This article originally ran in Back Alley Games Issue 17, July 2025

Future dystopia has never before been so full of rats.

In Rats Rats Rats, the second runner-up in the Audience Choice category at this year’s AllStars, you’re a rat. Don’t feel bad, though, everyone else is also a rat.

Programmers Avery Chang and Des Mora have created a world that delights and offends city-dwellers in equal measure, filled with toxic waste, Chicago’s ubiquitous “TARGET: RATS” signs, and rad-as-hell guitar music.

The premise is simple: Climb to the top of trash mountain as fast as possible, please the Rat Overlords, and be crowned the new Rat King.

Chang recruited Mora and then pitched their idea to friends and community members for feedback.

The partnership between the developers was borne of Chang’s desire to add games to their résumé as well as to work with more people and learn from their processes. For Mora’s part, he was trying to help a friend out and meet more people.

Chang is a student studying New Media Arts, which they describe as the cross section of art and technology. Going forward, they hope to continue developing their skills in Unity and Blender as well as to expand to other tools used widely in the games industry.

For this project, Chang focused on 3-D assets and environmental design, creating the rats, the trash mountain, and most of the other visual aspects of Rats Rats Rats.

“Within two weeks, I was able to implement more than six visual scripts that created various power-ups and obstacles,” they said.

Those power-ups include a green glowing can that permanently increases the player’s walk speed while also turning the game screen blue and both music and graphical elements that speed up as the player gets closer to the end zone.

Each of these elements came with their own specific bugs and challenges, but Chang said that working with Mora, who codes professionally, they were able to get the game to a working state fairly quickly.

“I feel super thankful to work with Des,” Chang said. “His ability to learn on the spot within two weeks and create a fully functional leaderboard allowed me to focus on the gameplay and environmental design.”

Mora agreed, saying the pair hit the ground running, but that the leaderboard presented the most challenges during the development process.

“I had never made a game in Unity before,” Mora said. “Coding in such a way where it [the code] needed to be attached to a physical game object takes some time to get used to.”

While developing, Chang also said they never stopped thinking about functionality and how exciting the final gameplay loop would be. The exact placement of obstacles, their collision, and how much the environment led players to the goal were all factors.

“I spent a lot of time creating simple assets that could be repeated and also altering cc0 assets to create the feel of a toxic waste trash mountain landscape that beckoned the player uphill,” Chang said.

The environment sure does beckon, due in part to Mora’s music. Because of his experience playing in two bands, Chang asked him to take the lead in that area, encouraging him to be as creative as he wanted.

The result is high-energy music that increases in pitch and tempo as the player’s rat gets closer to the end zone. Coupled with Chang’s 3-D rat model that spins in time with the music, the overall player experience is one of ridiculously fast race in a dizzying, almost-senseless environment.

So, knowing all that, will you be the next Rat King?

Play Rats Rats Rats here: https://grocerybiome.itch.io/rats-rats-rats