‘Rat King’ was my final game for Push Gaming, and easily my favourite project to work on.

As an original 16 bit gamer, I’d been itching to work on a pixel art title, so when the opportunity came up to pitch an idea, I grabbed my chance to put this forward.

This game actually went through several iterations, the first, ‘Snake n Bake’, being based on classic Nokia game, ‘Snake’, with the titular creature chasing the rat and building multipliers.

I experimented with several art styles for this before settling on pixel art, initially leaning towards a classic rubber hose animation (check out the sketches in the gallery below for some very early experiments) but, after following hot on the heels of Generous Jack, we decided to go for something the studio hadn’t tried before - and I jumped head first into 1:1 pixel sprite work, with the immensely talented Lisa Liu tackling frame by frame animation.

Ultimately the snake mechanic was dropped due to technical difficulties, and the game was adapted into a scatter pays mechanic, undergoing some further visual adjustments in the time between my departure from Push and its eventual release, but it still maintained it's retro video game heart, even if it wasn’t as truly faithful to early 90s videogame art as I would have liked.

Take it for a spin here.

My contributions to the project included;

• Initial game pitch

• Art direction development

• Principal artist, creating core art assets, supported by a UI artist, and preparing them for animation

• Direction of animation

Art