Rat Race

RatRace started as an office simulation game. You played a middle manager who competed with another middle manager by winning over the workers and getting them to work for you, thereby increasing your overall productivity. After many iterations, it eventually turned into an episodic comedy adventure game with stellar writing and fun minigames. It got picked up by Sony and was slated for release on the PS3 before being canceled while in alpha.

My specific duties were:

  • Wrote various subsystems from scratch including the mini-map, the input system, the camera manager, the wardrobe, the bonus buck system, and various others.
  • Took over the existing AI and pathing systems.
  • Ran the game through SN Tuner and Visual Studio Team Suite's profiler to find and correct performance bottlenecks.
  • Helped write the hardware abstraction layer to switch from PC to Playstation 3.
  • Helped move off of the Renderware engine and onto the Gamebryo engine.
  • Took over the Lua integration.
  • Implemented many of the mini-games and worked closely with the designers to ensure their vision was properly executed.
  • Touched every aspect of the game engine at one time or another.

Sony blog about Rat Race