Rat Jail
Forty rats. One exit. They learn.
Forty rats with tiny brains are locked in a prison. Every round, the ones that got furthest have babies, so each generation gets a little better at breaking out. Nobody shows them the way. You can help, or you can release the cat.
Play it here
For a desktop browser; it downloads about 8 MB the first time. Tap the commands in the sidebar, or use the keys: C cheese, K cat, F flood, L lockdown, A adopt, 1 to 4 for speed. Your rats are kept in your browser, so they carry on learning next time. , or open it in its own tab.
Watch it live
While I work on the games, Rat Jail often runs live on YouTube. In the stream’s chat, these commands reach the prison:
- !cheese
- Drops cheese somewhere in the maze. Rats that eat it score a little, so it pulls them off the escape route.
- !cat
- Releases a cat that hunts the nearest rat for fifteen seconds.
- !flood
- Floods the prison. Every rat wades at a third of its speed.
- !lockdown
- Seals every barred door for eight seconds.
- !adopt
- Gives you a rat with your name on it. If it is good, it survives into the next generations.
What you are watching
Each rat sees the world through seven whiskers, smells fresh air coming from the exit, and can tell where the nearest cheese and the nearest cat are. A small neural network turns that into steering and speed.
A round lasts thirty seconds. Then the rats are scored on how far they got, and the best five carry on unchanged. The rest of the next generation are their children: mixed from two parents, with small random changes. A rat’s jumpsuit colour follows its family line.
When half of them escape three rounds running, they have mastered that prison and are moved, brains and all, to a harder one: the yard, the sewers, then maximum security.
When nobody is playing, the Warden keeps things moving with random events: cheese rain, a cat patrol, a burst pipe, a lockdown.
How it was made
The rats’ brains are small neural networks that learn by evolution, live, while it runs: nothing is trained in advance. Everything on screen is drawn by the game’s own code; there are no generated images. The music and sound effects were generated with ElevenLabs from the developer’s prompts, then chosen, cut and mixed. The code was written by the developer with an AI coding assistant. The idea and the direction are the developer’s. Nothing is generated while you play.
Rat Jail is a Lab experiment from Wickhouse Games Studio, made by one developer between the real games. See the games.