We’ve updated our most recent post with new mac and windows builds that fix a major bug that cropped up. If you started playing on challenging, the bug would end up changing the difficulty back down to casual, when you died and respawned. Since having another difficulty level is a cornerstone of this release, if you’d already downloaded the previous one and feel like challenging doesn’t change anything, you probably want to download again.

This is especially embarrassing to us since we’ve put so much time and effort into having another difficulty level. It seems that the reason we never found it is that almost every time we tested the higher difficulty, we used a special commandline option to jump-start the game on a level later into the game, with higher difficulty (allowing us to test the game in segments). Because this option internally works in slightly different way than our difficulty-selector screen, it prevented the “revert to casual” bug from happening to us. There are several lessons to be learned about software QA here. 😐

Thanks for sticking with us, sorry if that bug means you needed to download again.

We’re almost done with 1.3 at this point, and we’ve got a mac build and a windows build ready for final testing (linux users will need to compile from source). If you’re interested in testing, please download these and post about any bugs on our forum! We don’t have the mobile versions of 1.3 done yet (we’re fixing some last few bugs that are mobile-only).

We have screenshots up for 1.3 if you’d like a peek at what’s to come. There are also several great new songs in 1.3; this is the new centerpiece for seaside (seriously, I ****ing love this song), this one kicks off the forest area, and this is the new theme for frogatto himself.

In this release candidate, we’ve included all translations, even those which are currently mostly-unfinished; we’re going to ship the final version of 1.3 without the unfinished ones. If you’d like to help out with translations, you can read a guide on helping out, and can chip in on our transifex page, which lets you look at a side-by-side listing of the original english lines, and blanks you can fill in with a translation to your language.

Thanks in advance for all your support, guys!

We’ve done a total overhaul of the forest ground tiles, similar to what was done to the cave tiles. In these screenshots you’ll also see the new foreground art, some minor enhancements to the background, and a third palette used in the forest. There’s also a much-needed overhaul of our old, ugly fountain art, which now meshes nicely with the level tiles.

I’ve decided to occasionally link to other indie/semi-indie games I’ve been playing and enjoying, just to share the love. Reciprocity would be cool, but honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if quite a few of these people don’t even notice the linkage. I’m just doing this for the good of the indie game scene.

This might seem odd, but I’m really not afraid of “competition” – I don’t think other indie games would stop people from playing Frogatto. The cost isn’t exclusionary on mobile games, the time taken by story-driven games leaves you with plenty of time to play the others, and I just think there’s so much more to be gained by cooperation. There’s a short supply of really well-made indie games, and I want to see our art form thrive – I want to see other teams, who’ve put their heart and soul into it, succeed.

Pizza Boy:

So the first one is a game I’ve been playing on my iPod called Pizza Boy, which is a platformer, but is really, really different from Frogatto in almost every way. It’s very much in the Mario Bros vein of things – rather similar physics, timed-levels, worlds with four stages, and a lightly-handwaved story. It also shares the mario trope of killing enemies by jumping on their heads (which we use somewhat sparingly in frogatto).

Pizza Boy is made by Acne Play, an offshoot of a Swedish design studio which seems to be increasingly branching into game development. (No, we don’t know these guys personally or anything.)

The whole game is built around some pretty tight platforming challenges, where each level is an exacting sequence of running and jumping sequences you have to figure out by trial and error, and then play back with crackerjack timing (quite unlike frogatto, which generally allows you to stop and smell the roses). Unlike mario, it’s quite forgiving because you can start at any level you’ve been on before (which probably defeats the purpose of having ‘lives’, but there they are anyhow). I like it – it’s frustrating, but frustrating in a good way.

One thing that’s great about it is a common mobile-game trope – there’s not much you have to remember (as you would in a complex, story-driven game like an rpg), so it’s really easy to get into if you’ve got a few minutes to kill. You don’t have to re-familiarize yourself with some big complex set of info (like, say, which items you’ve acquired, or which quest you’ve completed). I know from personal experience, that this can be a bit of a bugaboo if you haven’t played a game for several days or weeks (I definitely have had at least one RPG I’ve entirely started-over because I lost track of what I’d accomplished). I don’t wish all games were like this, but it really is nice for some games to be immediately accessible.

Also interesting to see another title doing the Left/Right controller scheme, rather than a full virtual Dpad. Seems to be gradually becoming an accepted/best practice for these kinds of games. We adopted it quite a while back (I believe sooziz was the title that inspired us to do so), because having up/down arrows between L/R, or having a full, plus-shaped dpad makes your touch areas for the side keys way smaller, and especially the U/D between L/R setup makes it possible to hit up or down by accident when “hat-switching” over to the opposite side – in a lot of games, this can really trip your character up.

