings

Rat King Entertainment was founded in 2011 in Halle (Saale), Germany. To get to know the business from the beginning they made small games mostly for Apple's mobile platform iOS, but also participated in several game jams. Pitman and Tumblox are two titles that were made in these times, laying the groundwork for future games. While Pitman has its origin in the 7-Day-Roguelike-Challenge (a one week game jam) and was ported to desktop computers, Tumblox is a slick puzzle game challenging the players' brains. Later on, while developing TRI, they continued to experiment with jam games and a few releases on Android.

Development of TRI: Of Friendship and Madness

TRI is the first bigger game by Rat King. The prototype was made for the online contest Ludum Dare in April 2011. Several months later Rat King started to work on the full game, where players would retrieve the legendary TRI artefact and get the power to conjure triangles out of thin air, everywhere. Those they can use to overcome obstacles, reflect light rays and walk on the walls, to finally find the Divine Fox on behalf of a mysterious Monk. In a series of Making-Ofs Friedrich and Jana explain their journey to the finally finished TRI, released in 2014 under the banner of Rising Star Games on Steam and several other sale platforms.

SOLITUNE

In 2015 Jana applied for a sponsoring at the Art Foundation Sachsen-Anhalt, to create a game based on her escapist fantasy to become a shepherd and live a solitary life. With Friedrich's help she created an isometric art game where an office clerk wanders around an office, talking to people in different situations and turning them to sheep, while the environment slowly becomes the nature we all desire. SOLITUNE was first presented at an art exhibition for children in 2016, and afterwards digitally released on itch.io.

Current project

Rat King's current game project is "Behind Stars and Under Hills", a dungeon adventure with detective elements. It puts emphasis on story and atmosphere, on interaction with NPCs (dialogues) and on exploration. While there are fights, those aren't the main focus. Instead, players will find hidden ways and items, translate scriptures, talk to the inhabitants, trade with them, circumvent and/or find ways around dangers (like enemies and traps), and use the light by placing torches. 'Behind Stars and Under Hills' is co-funded by Creative Europe MEDIA of the European Union and the Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung.

Projects


Videos

Release trailer of "SOLITUNE" YouTube

Release trailer of our game "TRI: Of Friendship and Madness" YouTube

Release trailer of "Farbenspiel" YouTube

Music video for the game prototype "Power of Love" YouTube

Friedrich's keynote for Ludum Dare 33 YouTube

Serious Game - "Sabah" YouTube


Images

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There are far more images available for Rat King, but these are the ones we felt would be most useful to you. If you have specific requests, please do contact us!


logo


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Awards & Recognition

  • "#1 in Innovation (for 'Treachery of Gamedev')" - Ludum Dare #38, 2017
  • "Nominated for "Most Amazing Game Award" (for SOLITUNE)" - Berlin, A Maze Festival, 2017
  • "Winner German Computer Game Award "Best Youth Game" (for TRI)" - Berlin, Germany 2015
  • "Geekie Awards – Honorable Mention (for TRI)" - 2015
  • "Finalist for Best Game Design and Best PC Game (for TRI)" - IndiePrize Europe at the Casual Connect 2015
  • "Editors Choice - Creativity Award (for TRI)" - IndieDB Indie of the Year 2014
  • "Indie Games PGA - Best Presentation (for TRI)" - Poznan Games Arena 2014
  • "Der Goldene Spatz - Best Indie Game4Kids (for TRI)" - Erfurt, Germany 2014
  • "Finalist in the Indie Game Contest (for TRI)" - Strasbourg European Fantastic Film Festival 2014

Selected Articles

  • "On SOLITUNE: I bloody love the look of it."
    - Tom Sykes, PCGamer
  • "On SOLITUNE: They show me something weird and/or surprising I'd not seen before. It's awful pretty too."
    - Alice O'Connor, Rock Paper Shotgun
  • "On SOLITUNE: All of this is delightfully strange."
    - Thomas Faust, Indiegames.com
  • "TRI: Of Friendship and Madness is one of the finest representatives of the genre and shares the top of the list only with the esteemed Portal. In spite of minor issues with the controls, TRI: Of Friendship and Madness is a truly remarkable game."
    - Michael Vondung, Nintendo Cubed3
  • "I always knew that TRI: Of Friendship and Madness was shaping up to become something special indeed, but I honestly never expected it to be this good and so amazingly polished."
    - Konstantinos Dimopoulos, Indiegames.com
  • "TRI: Of Friendship and Madness is a fantastically executed return to the well of first-person spatial tinkering (...)"
    - Brandin Tyrell, Gamespot

Rat King's Blog
We write about our games and other stuff ratking.de.

Friedrich's Dev Blog
He writes about the technical side of game dev mostly https://ratrogue.tumblr.com.

TRI: Of Friendship and Madness
The website of our game TRI http://tri-game.com.

Indie Arena Booth
Jana does PR for the world's largest exhibition of indie games http://indiearenabooth.de/.

Soundtracks of our games
Our composer KingLudi offers some soundtracks on Bandcamp https://kingludi.bandcamp.com.


Team & Repeating Collaborator

Friedrich Hanisch
Game Design, Programming, Level Design

Jana Reinhardt
Art Direction, Game Design, Level Design

Ludwig 'KingLudi' Hanisch
Music


presskit() by Rami Ismail (Vlambeer) - also thanks to these fine folks