Rise of the Rat King - Prototype
Below, among the ship rats of the western docks, a rat rises.
One who dares to dream of a rat kingdom.
Safe passage Above must be secured. The rats Below must be united.
Then the assault begins.
Survive
Feed your people so that their bodies may be strong and their minds sharp when you pit them against those Above.
Expand
Expand your influence Below, assimilating communities and removing leaders that stand in your way.
Conquer
Once you've found your way Above, create fear in the populace to take advantage of opportunities for sabotage and death.
---
Created by Jaco van Hemert
with SFX from pixabay.com
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
I'll agree to the pause issue. I actually had a weird noise that I normally would have loved to go check out (just my cat being a gremlin) but I was like "welp, no pause. I guess?". So that wasn't great from a QoL standpoint, as well as the rushed feeling.
As for death, I didn't have a single death all run and my rat king mission was at negative chance of death. I don't know if you always get Blossom. But if you do, making sure to bring them on every single mission to abuse the double levelup gains was pretty key. It ended the game with 70+ in every single attribute for me.
The only thing that was kind of meh from a balancing perspective, was that right around when you unlock the surface you end up with a massive supplies drought. So I had to just grind out the hunting mission like 8 times in a row to stabilize, which also just made my Iron+Aura rats obscenely overleveled and the rest of the game became trivial to the point I'd do most mission 1 rat down after that. So I think that mission is too strong. But the supplies shortage that current makes that mission required is probably the root cause, and what needs to be looked at. Because as long as that mission is in the game. You can kind of just power level past the power curve of your missions at will.
I guess the alternate approach would be to nerf the current influence income. Since I felt like it is a 'non-resource' currently. I always had so much of it that the actual number was meaningless. It was effectively an infinite resource. If it was more sparse. You'd need to actually decide when to use it. That being said, I would have just game-overed if I didn't spam Hunting at least 2-3 times. So not like that would fix the underlying issue there. But Influence being too freely given is still an issue of its own. I suppose.
Nice base game. Just a couple of comments:
One, I feel we need the ability to be able to pause on demand or slow down the game. The fact the pause is only enabled with certain actions makes tou feel like you are always in a rush and doesn't allow you to properlu enjoy the underlying narrative.
Two, The balance of death seems a bit off. Not so much because of the numbers, as you can reduce it a lot most of the time. But because of the fact that you just get specific agents at predetermined points.
This means that a bad roll can often kill your entire game. Swiftly if you are very unlucky (I once lost 3 in a mission with 12 risk of death whihch meant I couldnt do many of the remaining missions), but even if it's just 1, if it's a high aura it can make it so you are forced to take higher risks from then on and it just spirals.
This gt compounded because you have that rat pit ambush that even with your best agents the best you can achieve is around 40% death. So its very likely you miss 1-2 agents, which as that point derails your game because you have 4 and yu are going to have skills gaps.
I feel like you would need a more dynamic way to recruit new agents (even if you have some story based ones) to be able to recover from potential deaths, even if it makes the game harder.
Thanks for playing!
Agreed on the pausing. I think having a way to slow down and take stock would be a nice addition.
And good points on the death balancing. I'll give it a think and figure out a way to make deaths less game-ending than it is right now.
absolutely brilliant and addictive
Really really really like the game, has some amazing potential
Time feels a little rushed, would like to be able to slow things down a pinch and read through missions
UI feels quite 'on top of each other'
Didn't make it all the way through the game (definitely going back to finish it) but some sort of training task would be nice - by the time you have enough rats to train most missions had too high a risk of death to chance them
Hope you continue developing the game, love it already, well done and good luck
I'm glad you enjoyed it!
And I hear you on the "rushed" feeling. I'll probably do an update later this week with a pause option like the commenter above suggests. That way, you can pause and catch your breath, read missions, etc., and continue when you're ready.
There's an issue with pausing in other similar games in that it just kind of invalidates most of the challenge or rush and there's no benefit to playing at real time, just hurting yourself for no reason by doing so
For that sake I'd just prefer slowing down if possible, 2/3 speed or even 1/2 - maybe even for a limited time so that it's not too strong in a balance sense
Also understand that yes death is a crippling factor in the game right now, but.. nobody forces you to take on those missions, they can be left for later, train up etc - that particular mission, fighting pit rats, I had about a 4% death chance, not 40%
All in all, just saying that not everything anyone requests is good or the best course of action