Remembering Lab Rats 1

This Sunday (Nov 26th) Lab Rats v1.0 will be released to the general public and mark the official end of it's full time development on the game. About this time also marks the one year anniversary of development for Lab Rats, so I wanted to take a look back at how the game changed over time and went from idea to completion.

I got the idea to make Lab Rats about a year ago - I don't have any records of the exact day unfortunately - when I was looking through some of the various adult games that were currently available online, in particular on Legend of Krystal. I've always been a fan of video games as a medium for porn, but it just struck me that night how much absolutely terrible stuff there was floating around. Games would be started and never finished, development teams would set up a Patreon page to collect a few bucks then disappear without a word, and nobody seemed to pay any attention to the actual game design of their games! The average game was so bad I figured I could do better.

All this happened to come at a time when I had about a week of free time with almost no obligations. I tossed the idea around in my head a little, then committed to making something and sharing with everyone.  I scribbled a basic plot and game design on a notepad and set to work that very night. I was a relatively experienced programmer, mainly with Java and C based languages, but had never done much more than write a Hello World script in python and hadn't touched Ren'py at all. The next few days I taught myself the basics I needed to start writing the script, wrote a few scenes, and got the first few image sets into the game. The project was so interesting to work on that I ended up spending 12 hour days on it sometimes. In the first week I wrote 20,000 words of dialogue as well as building the coding framework for the game.

v0.1 of Lab Rats was a very early build, with no ending or way to access half of the content that had been written, and missing image sets for a lot of the scenes as well. I posted it publicly so people could try it out and give feedback, and put up my Patreon page so that people could throw me a couple of dollars if they liked it. At the time I figured that's all it would ever be, a hobby that covered the beer and pizza cost of development.

As time went on it was clear that there was more interest in my work than I had expected. The next version of Lab Rats had 40,000 words of content, and a more complete set of art. The resistance system that we have today was put in, so that old events could be done multiple times without encouraging you to just grind the same one over and over again. New menu art was added and more scenes bumped the word count up even higher. It reached 100,000, then 200,000. Once endings were added to the game, both singular and harem, Lab Rats 1 began to feel like a complete game. There were still empty parts, but you could play through the entire thing and get a mostly-complete experience.

That brings us to more recent development. We've pushed over 300,00 words of dialogue, more than 1000 individual images, a pile of different endings and hundreds of different scene levels and variations. The training systems let players push their games in a direction they like, while avoiding content they don't. It's been hard work, and I've drank a lot of tea staying up late to get some of this stuff done, but I can honestly say that I'm proud of the work I've put into Lab Rats, and I'm proud to be able to say I saw it to the end.

v1.0 won't be the end of Lab Rats 1. I have plans to keep development going for a while longer, both to add a little new content and to knock down any bugs if (when) they show up. It does mean the start of a new chapter though; with Lab Rats 2 we will be returning to the early days of development when everything is new and fresh, when the whole game is filled with potential (and not much else!). I'm excited to get down to it, and glad I have the support of all my amazing patrons! Without all of you, I wouldn't be able to devote as much time as I do to this work.

Thank you for your continued support, I'll keep doing what I'm doing,

- Vren