Idle Lab Rats
developed by  cdsa142 gamedev | rated 4.3 stars, 51 ratings |
51 ratings
Posted June 16, 2024. Updated June 29, 2024. Played 2561 times for a total of 2591 hours.
description
Story
Hey there, I sent you one of those rats I was telling you about. Make some room in your garage and set up a maze for them to run. They learn so fast, especially with a little boost. The best part is all these testing labs that will buy skilled rats for their experiments. I bet you could turn that cash into some better equipment and even find more premium rats to buy and train up.
I’m telling you, some of these rats could be faster and smarter than any human if they were pushed to their full potential. Just remember, don’t get attached. These rats are nothing more than tools. If you want the best rats, you’ll need to do whatever you have to.
We hear you. The rattling of your cages echoes in our hearts. We will find you. We will make them pay.
Buy and Train rats
Rats may all start slow and witless, but they all have a wide range of undiscovered potential. Train the rats in mazes of increasing difficulty to push them to their limits. Use what you learn from the rat’s training to improve their proficiency.
Fulfill Grants and buy lab tools
Once a rat has improved enough, submit them for grant money. Use the money to buy new rats but also to acquire new lab tools. Fill your lab with the equipment that will serve your playstyle:
-Get more mazes an train many rats at once
-Improve your rat’s proficiency with specialized chemical regimens
-Use other training tools like running wheels to passively train your rats
-Experiment with new maze styles
newest comments
They added ×2 letters and numbers to galaxy? I DIDN'T BELIEVE THIS!!!
its good but I tried it on Chromebook and the size is messed up
I personally think the scry should force the rat to follow the path if it finds the cheese, and maybe even mark single dead ends.
developer response: yeah, it's a bug that will be fixed in the next update
Personally I do feel like the "bad path marking depth" should reason from the closest end-tile rather than furthest, in the case of converging paths.
developer response: I think this could easily lead to massive dead end chains, at least up to the max dead ends limit.
I hope there'll be another update soon.
Maybe something like higher tier rats not starting from 1 on stats. Or free rats' max stats being raised so you can always complete a grant. Or a repeatable grant that gives lower than average money but can always be completed with a free rat.
Or maybe rebalance stat growth just a little. Stamina usually falls behind agility and intelligence in growth (when the upgrades are equal).
developer response: Update is in progress. The plan for getting stuck with difficult grants is to increase the sell value of a rat based on stats gained rather than just half of buy cost. This is effectively a cheap repeatable grant except it doesn't award grant level progress.
Also the math for stats is going to change pretty drastically. In the live version, stats have an exponent on the actions that award xp, which makes a rat that does a bad job at solving a maze and wastes time rack up increasing amounts of xp. This is being replaced with a multiplier based on maze size and flat gain during the maze solve. This awards fast and slow maze solves the same amount per time.
top comments
Finally figured it out. The carpenter bench in the lab needs to be adjacent to the maze(s) in question for you to be able to switch to different maze styles. My bench is now adjacent to 2 of my 3 mazes, and I can finally switch to other maze types for those two.
This... should probably be made clearer or the adjacency requirement should be removed entirely.
Hi all,
Thank you to everyone for giving this game a try. There’s definitely more work to be done, including bugged abilities, UI/UX, better descriptions and some balancing. I’m hoping to have the next release done in a few months with a good amount of new features. I was originally planning on wiping progress with the next release, but after seeing the enthusiasm players have shown, I’ll probably have to reconsider this.
Thanks again for the feedback,
-Alex
I feel like the scry ball ability might not work as intended? I've repeatedly had a rat go down dead-end paths that were scouted by the scry ball, or completely ignore the arrows pointing towards the cheese when the scry ball found it. Right now I'm rating it at the bottom of all abilities I've encountered.
The chemistry upgrades get prohibitively expensive quite quickly, meanwhile there's no major rise in research gain so it just comes down to throwing time and rats at the cost.
Training equipment seems of very limited use right now, especially seeing as the rats' proficiency does not factor into it at all so higher levels are impossible to gain with training equipment. It gives some easy early levels, but that's about it. If you sell the training equipment you can have a 4th rat instead.
This game has tons of potential. It's already fun in its current state, but has a lot of places it could (should) grow in. In its current state, not only do I not see much reason to purchase more than one of each rat training facility, but you just don't have the space in your garage to do so. A good alternative maybe would be to allow us to upgrade those things so they level up a rats stats faster. Another good example of this is the chemistry set or the carpenter bench. Why would you ever want two chemistry sets when all it does is unlock research and takes up 4 squares of space?
Secondly, some of the level-up perks your later rats can unlock are just super useless at best, and detrimental at worst. For instance - spin top is basically completely useless. It doesn't appear to make your rat go much faster and just seems to be goofy, but it doesn't really appear to make them any slower either. In stark juxtaposition, drift king is extremely useful. Scrying orb is VERY detrimental in its current state. Maybe it's bugged? It seems like when it reveals a bad path that dead-ends, my rat will follow it anyway, and even when it scries the correct path to the cheese, my rat will also completely ignore that and wander around as usual. The worst part about it though is a combination of 2 things - firstly, it pauses your rat every time it scries, which slows things down quite a bit, and as Trondor mentioned in another comment, if you have a rat with 2 INT perks and they are scrying orb/blink, your rat will just freeze when it blinks and scries simultaneously. Other perks in the game all seem to be in a good state, even though some are definitely stronger than others.
This is definitely a fun experience right now though, so don't give up on the project. I could very much see this being a game that ends up being an indie release on steam or something with some more depth and love given to it.
the window size only worked once i went on the original site