Behind Stars and Under Hills

This is the picture blog for Rat King's next game, a dungeon adventure with detective elements and animal people. We post screenshots, drawings, videos, GIFs and everything else visual here!

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The prototype for Behind Stars and Under Hills was co-funded by the Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung.

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Simple, but effective - shoveling away loose earth uncovers dark secrets

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The Dark Places once more, but this time we took our torches with us - and found a treasure

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We want to have “Dark Places” in the game - zones that are especially saturnine. Don’t forget your torch when you see one!

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This video demonstrates how the dialog system got a nicer UI. There is still some room for improvement, of course

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Some work has been done on the effect for some kind of detective mode. That mode lets you see hidden things like “ghost scenes” and hints/clues on the wall. The shader for the ghosts have yet to be improved, but the post effect is now pretty much how we’d want it to be

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Some more assets for the temple setting - things like statues, dirt heaps, plants, a chest, banners

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Experimenting with chests and their contents. Objects too large or too numerous are a bit of problem right now...

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Just a test with removing blocks. In the final game there will be a special destroyable material blocks can be made of. This won’t become a Minecraft clone ;)

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Added a tool to the editor that specifically allows us to create joists, bars and beams; they’re automatically unwrapped and use the textures of the ‘voxels’

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Current state of the mood and atmosphere in the game

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Some more ingame style tests, experimenting with colors and post effects

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Visualization of light ranges and colors, and sound source radius inside the editor (only for selected lights/sounds)

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To showcase the game in Poznan to people not speaking/reading English that well, we prepared a simpler demo by changing the temple level to a single quest level.

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Impressions from our booth at the Gamescom 2017. Big thanks to our helpers Björn, Ludi, Max and Jacky! And of course a shout-out to the team of the Indie Arena Booth! It was great!

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We finally replaced the ugly looking white spheres with tick-like animals. They just stand there and glow a bit.

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We’re sorry for the lack of updates, currently, but preparing a prototype demo for the upcoming Gamescom is stressful. (Not to mention the Gamescom itself.)

In the demo there is one side quest, where the goal is to lure little mousechickens away from a moss cave. You can just lead them to another place to frolick, or even drown them in water. So it’s possible to throw things, and having little AI agents follow them.

Overall this is the beginning of some more gameplay mechanics, hopefully.