Ratmania - The Game
Mankind at its' border of annihilation under the phantom menace of the rising Rattus Interstellarus Empire. Will you be able to escape the evil claws of Dr. Nikolai Krawjaczek, return to the Dominion and initiate the final stand to destroy the last remaining humans in advance to a new rat world order?
... find it out by yourself and try your luck playing Ratmania!
More Information
Ratmania is a 3D Platform computer game with emphasis on strong puzzle and Jump'N'Run elements, designed by Michael Heiml. The game was produced in the years from May, 2005 until December, 2007 by the Blacksheep Software development team. Visit the official homepage www.ratmania.at.tf to download your free copy of the game (~120 megabyte).In addition, many of the games' assets like the soundtrack, videos, comicstrips, making-of's, screenshots and solutions are ready for you to view and download there.
Background
Ratmania is the practical part of Michael Heimls' diploma thesis Ludo, ergo sum, which is about the creation of immersion in virtual worlds, with a special focus on computer and console games. The game and the thesis serve the purpose of a first effort on Game Design and Game Development by Michael Heiml in order to advance into the Game Industries business in near future after graduation.
Technical Information
Ratmanias' development was broken up into three divisions responsible for game-, video- and computer graphics (cg) development. Each division had its own schedule, implementation guidelines and tools for the creative work, in order to pull the parts together later in the overall development process. The creation of the games' assets like videos, textures, comics, animations and so forth were finished around January, 2007, while the development of the game itself, including programming, level design, tool chain and performance optimizations, beta testing, quality management, licensing and distribution considerations went on until October, 2007. The main tools used for the entire creation process were Virtools, Visual Studio .NET, DirectX SDK, Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Logic, Maya, Dreamweaver and Flash, along with smaller tools for more specialized tasks like animating, texture generation, keying, compression and compiling.
Other Info
Ratmania was a great success on release. Many newspapers and game websites published an article about it (like derStandard, Salzburger Nachrichten, FM4, PC Action, PC Games, gamestar ...). Festivals are pending. Not counting the games magazines, the game was yet downloaded several thousand times with about 50 downloads a day.
People
About 50 people worked on the game, many of them FH / MMA students, as well as externals. For a complete list, visit the official website www.ratmania.at.tf
Gallery
