rat_race is a dread-soaked interactive simulation of modern employment. You have a job. Your goal is to save enough money to purchase a house. By design, this is impossible to achieve. But what other choice do you have?
Genre: Horror Arcade Simulator
Role: Game Designer, Narrative Designer, Sound Designer, 2D Art Assistant, Playtester
Team Size: 2 people
Platform: PC (Itch)
Tools: Unity, Google Docs, Photoshop
My Contributions:
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Designed and documented the core gameplay loop, including minigames, money scaling systems, and "win" condition, for the game jam mechanic of "Capitalism".
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Wrote flavor text to provide context for the player's actions and add to the grim, hopeless tone of the game.
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Collaborated with programmer to ensure key systems were completed on time.
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Created simple 2D graphics to fit with the game jam's 1-bit visual aesthetic, and to supplement the game's intentionally minimalistic aesthetic.
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Composed music and sound effects, and assisted with playtesting and publishing.
"Win" Condition
Problem:
Our game needed to follow the jam's theme of "Capitalism" in its design and aesthetics. I brainstormed a number of ideas, but they all felt the same: game genre but with more money involved. I wanted to make something that would stand out, and would give players something to think about after finishing.
Solution:
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I was inspired by the art piece Minimum Wage Machine, a crank-powered box of pennies that dispenses them at a rate of $7.25 an hour. I designed the game to have a similar focus on drudgery and mindless work.
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My ultimate design became a simulation of the experience of living in capitalism at the lower-ends of the rung. Inspired by my own job history, I designed the game to be intentionally boring, but still require constant non-automatic input from the player, just like an actual job.
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Finally, I based the win condition of the game, to save up enough money for a house, on actual modern economics. The end result was that no matter how much the player worked, they would never even get close to saving enough and "winning" the game.
Lessons:
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The final product was exactly as I envisioned it: a satirical simulation of the pointlessness of modern labor, like chasing a carrot on a stick.
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Players connected with the bleak tone and atmosphere but didn't find the game particularly fun to play, which is exactly what I intended.
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The bleak tone wound up working in our favor for the art direction. Since I didn't want the game to be visually entertaining, I used simple shapes and bland text for the minigame assets. This greatly reduced the amount of time spent on art and allowed our team to prioritize coding and playtesting.
My original design for the game's UI.
The UI design of the final product.
Flavor Text
Problem:
After designing the gameplay loop, I needed a way to provide further context to the player's actions and emotionally connect them to the gameplay.
Solution:
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I wrote over 50 lines of flavor text describing the day-to-day miseries of low-income labor, to immerse the player in the madness of doing the same thing day after day without any tangible progression.
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I also included real-life statistics about wage inequality and housing shortages to make it clear to the player that these problems are not hypothetical.
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Finally, I designed a UI system that would show one line of flavor text per minigame (one in-game "week" of employment), without distracting from the minigames and other important information.
Lessons:
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The narrative design was well-recieved, and fit perfectly with the game's tone. Players found the writing both relatable and informative.
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The length of the game jam meant I could only write so many lines of flavor text, and as a result the dialogue repeated quite a bit. While I would have liked to include more content, the repetition wound up working with the game's themes of drudgery.​
My flavor text for rat_race, including the citations for my collected statistics.