How to play?

  • Use to mouse to do everything.
  • There's a tutorial ingame.
    Also, tons of stuff will display a tooltip if you hover the mouse above them.
  • You lose by running out of rats.
  • You can beat the game in various ways. Win by playing in your own way!


After millenia of being a side character in the story of Earth, being called vermin many times, rats now stand a chance to change the course of the world...

Will they befriend the humans? Conquer the entire planet? Or perhaps something else...?

How will YOU lead them to a better future?

 Made for the Pirate Jam 14, in roughly two weeks.

The theme was "It's Spreading". The idea we had was of a 4X game where you lead a rat colony to a new era. After all, rats spread lots of stuff, from diseases to themselves. We focused on the latter, of course!

 Opposed to the last game we made, this one had lots of feature creep. Still, somehow I managed to finish it. Sadly, I had to solo develop it. Code, sprites, audio, UI, testing, etc. Sucraiso helped with the idea and QA (specially the latter) though, so I'm including him on the submission for the jam.

 As always, feedback is very welcome!

Inspirations: Civilization III, Age of Empires 2, To a Mouse (poem by Robert Burns)


Palette used was Endesga-32.

Software used:

  • Godot Engine v4.2.1 Stable;
  • Audacity v2.4.1;
  • Deflemask Legacy v0.12.1, NES module;
  • Aseprite v1.3.2;
  • LabChirp v1.60;
  • Screen To Gif 2.31;
  • Git for windows v2.43;
  • GIMP v2.10.32.

You can check this game's Game Design Document (aka GDD) by clicking here!

StatusReleased
PlatformsWindows, Linux, HTML5
Rating
Rated 4.8 out of 5 stars
(4 total ratings)
AuthorEscada Games
GenreStrategy
Made withAudacity, Godot, Aseprite, GIMP
Tags2D, 4X, Cute, Godot, Isometric, Pixel Art, Singleplayer, Top-Down, Turn-based
Average sessionA few minutes
LanguagesEnglish
InputsMouse

Download

Download NowName your own price

Click download now to get access to the following files:

of-rats-and-humans-linux32.zip 27 MB
Version 7
of-rats-and-humans-linux64.zip 28 MB
Version 7
of-rats-and-humans-w32.zip 31 MB
Version 7
of-rats-and-humans-w64.zip 31 MB
Version 7
Of Rats And Humans GDD
External

Development log

Comments

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(+1)

Awesome little experience.

Love seeing a game about rats, one of the best animals there is.

Really enjoyed the music and 2D rat art!

(+3)

Man i love rats

(+1)

Wow love it! great art!

(+1)

I tried to play and it seemed great it was just too laggy for me, I don't think my computer likes running it very much. Wasn't able to play long enough to get a good feel.

(+1)

Great concept and very impressive. Loved it. Very cute too. I hope you'll expand on it after the jam.

Great fun! The ending was a bit confusing, the two remaining cities were perpetually under construction and I could not attack and completing my rat empire. Very polished experience!

had fun, found the 3 endings. hope you add more to this in the future would like to play it some more

I liked a lot the game the visuals are very beautiful. But I didn't not find any difficulty while playing. Humans basically let me to build without any problems, so I just farmed a lot and then win the game. I doubt that I'm to good at it, so I think it might the game that is easy.

(+1)

Really neat game! Loved the visuals!

one question, how did you do the text? like what font did you use and how did you get different text colors and icons in Godot?


was struggling with having good looking pixel text for my game, so i would love to know a better way to do it :)

(+1)

Also really loved the circular progress bars theyre just so satisfying lol

Awesome, happy to know you enjoyed it!

I hope those answers help you (in case I missed something, feel free to answer this comment):

  • The font I used is one I made myself.
    I have thought about posting it here on itch before, but didn't do it because it was in a very early phase. For instance, close to finishing this game that I noticed it didn't have a "?" character 🙃
    Until then, some really good pixel fonts, in case you don't know, are managore's fonts, like this one.
  • Whenever you see text that has an icon or different text color, it always is a RichTextLabel node with BB Code activated.
    It might seem a bit intimidating at first, and sizing it can be finicky too, but it's really powerful. You can add effects (like shaking letters), change font mid-text, and add icons/change text color as well.
    The docs page for it gotta be one of the doc pages I open the most!
    • Regarding this game in particular, I created a function that looks for certain keywords and add a icon + color to them. So, whenever the word "Food" appears, I add the food icon right before it, and also change its color.
      This helped me immensely! If I had to manually code the text to look like that, I just would not have done it.
  • Finally, when importing a pixel font in Godot 4, IIRC, it can end up looking blurry. This isn't difficult to solve, but I can't remember the exact way to solve it. I think it is what says on this reddit post.

Hope this helps!

(+1)

Thanks so much for the response!

I had heard about BB code before, but it looked scary lol

will def check it out sounds really fun and powerful!

the adding colors and icons for specific keywords is so smart ill definitely keep that in mind for the future.

(+1)

Also now that i think of it, where would i go to make my own font like you said you did?

is there any special tools?

im not very familiar with the ui/control side of game dev ;)

No problem, IMO game dev is basically a lot of not being familiar with something and learning stuff to be more familiar with stuff haha

I can't recommend enough Pixel Overload's tutorial on fonts (jump to around 4:37 if you want to see the tools needed to create the font file): 

Sadly, the process is really boring and time consuming... but having your own font, with your own style and belonging to you is quite cool!
(+1)

Yo thats so cool!

Thanks a lot!

this is really late, but i found this pretty sick web program for making fonts really fast FontStruct | Build, Share, Download Fonts its a bit janky, but wayy way faster than making a ton of individual svgs. it works really well especially for smaller fonts, which is just what i was looking for.

(+1)

Nicely done. How many endings are possible? I found three (encoded for spoilers, go to rot13.com to decode):

ercryyvat nyy uhzna bpphcvrq pvgvrf
trggvat rabhtu fpvrapr be ohyvqvat rabhtu bofreingbevrf

trggvat uhzna bcvavba gb znkvzhz

I tried for a fourth, but I'm not sure it's possible before getting of the above:

trggvat eng cbchyngvba gb fbzr nofheqyl uvtu ahzore

Thanks, glad you liked the game!

Gurer ner guerr raqvatf, lbh'er evtug. V npghnyyl qvq pbafvqre nqqvat n sbhegu raqvat gung jbhyq gevttre jura lbh tbg 1000 engf V guvax, ohg V qvqa'g unir zhpu gvzr gb vzcyrzrag vg. Jub xabjf, znlor n shgher irefvba jvyy unir vg.