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Rats vs. Bankers's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Style | #1221 | 3.773 | 3.773 |
| Overall | #1601 | 3.455 | 3.455 |
| Enjoyment | #1973 | 3.182 | 3.182 |
| Creativity | #2080 | 3.409 | 3.409 |
Ranked from 22 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
You build and scale your sewer
Development Time
96 hours
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Comments
Thanks for submitting your game to the stream! If you wanted to look at it again in the future heres the vod timestamped to your game
With a little bit more polish, like a more clear and concise tutorial, I think this could be a really fun game :) . I also love the animation of each sprite.
Hi, is there anything more specific you would suggest to improve the tutorial? Thanks
I was thinking of an animated clip that shows you what to do along with the text, instead of just the text, because I feel like i was missing something when I played.
Ok, thanks for the feedback!
no problem!
Love the brash bankers, very silly. Cool concept, though it was a little weird how the game would give me sections to place on the board that couldn't connect to it (unless there's a rotation button I missed)
Thanks! Jimmy made the bankers
Nope, there's no rotate button, I wanted the direction you build out your sewer to have strategic implications (i.e building south east will give you less room for rat pits and north west will give you less room for armouries); I also wanted players to have to think about leaving connection points open for future rounds, so they would have to do some long term planning in order to let them keep scaling their sewer efficiently.
With a clearer tutorial, this could be a finished game! Everything was super charming and polished, nice work!
Thank you!
"the rat is too fat to move"
just take my rating and go this is too good lmao
i tried thinking of feedback but i have literally none. its too perfect (ok im jk there is an off-centering issue with fullscreen but the game itself is fine)
also can i know what engine you used? and what tutorials you used (if any)? because ive been thinking of making an isometric turn based game (like Into the Breach) and would like to get any leads possible!
Hey, thanks so much for the high praise!
Yeah the off-centring thing is because this is my first html5 port and I only tested fullscreen in gx.wasm and windows; now I know for next time!
I used Gamemaker engine because that's what I'm used to, but the faux 3d stuff can be done in any engine. I made a tutorial last year on the Gamemaker subreddit, because I also wrote a isometric game last year for the GMTK game jam (it's also a bit closer scale to Into The Breach). But with more experience I don't think the methods I used in that tutorial are very good (This game would run at like 1fps if I used the same method from my tutorial); the maths and basic concept is still alright though, it's just that the implementation details are very questionable.
The route we used in this game was to just draw every chunk from the back to the front, adjusting their x and y position on the screen using their virtual x, y, & z positions (their real in-game coordinates) using some maths. Before the draw step, we just added every entity to a priority queue that each chunk owned with their priority based on how close to the camera they were, during the draw step for every chunk, we just draw the entities in that chunk based on their priority. Here's a pastebin link for the draw stuff in GML (beware, it's very messy because it was obviously written in a short amount of time for the game jam).
This is not a good long term solution if you're making a non-jam game, because it meant that we had to draw the rooms and then manually set define where the ground, water, and walls are in code. Rats also have small clipping errors when they're at the borders of chunks because of this. I would probably recommend (with like low-middle level confidence/conviction) making your game with a real, 3d, orthographic camera (with a fixed 45° pitch & yaw) and then bill-board the sprites in that 3d space if you're planning on doing a long-term project. I just wrote it this way because real 3d would have taken too long to set up in the short-term in Gamemaker.
ok thanks for taking the time to respond! really appreciate it
Really cool retro and groovy vibe, well done !
Thank you!
Pretty cool level extension rat management game!
Thanks!
Had a bit of an issue with the tutorial, but once I got passed that it was a great game. I wonder if you do some tile bagging to help ensure a somewhat consistent distribution of tiles between runs.
Thanks! Can you tell me what the issue is? It would help for future projects.
There's no bagging, I may update the game after the rating period when the jam is fully compete to have some small QoL stuff like that
There were two issues that went together:
- First issue is that somehow I thought I moved the rat for the tutorial, but hadn't. Not sure if this was because I did it before the text showed up or not)
- Second issue was when I was messing around after this, I pressed spacebar and the message about needing to place the entrances showed up. I thought that message was more important to listen to, since it was after the other one.
I think disabling the spacebar message until the entrances are available probably would have resolved the issue.
Ah, yep that would do it. The game only checks serially if the instructions are complete, so if you moved it before the text popped up it wouldn't have been recorded. And yeah, I should have probably disabled that message. Thanks for letting me know, I've been trying to improve the onboarding for my games over the past year and feedback like this is the only way I improve
I like the presentation of the game and I like the sounds the rats make. I like that you have to think ahead of how you scale the sewer in order to be able to upgrade your units and create more units. For some reason it was not obvious to me that entrances remain and will continue to spawn more bankers. Maybe the same that you have the notification on how many rats or banker will spawn, have pop up again before I put down an entrance.
Thanks, we made so many rat sounds while we were on voice chat during the jam
It's the giant rat that makes all of the rules! Thanks for the stream submission :)
Lots of interesting takes on the genre. The amount of rats and weapons still need a bit of balancing, but otherwise this is doing a lot right!
Thanks! This is literally the reference I sent to Jimmy for the giant rat art
RAT !!!
This was a very fun concept :D I would play this if you ever turn it into a full game!
Thanks, I appreciate it! I might polish up a few things code-wise and release an updated version after the jam (but probably no new content). However, I've another isometric rat strategy game (different from this one, I just have rats on the mind) in the planning phase right now for a long term project after I release my other game, Dead Oculus, on Steam.
Just wishlisted Dead oculus. That looks like a game I'd enjoy! Good luck on the release :)
Thank you so much!