We’ve been hard at work since E3 finished and now we thought it was time to start sharing some of that progress. New art has been completed to help fill out the world but mostly went through an optimization phase. In a game world like in R.A.T.S. assets can quickly become high in polygon counts and we often have to tune these assets back as much as possible without sacrificing quality. This becomes a constant practice as we go along in development.
R.A.T.S. Army Rat
The characters probably went through the most overhaul in terms of optimization. During E3 our demonstration was about RATS versus RATS in a team versus game style to put the players at the shadow directly into combat action. We had planned it this way. We didn’t want to potentially confuse anyone or cause a game-play scenario that would take a few minutes to grasp so we threw everyone into a five minute limited team death-match.
Although that is a likely scenario, since such a game-play mode will be available, we had to continue with our other planned enemies and combat scenarios. During testing we had a large swarm of ANTS to battle against. With their large numbers, it was exciting, but our frame-rates suffered due to their original higher polygon creation. They were optimized and given a full texture and material overhaul. This sparked the idea of creating a more complex material setup to provide several visual varieties for each ANT. This same idea was then inherited over to the SPIDER as well.
R.A.T.S. Ant
Take a look at our updated gallery to view more screen-shots of these enemies, items, environments and more. Shortly we will be uploading our second promotional video for R.A.T.S. which soon ends the Alpha phase for R.A.T.S. and goes into Beta.