Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Hello Ratmaze 0.5!
Yes!! Ratmaze lives again!! I'm very happy & excited to announce the release of our very first finished game, Ratmaze 0.5! I'll talk more about it, how it came to be, and other stuff in a moment. First, a link to the game (it's free!):
Click to play at http://games.pixeljam.com
This is Ratmaze 0.5b, to be precise. A much a scaled down, simplified version of the original Ratmaze game I had written about last week. This version is more like a game that consists only of a delicious cheese consuming bonus stage. There are no enemies, and there is no death (or killing), only running, eating, & dancing. There is a timer, and 3 levels of rank, with a slight payoff if you complete the game before the music ends the first time through. If you eat all the cheese within that time (roughly 127 seconds) you'll get to see Rat do backflips and dance. You'll get to see him do a simpler dance without the backflips if you do average, and if you're really slow (take longer than 254 seconds) I made an animation of him getting fat and having to sit down and be too full to dance. All of them are worth seeing though, 'cause the rat is really cute doing all of it. Oh yeah, the game is very kid friendly.
Look at all that delicious cheese! I think the rat ate too much.. here, take a look at some screenshots from Ratmaze. click on them for a larger view:
 |  |
 how's he gonna get those cheeses?? |  Hey, It's Dude, our good friend from Game01 (unfinished, unreleased)! He's just a dancing fool in Ratmaze. No, you can't eat him. |
I have to tell you about the music for Ratmaze 0.5. It's totally awesome!! It's perfect for this game. Many thanks to Mark DeNardo (markdenardo.com) and Anthony Koerber (squareproduct.com) for their 8-bit masterpiece "poulenc". What fun it is to run around and chomp cheeses to.. You can also download it from within Ratmaze if you find the secret area. ;) If anything Ratmaze is a cool music video.
So, how did Ratmaze come to live again, you ask? I mean, I know I had written a whole blog, lamenting how it wasn't going to happen last week. well, it's as simple as this.. I posted a bulletin on myspace.com letting people know about last weeks new blog entry, and one friendly person sent me a message saying that she would have loved to have played Ratmaze. She went on to explain how much she loved rats, and even had a rat on the t-shirt she was wearing in her illustrated profile photo. I thought about sending her the relatively lifeless version of the game we had built it up to so far, where you could run around and eat a few pieces of cheese in silence, but I thought if I was going to do that, maybe miles wouldn't mind adding chees to all the rooms to make it more enjoyable. He was okay with that, but we decided to go ahead and do that and add a few other little details and release it for everyone to play. With 4 days of constant, hard work & late nights, we managed to finish it up last night. We made a temporary site for pixeljam games and behold! An actual finished game and a website to download it from/a URL to give people . games.pixeljam.com is born. It's only a temporary site for now and will be more thought out when we have time. I'm sure by the time gamma bros. is finished, we'll have made some changes.
Well, that's about all for Ratmaze 0.5. please tell all your friends about it if you like it. It's free and all, so, why not. Also, let us know about any bugs or glitches you come across. it's still kind of a beta version.
As for Gamma Bros. progress, we've been working on it some more as well. I made a few animations for the guys ship blowing up, and of them getting into their ships in the hangar at the beginning of the game. Miles has been programming the first level's waves of enemies and so far it's great fun to play. Here's an action packed screenshot of some game play. click for a larger version (actual game dimensions).
Super action!!!
okay, that's all for today. thanks for reading and have fun eating all that delicious pixel cheese!
-Rich
