11/11/2025: Rat Zone Official Blog Debut

We have blog now finally!

After 2-ish years of Rat Zone existence, the time has come for us to put actual effort behind PR. While we have an active Discord server and semi-active Bluesky account where we casually share development updates, we wanted to make use of our website to talk more about what we’re doing. This will cover production on our primary projects, but will also include early details on future projects since we’re insane and like to work on multiple things at once.

As far as cadence goes we’re aiming to do this once a month or two, but that is subject to change based on Life Circumstances (game industry folks if you know you know) and whether we have anything interesting worth showing. We’re all doing this part time, so our ability/free time to work on stuff can be pretty inconsistent.

It’s also worth mentioning that I’m making these posts via extremely jank static html, so the format may also change depending on how tedious it gets over time.

Creature Kitchen Where??

Our original plan was to finish up production by the middle of this year, but we had a bit of a production hiatus while we were in talks with publishers. Ultimately though we’ve decided to stick with self-publishing, so we are now on track to be releasing early 2026.

Those of you in the Seattle area got to see an early demo at the Seattle Indies Expo back in August and we got a lot of good feedback! We’re currently in the midst of polishing that demo and releasing it on Steam before the end of the year, so stay tuned for that…

In the meantime, enjoy this collection of concept art + development screenshots presented in no particular order:

Other things we’re working on…

CHAIRS Multiplayer

Thanks to the networking prowess of our friend @erinn.dev, we have a proof-of-concept for a networked version of Chairs. It’s very much in the early stages, but we intend to take it into production after we release Creature Kitchen. As it turns out, porting the single player mode 1 to 1 is a Bit Jank for Many Reasons, so it’ll take a bit of time to iron out all the design stuff.

Rat Zone Project #4

We had a bit of downtime production-wise during publisher talks for Creature Kitchen, so we’ve spent most of that time spinning up production on our next game. When it comes to making Video Game Experiences we tend to start from the bottom-up by playing around with individual mechanics until we find what sticks so at the moment we don’t have much of a high-level plan. That said, here is a non-exhaustive list of things that are more or less set in stone:

-Big Jump
-Gradient-mapped triplanar shaders
-Fucked up gravity manipulation
-Weird coin
-Baked lighting
-Shameless Chairs assets reuse
-???

We will show various things out of context as production continues...

100 Rats

This blog post is over, now time for rat: