Frogatto & Friends

Frogatto sprite

Frogatto & Friends is an action-adventure platformer game, starring a certain quixotic frog.
We're an open-source community project, and welcome contributions!
We also have a very flexible editor and engine you can use to make your own creations.

Translator Quest

September 30th, 2012 by marcavis

So, over the past few weeks, we’ve been edging closer and closer to releasing a new Frogatto version.

There have been plenty of changes since the latest version – some under the hood, but also we’ve been improving the content on several fronts – better balancing, new enemies, new songs, and much more.

So, as Frogatto 1.3 is better than ever (but not as good as 1.4 will be, later on), we’d love to make the game accessible to as many people as possible. There’s only so far we can do that by ourselves, though – translations are key to let us reach a wider audience. Can you help us with that?

If you have a solid grasp of a language to which you’d like to translate Frogatto, check out our page at Transifex, which is where our translations are managed: https://www.transifex.net/projects/p/Frogatto/

There are also some guidelines to the translation process in this forum post, so check it out, too.

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Realtime Images

September 3rd, 2012 by DDR

Recently, we’ve added a brand-new feature to our editor. Images now get reloaded in real-time, while you’re playing the game in the editor.

If you’re an artist and you’ve spotted a tiling bug with some part of the ground, you don’t have to stop playing (and loose your position) to fix up the error. You just edit the source image, save it, and there it is in-game. This is especially useful when creating animations, since you can see the animation as it is played in its natural environment. It’s also quicker – animating with a live preview is much better than animating in a situation where you have to wait for everything to load before you can see the results of your efforts.

This also has implications if you’re prerendering your art. I’ve been working on a little project for the past few months which uses Blender 3D to render the graphics. In the following video, I demonstrate the results of telling Blender to output its rendered images to the game’s graphics folder. (The change is a bit exaggerated, but it’s to make a point.)

Although there is a bit of a delay in rendering, the time cut off having to start up the game to see the results are very nice. This technique also works with spritesheets, although the script to compile the spritesheet has to wait for all the images to be rendered before compiling the final image.

This is all free, open source software. The Blender file, the game, and the Anura engine can be found over on github. If you’d like to get started using our shiny engine, drop us a note on the forums or talk with us via internet relay chat.

An early beta of Cube Trains is available from http://ddr0.github.com/.

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