Description

Made for the Pirate Software - Game Jam 16 with the theme of "You are the Weapon."

Plague rats in the media are justifiably presented as more of a force of nature than anything else. The rats themselves are oblivious to what they do, their effect on the human populations is totally unknown to them. 

Despite that, their historic lethality is well documented. As we were trying to come up with an idea, we though of the town in Nosferatu, as a boat full of rats is crashed into its port and a plague begins. We thought it would be an interesting idea to make a game about a swarm of plague rats.

To that end we tried to make a game that captures the ‘force of nature’ element of these kinds of disasters, a sense of uncontrollability  and unruliness, with enough of a sense of deliberateness to clearly distinguish the swarm as a ‘weapon’.

Tutorial

Objectives

1. Monitor plague doctors and position rat dens to avoid poison, and deliver rats to the surface.

2. Plan your route through the sewers and stay alive long enough to advance all the way across the map.

Controls

Use standard rts controls to select the 'Rat Dens'.
Left click to select, and right click to move.

The moles are controlled in a similar way - right click to select, and left click and drag to lay out a move order.

Disclaimer

When we were putting together our team we ended up with 6 people interested.

We decided it’d be more fun to have the full team, and went ahead with everyone. We recognize that this was called out in the rules - so we want to voluntarily disqualify ourselves from the competition.

We also ran into some last minute issues with the mole code - we're hoping to patch it in the judgement period, but it was not working at deadline. At present the game can still be beaten by keeping your rat dens safe for the duration of the game.

Any feedback is still greatly appreciated - and thanks for playing