The Big Sound Update

Wow, it has been a crazy week! Just to recap we uploaded a Linux version of our build, and got an amazing response/a ton of feedback. One of the most frequent critiques was sound. Our demo has really only ever had placeholder sounds. Combine this with the issue of misconfiguring our sound settings, people were rightfully put off by the lack of sound design.

To remedy this issue I spent hours this week listening to different explosion sounds on Sound Snap. After finding some useful fire/flame sound effects I then turned my attention to finding ambient noise. We found a great track that has a lot of ominous noises of pipes and ventilation systems running. As I was listening to soundtracks over and over again I figured we may as well find at least one music track to include in the demo. Instead of finding one, we found ten we liked. With each one being pretty pricey for an indie budget we decided to spend some more time going over each of them before picking one for the demo.

While we were adding new sounds we also worked on cleaning up some code internally with our obstacle loading system. Previously, every time we built the game someone would have to manually move over our folder of obs otherwise none would be included in the release. Our old system was perfect for allowing user-created maps and such in the future, but a pain point for sending out releases. So we decided to add another system for loading our game files, while also preserving the old way for map sharing. This Unity system is called Streaming Assets. Here we are able to worry-free make sure our ob json files are included in every build without any additional steps.

We also added 6 new obs created by our level designer Hisako. These currently take a while to add because back when we first hired our level designer we did not have an internal level builder so we relied on a program called BoundMaker. For those who aren't aware our game Rat Race is based heavily on the Bounds map genre from Starcraft Broodwar Use Map Settings maps. The tool BoundMake spits out data that designers can use in a starcraft map editor for creating a bound map. It also saves xml files which we convert to our own json format. Because of the variability of the BoundMaker's output, we had to implement a quick and dirty level editor that currently only works in the Unity Editor, in order to clean these json files up. Going forward we plan on cleaning up our Ob Editor to be used more heavily internally and eventually by players when we go Early Access.

Finally, the other big feature we released for testing this week was giving rats names! Now instead of watching nameless rats perish in this crazy obstacle course, you can learn their name and grow attached to them. The system was surprisingly easy for our lead programmer Jacob to implement. Pull a name from a list of over 300 names and add a 3 digit numerical id to it. Going forward we plan on revealing all the stats we collect about each rat at the end of the game. That way you can remember all the brave rats that perished on the path to victory.

There were a couple of quick fixes we added regarding the win state of the game, and some cleanup with the way we deactivate the previous obstacle. I also made sure to distribute this week's Linux build as a tar instead of a zip which was messing with users being able to run the game on Linux.

 Please stay tuned for more updates as we get closer to releasing a full game on early access. Also, feel free to join our discord and chat with the developers about the game.

--Andrew