Kingdom of Rats Concept Art

Sometime around 2017-2018 I began working on a prototype for a retro first person shooter. Something that we would call a boomer shooter today but I dont think that term existed back then. I felt a strong nostalgia for games like Quake and Painkiller that featured fast but simple gameplay in uncluttered levels. When Threaks was wrapping up their current project I wanted to slip in and pitch them this game as their follow up project. A previous project utilized a cool internally developed shader based vertex animations system that read its keyframe offsets from a texture, with the goal of putting lots of cheap animated creatures on screen. I felt that feature hadnt really enjoyed its place in the sun yet so tried to incorporate it into the pitch somehow. I think it was at this point that I remembered the Dishonored announcement trailer that shows the player commanding an army of rats to attack and eat their enemies. I was super excited for that feature form the pre-rendered trailer and was ultimately disappointed how few rats were featured in-game. I ended up loving Dishonored 1 and 2 regardless but for completely different reasons. Maybe I can live up to the promise of that trailer with this game I thought.
There was supposed to be a strong anti capitalist vibe throughout the game. We jokingly referred to it as a later "Late-Stage-Capitalism-Shooter" set in a world destroyed by the financial exploitation of nature. Only the super rich are left alive thanks to their Walled-Gardens, Panic-Rooms, Super-Yachts and Fallout-Shelters. It was important to me that the enemies are real life monsters and not some cute animals that are only minding their own business that you farm for XP. I was keen on self financing this title with the earnings of the current project or entirely out of our own pockets. Threaks however were crystal clear that we can only make this if we get outside funding. I had already spend about 2 or 3 months on concept art and making art assets for a prototype and for 5 weeks every Friday (on my day off) I would come into the office and I would get the support of one coder: Henning Steinbock to work on this prototype before we would take the prototype to GDC. Way to tight a schedule for my liking. What we ended up pitching was a prototype that I couldnt even describe as 50% finished. Asking the big boys for money to make a game that is all about killing rich people also felt like cynical-contradiction and total hypocrisy to me. A game like this should only be made under truly "independent" circumstances or it would loose all its teeth and legitimacy. No funding came through which I was equal parts disappointed but also relived over. I just thought I would continue working on this in my spare time. But what ultimately took the wind out of my sails was the announcement of "A plague tale: Innocence" a game that also focuses on large swarms of rats as their hook and their tech was much further along than ours. The game shipped shortly after and to my disappointment was really excellent! At this point the retro shooter niche was also getting filled with excellent throwback titles like Dusk, Ion-Maiden and Prodeus. I had been beaten to the punch by absolutely everyone so I decided to shelve the project.
There is some stuff here that I am super proud off that I think is worth showing off:
I had defined this visual language: Everything static/none interactive gets low-res point sampled textures and everything interactive gets high-res filtered textures. Everything with the opaque shader (fully atlas mapped) has collision and everything that is alpha masked does not(also fully atlas mapped). It was important to me to have level geo that is as simple as quake with nothing to get stuck on anywhere so I build up everything with Large blocky opaque geo and disguised all the edges and its low-poly-ness with alpha masked floaters. All Particles use the same shader/atlas map and automatically get batched to 1 drawcall.