The Rat Boy was a project I worked on as the capstone project of my college course. The goal for this game was to make it into a stealth puzzle platforming game, about Ratboy who lives in a post human world, who explores the ruins left behind by humanity with his big brother, until they are seperated by a tribe of nomadic insect raiders. The goal of the game is to outsmart these raiders while trying to find your way back to your big brother.
Ratboy is still young, so fighting enemies head-on is suicide. So the goal is to use things in your surroundings to solve puzzles and fight from the shadows, with your most powerful weapon of all being your backpack where you can carry the things you find and use them when you need them.
At the end of the semester, we ended up with what I believe was a good proof of concept, even if it's not easy to call a full "game". It demonstrated the core mechanics I had invisioned as discreet, seperate challenges in 4 different rooms, demonstrating stealth gameplay, platforming, and puzzle solving using items.
I worked with a very talented and dedicated team of individuals on this project.
I acted as the lead designer, making most of the major design decisions, as well as handling level design, 3D modeling for the enviornments as well as the items found in game, and some of the 2D UI elements. I also programmed Ratboy himself, and his core functionality.
Laurence Jamil was the lead programmer on the project, as he was by far the most experienced programmer in the group, and probably one of the most talented programmers I've ever met. He was the mastermind behind the inventory system pictured above, as well as handing some of the more advanced programming on the back end, such as saving the game, and preserving world state in each room, so that items that were dropped would remain where they were supposed to. When it came to programming, he was (and is) the man to talk to.
Joe Rines worked on the enemy programming of the game. He worked hard trying to find a solution that would be able to handle what I thought would be nessessary. In the end, the system was somewhat incomplete, but I fault myself for this, as I perhaps overestimated what kind of challenge AI would be given the amount of time we had. But Joe gave it a heroic effort, and he is the hardest working man in PA game design.
Mitch Schlad did the original concept art for Ratboy and the enemies, and also drew a few level concepts that inspired some of the levels in the game. He also 3D modeled all of the characters, including Ratboy. I gave him a really scatterbrained description of what I had in mind for a character, and he absolutely nailed it.