Rat-Stack by Arend Hintze

[raw]
made by Arend Hintze for Ludum Dare 50 (JAM)

Rat-Stack

The water is coming, and you have to stay alive! Stack as much of the sewer trash on top of each other to make a raft. Unfortunately things soak and you can only postpone the inevitable - but for how long?

Cursor keys to control the rat, space to pick up and drop items, c to remove thinks you carry, and m to mute!

Give it a bit time to load at the start, music and images take a moment.

Cheers ArendScreenShotBeginning.jpgScreenShotGameOver.jpgScreenShotHigh.jpgScreenShotMiddle.jpg

Ratings

Overall 1319th 2.813⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Fun 1248th 2.76⭐ 27🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 1080th 2.86⭐ 27🧑‍⚖️
Theme 738th 3.62⭐ 27🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 1216th 2.654⭐ 28🧑‍⚖️
Audio 776th 2.98⭐ 27🧑‍⚖️
Humor 770th 2.804⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Mood 1210th 2.891⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Given 64🗳️ 27🗨️

Feedback

Jibberwocky
04. Apr 2022 · 07:22 UTC
A nice game when you actually get a good stack going, but sometimes the objects spawn in such a jumble at the start it feels like you can't move anything without something else being in the way and it turns into more of a rat clean-up.
KidderTTV
04. Apr 2022 · 08:20 UTC
Yeah this was okay. Pretty addictive once I got the hang of it.
leviathon
04. Apr 2022 · 09:28 UTC
when i played this game i noticed that the controls feel very rigid. the core concept is good i think the execution could be better. i liked the end screen but just felt limited by the movement
Calzone407
05. Apr 2022 · 15:15 UTC
This was a pretty funny game, it should have more people playing it
LDJam user 238528
06. Apr 2022 · 02:15 UTC
My highscore was 19 water level before drowning. I have to agree with @leviathon on this one: the controls felt too rigid. I understand from a development standpoint that this was probably due to the grid-based nature of the game, and honestly I kinda liked the way you could move things around to stack them. The death animation was also pretty neat, fitting for a game delaying the inevitable.
gamesplusjames
08. Apr 2022 · 10:20 UTC
This was fun and very addictive :D Great work!
Confidant17
08. Apr 2022 · 21:50 UTC
16gb of ram. nvdia gtx 670, i7quadcore procesor, win10, and game never started... shame it looked fun.
Slecornu
09. Apr 2022 · 14:24 UTC
It's a very addictive game for sure, good job!
PashaLoban
10. Apr 2022 · 09:53 UTC
Cool game
SheldonZS
10. Apr 2022 · 21:44 UTC
Unfortunately, the game window was too tall to be able to see the bottom of the screen, I so I couldn't really play it to evaluate it.
codebug
10. Apr 2022 · 22:39 UTC
Couldn't run using Processing on Linux. Got error: The nested type Scene cannot hide an enclosing type

Happy to give it another go, if you can tell me what I might be doing wrong.
JOZGames
10. Apr 2022 · 23:03 UTC
tetris diferenciado
🎤 Arend Hintze
11. Apr 2022 · 06:35 UTC
@codebug - interesting! We got the same error when running it on openprocessing and we also have no clue where this comes from. Especially when we take into account that is compiles fine on the other systems. I assume this has something to do with us using processing 4.0 and that it is still somewhat buggy. We used different 4.0 releases during development so that we catch more of those issues. For example, the Windows version compiled on OSX didn't run on Windows - sorry for that. My conclusion is to either use Unity again next time or develop on openprocessing directly as that would also solve the hosting issue. Cheers Arend
codebug
12. Apr 2022 · 00:06 UTC
@arend-hintze I tried running it in Processing 3.5.4 and it didn't run but it gave me a more meaningful error. At first it required the directory to be named the same as the sketch. It then ran the start screen with music. The mute toggle worked but when pressing any key to start it crashed with: textMode(3) is not supported by this renderer.
Processing 4 still does nothing.

Update: by commenting out the 2 uses of textMode(CENTER) in Scene, I got it to work in 3.5.4. A truly baffling bug.

It's an interesting game and definitely on theme. The rising water is definitely an unstoppable force. I did feel that the character was quite small and the movement could be a bit awkward at times. Also, I felt that seemed to be a fair amount of unused screen space, but that might have been that I didn't live long enough to make use of it.

Other than that, a solid effort. Well done!
🎤 Arend Hintze
12. Apr 2022 · 07:14 UTC
@codebug - awesome catch! I think the text in processing sometimes requires a font, and it might not be packed with the game ... I had something like that before. That the error comes from textMode and not text is weird indeed.

We discussed the resolution, and now that I played it a bit more often, I tend to agree, the arena is 40x40 and 20x20 would probably have been fine. The main reason why I shied away from that is the somewhat clunky keyboard control. We actually don't smoothly move the rat but it jumps from tile to tile. That becomes more obvious with larger tiles. We all had to work on Monday, so we never improved the rat motion. With more time (on our side) we would have improved it, and then probably gotten to the larger tiles.

Anyways, a ton of thanks for finding that bug! Cheers Arend
Necdilzor
14. Apr 2022 · 19:43 UTC
Definitely a challenge, although a bit difficult to understand how piling works.