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Rat King was a game concept I was conceptualising for quite some time. It would've been inspired by Knuckles' Chaotix, as well as cartoons like Rocko's Modern Life and Ed, Edd, N' Eddy. Over time it got over-ambitious and I had to pull the plug as I was too attached to the ridiculously ambitious ideas to let go.

The game would of starred the members of the Rat Monarchy, the sword-weilding Rat King and bow-and-arrow armed Mouse Queen are planning to abdicate and leave their teenage daughter, the Rat Princess, (can't remember her weapon - might've been land mines?) in charge of the sewer kingdom and raising the Mouse Prince, a babbling baby with a flying machine - however, they're being chased by the psychotic Rat Executioner who was put out of a job after the Rat King banned public extermination early in his reign. You'd choose two of the characters and run across momentum-platforming levels with your tails tied together.

The game would've been presented as if you're controlling a cartoon - the difficulties would be called "original airing" (hard), "chopped for syndication" (normal), and "censored VHS" (easy). The game's HUD would be designed like a screen bug. Between stages there'd be fake adverts for non-existant products as cutscenes. The cutscenes that tied into the game's plot would be fully animated. See where I'm going with this? It'd be ridiculous with an AAA budget, let alone a shoestring indie budget.

The most ridiculous idea I had was licensing out "It's Raining Men" to use as a final boss theme. WHAT WAS I ON? I planned for the rest of the soundtrack to be reggae which only adds to the weirdness of using a song about shirtless studs as a final boss theme.

But I had these stupid ideas in mind for so long after concieving them that I couldn't detach them from RK once I finally figured out they were stupid or impossible, and as such it was virtually impossible to imagine a fake-advert-less Rat King.

There are some ideas from this I do still like in hindsight though:

• I planned to have only two boss battles, both at the end of the game, which I think was a pretty good way of keeping the pace fast.
• Some of the stage ideas I still love - like the dusty house of a lowlife slob, a supermarket, and the British high street, the later two are ideas I'm keeping for my current project.
• Reggae is seriously underused in games and while I don't plan to use it in my current project it's something I will keep in mind for future.
• I'm not opposed to reusing the Rat King characters, though it'd likely be for something different.
• The game-inside-a-cartoon meta concept is definetly worth exploring further.
• I had the concept of the Rat Executioner getting redeemed and if there were to be sequels there'd be background cameos of him going into a music career.
• One concept I loved was having Ren & Stimpy/SpongeBob-esque detailed "gross ups" of your character's bruised face flash on the screen every time you get hit. I'd probably reuse that for my current project if it weren't for the fact its protagonist is a demihuman/merman child, which may cross the line of good taste a little too much.
• Since this was supposed to be a "tiny person game" I wanted the final boss to have you climb up a human rat exterminator, love that concept and while it wouldn't fit my current project it's something I'll 100% try to revisit should I have a go at another "tiny person game".

Deimhoztarizuz. It's a Jewish name.

The idea that being a "contributing member of society" determines your worth is the sort of thing you'd expect a one-dimensional comic book supervillain to say to justify a murder, yet we've been told it so much we don't question it.