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Behind High Five and Under Gamescom

Hey - long time no read! We're sorry for the lack of updates. (I bet you heard that sentence before.)

After months of finalizing and polishing Behind Stars and Under Hills' prototype, we pitched the project to several publishers. Afterwards we put the game on a temporary hiatus, so we can pursue other projects for now. Behind Stars is still highly active in the back of our brains though - more about that in later posts! Meanwhile, a few atmospheric screenshots from the current state of the game prototype:

To earn some money we currently design and implement a mobile game for local animation studio MotionWorks - it's pretty cool to collaborate with creatives working a few streets away for a change! Unfortunately we can't tell too much about the project yet, but the setting will be the Bronze Age, and the game itself is embedded in an interactive app about the Nebra sky disk. It is co-funded by the Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung and the Investitionsbank Sachsen-Anhalt.

In April we visited the Reboot 2018 in Croatia, together with our good friend Björn. The Reboot itself was a very cool 3-day event within a luxurious hotel lobby with lots of games, food and talks! But we were also mesmerized by the beauty of Croatia and Dubrovnik, and the bombed hotels along the coast line...

A short time ago the summer semester of our former art school ended, which always concludes with the annual summer fest together with an exhibition of all the students' works. As our office is part of the incubator Designhaus which is directly tied to the university and thus does an Open Day during the exhibition weekend, we were obliged (and happy!) to also show stuff we made. We decided that Behind Stars and Under Hills would not work for the audience of people mostly interested in the finer arts (and their young kids), so instead we created a small game specifically for the Open Day.

We also were adamant that everybody would be able to play the game. But from former experiences we knew that some visitors even have reservations against using a mouse or keyboard. This is why we got a Makey Makey and made a game you would play with high fives only: High Five Romance Race! Later on we also presented the game at the Talk&Play in Berlin. We can say without shame that this simple endless runner is one of our most popular products now. ;)

Of course we will visit the gamescom this year again - we won't showcase anything this time, which is actually a good thing because it gives us more leisure to have a look at all the great games presented at the Indie Arena Booth. Just today their line-up was revealed, so have a look!

INDIE ARENA BOOTH trailer 2018

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Are you going too? Tell us via Twitter - or even better, join us on our new Discord server and talk directly to us! :)

A picture blog for our new game

As some of you may already know we currently work on a new project, which was named "Morituri" for some time but has now the title Behind Stars and under Hills. Its prototype is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and the MDM.

Behind Stars and under Hills will be a Dungeon Adventure with detective elements and animal people. It puts emphasis on story and atmosphere, on interaction with NPCs (dialogues) and exploration. While there probably will be fights (of low complexity), those won't be the main focus of the game. Instead, players have to 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.

There are no real hard facts to announce yet (hopefully soon though), but we started a picture blog for the project, especially for the prototype we currently work on. You can find it here. We post everything visual, i.e. drawings, scribbles, animations and screenshots from the game and the level editor. Our intention is to link the blog whenever we post those pictures on Twitter or Facebook, so people don't see a single slice of the game only, but can inform themselves more about the look of the game instantly. It also makes it easier to follow the project as long as we don't have a dedicated website.

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https://behindstarsandunderhills.tumblr.com

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New website

If this isn't the first Rat King blog post you ever read, then you probably noticed it already - we have a new website! Some parts are not finished yet - especially this blog. We had to move it to a subfolder, so it's very likely a lot of hyperlinks to some of our posts won't work anymore, and other stuff too.

Anyway, we thought a soft launch might be okay, and maybe try different WordPress themes on the go. We mainly wanted to make it all simpler and cleaner, which we wanted for a long time, but only now I had the motivation to actually do something about it. For some time I tried out different frameworks for responsive websites (for the home page, not the blog, as this would keep being WordPress), but then I read an article about Hugo, a generator for static websites, and thankfully it had everything we wanted, responsive themes included.

So now here we are - the content is mostly the same, but we wanted to put some more emphasis on our games this time, as we didn't have that much when we uploaded the second version of ratking.de back in 2012... wow, time flies. A redesign really was overdue.

Have fun, and if you find any glitches or errors on the new website, just contact us!

Farbenspiel released!

We released Farbenspiel 1.0 on itch.io - have a look!

Farbenspiel Title

But wait, what is this game!? It's true, we never talked about Farbenspiel on this blog here, but it seems we're a bit behind blogging anyway. One reason is that Jana is doing marketing for the Indie Arena Booth 2016 at the gamescom and is writing a lot already that way. (Check it out!)

IAB

But back to topic - Farbenspiel is a Local Multiplayer-Only Deathmatch Action game we did as a side project. 2-4 players with gamepads gather and shoot each other. To make it more interesting, the players collect power-ups (eggs) which allow them to splatter colored puddles. In these puddles they can hide - while the enemy becomes slower in it.

As you can't see yourself in a puddle of your color, and bullets reflect at walls, Farbenspiel becomes a bit of chaotic fun. ;-)

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The game is now officially "version 1.0", which means its fully playable. Just get it for $2.50 on itch.io, the finest indie sales platform there is! But there are a lot of things we'd like to see improved in Farbenspiel, like the balancing, and additional levels. So there will surely be updates in the future! Be aware though that it is still more of a side project for us, while we concentrate on planning, funding and prototyping our next bigger project.

Last but not least, here's a somewhat older gameplay video of Farbenspiel:


Farbenspiel - 2 Player Test, Level 2

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New website, post-portem, Indie Buskers

Welcome to the Rat King's shiny new website! The old one was pretty worn-out, and it was made in a time when we didn't have much projects to show. After a year and three months, and after several game jams and two iPhone games, this has changed! So the front page now is dedicated to the games we made, and eye-candy is everywhere to be found. Enjoy!

In other news, Friedrich wrote a post-mortem about our Seven-Day-Roguelike Challenge entry, Me Against The Mutants. The game was made for the challenge AND the Pitman Birthday week, so a review of the game's creation was just mandatory.

Last, but not least, some of you may heard that we are part of the Indie Buskers!

The Buskers are a group of indie game developers who happen to have a thing for game jams:

They also are not very rich. So they decided to make a public game jam where they create games based on suggestions they got from people all over the world, and accept donations while this game jam happens. The Busking is set for the midst of this month, so visit us on April 14th to 15th!

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