[Post #5] Rat Pie - Post Mortem

• Rat Pie - Post Mortem

  by Weston Campbell

  
  

  Group: 11 (The Rat Pack)

  
  

  Game Summary

  Rat Pie is a game about running rats through several routes in order to bring back food. The challenge is to make it through the route without being spotted by the head chef, and bring back more food than your opponent. The player with the most food at the end of ten rounds wins the game!

  
  

  Target Audience

  • Player Types: Competitors, Jokers, and Achievers

  • Player Interaction Pattern: Player vs Player

  • Age Range: 18-30 (College Students)

  • Appeal

  • Playing anthropomorphized rats as they scramble for food in a kitchen encompasses a lot of elements that many generations enjoy. Playing as animals is almost always a crowd favorite, and food is heavily ingrained in our culture’s values. There is a bit of strategy involved as you must make the choice of which rat to use, which route to run, and whether you want to move the rat this turn, or attempt to sabotage your opponent. 

  
  

  Obstacles Encountered in the Design

  
  
  Our game was originally meant to be a stealth, baking game for college students, which turned out to be trickier than we had first imagined. The first major challenge was keeping everything to individual player boards, as opposed to having a shared game board. In the end, we still felt that players would need to synchronize their player boards in order to simulate a shared space. Then came the issue of stealth. Stealth with player boards was very unusual, and it was very difficult to find any other games employing that kind of stealth that was also a fun mechanic. Our final result was just a gambling mechanic reflecting the likelihood of a rat getting caught by the head chef. We also included an awareness system which was supposed to go up whenever a player attempted a sabotage, however our playtesters never used our sabotage mechanic, and it felt like they didn’t think it was worth it. 
  
  

  One of the other surprising effects of developing a game in this environment was how few people made an effort to play our game. We suspect that it was a combination of the rules not quite being simple enough, and there not being enough visuals to help reinforce said rules. While I would much prefer to hammer down the mechanics before getting too into the visuals, it seems like next time we need to get those graphics out sooner to attach more playtesters.

  
  

  Task Completion

  My team was very on top of it. We met regularly, at least three times a week to work on the game, and each of us worked on an equal share of the work. I was fortunate enough to be paired with two talent artists who made the graphical design work look easy. Given the amount of time we had to work on the project, and many of the limitations thanks to the COVID-19 virus, we were only able to go so far with this project, but I think we all did a great job outputting the work that needed to be done every week. 

  
  

  My Role in the Group

  I ended up becoming the team leader merely because I was a little more organized. I would post Google Doc links up plenty of time before we needed to get started on the next task, and I would help nail down our next meetup season. I really didn’t mind the role, and I hope I made a good impression on them. 

  
  

  Future Projects

  Going forward it is clear that we need to heavily appeal to our playtesters if we want to get any valuable feedback. This means more visuals, less words, and quicker play times. I think that the next game I work on I would like to see how far one can get without words, and whether we can capture a number of time-tested mechanics that can be employed quickly and easily. I would essentially like to make a spring-loaded game that takes almost nothing to set up, and looks simple enough to start playing even if the players haven’t read all the rules yet. 

Final Rule Sheet: Rat Pie Final Version