So there’s Pizza Boy. Check it out!

A showcase of a whole mess of things we’ve been working on for the dungeon in the coming update. The dungeon has doubled in size, and best of all, the dungeon level-tree is now non-linear (an improvement I’m hoping to eventually have on most chapters of the game).

There are a wealth of graphical improvements; the back-wall in the dungeon now has actual edges, and windows, so we can crumble it away and reveal background art. Background art was also something we were lacking before; we now have two different parallax backgrounds where we previously had none. The whole dungeon has also been quietly switched to a perspective matching the rest of the game (a subtle change we began around 1.2 which we feel looks much better – the only holdout remaining is the seaside interiors which I’ll redo later).

Last but not least, we also have a bunch of different palettes in the dungeon which help set the mood in different areas.

I’ve been a bit remiss in posting these regularly, so here’s getting back into it: I’ve recently redrawn the cave tiles.

There were a number of haphazard bits to the old effort, probably the single biggest thing that was poorly improvised was the side-wall tiles, which had stalagmites jutting out at an angle. I wasn’t yet comfortable enough with our crazy panoply of tile<->tile combinations to attempt continuous columns of stone that carried through from tile to tile, and instead tried to hide the tile transitions with organic noise. This time around, I’ve improved enough to grapple with that, so I’m able to make the tiles look much more like the basaltic columns I’d intended for them to look like. (We’ve also moved to a more deliberate use of a small amount of perspective on the upper surface of solid areas, so this change also incorporated that.)

Here is a series of before/after shots:

We delayed this post for a couple days to give the blackberry announcement some spotlight time at the top of the page, but here’s the companion to that earlier post featuring Emilien Rotival‘s art.

In this one, we’ve got one more comic-style drawing, which is primarily a showcase for a vector-version of our logo; Emilien helped me out here because although the pixel version of it was entirely my work, I’m honestly quite rotten at vector stuff at the moment. I have so little experience with vector-tools that doing anything is a struggle, and I just don’t have the time to figure it out when there are much more pressing things to finish for the core game (I’ve already got several “learn a new skillset” jobs on my plate related to programming). He vectorized the logo, which gets us a nice, crisp, professional-looking one now, rather than later. Thanks, man!

The centerpiece, though, was a big “poster/box-art/desktop” style drawing he made for us:

It’s awesome to get fan art like this – and we’re open to fan art from anyone. If you’ve got fan-art you want to send, by all means, send it in! We’d love to see more, and if people send more in, we could make an ongoing series out of this. 😀

A friend of ours made some sweet fan art. I’m actually gonna split this into at least two posts, just to spread things out, since he made us a series of 5 pics(!) :D. The fellow in question is Emilien Rotival, (aliases being variously “The Arty Squid” and within wesnoth, “LordBob”), who’s a terrific illustrator, and all-around great guy to work with (rarely have I seen such a high ratio of skill:ego thrown around). He’s easily been the nicest, and one of the best illustrators I’ve worked with. If you’re looking to hire or commission someone, I can’t recommend him enough.

We ran into him on our sister-project Battle for Wesnoth – if you’re at all familiar with the game, he’s responsible for something like half the portraits in the game – in fact simply going to the homepage at the time of this writing is likely to have two or three of his in the randomly-chosen pool of them that decorates the main page.

So I linked him to frogatto a little while back, and then he did something very cool – a series of three cartoon-style illustrations of scenes from the game (click to zoom in):

THE GREEN ONE HUNGERS!

Oh, you sneaky town elder, you...

It never pays to get up early in the morning.

Stay tuned, because an upcoming post will have some additional bits he made. 🙂

In the upcoming release, v1.3, we’re overhauling how our powerups work, trying to solve a major design flaw in the current system. As it stands now, the way our powerups work is: 1] you have to kill an enemy to cause it to “drop” some powerup. 2] you then have to tag this powerup, which moves around and can be hard to get, and 3] once acquired, it only lasts for a tiny window of time. These rules didn’t add up very well inside frogatto, because of our pacing. It took a while to figure out what was wrong, and here are our thoughts on the subject:

The drop-and-grab design is really common in flying shooters like Raiden, or Gradius, where there is always a constant and numerous stream of enemies coming at you. In the story mode of frogatto*, this isn’t remotely the case. There isn’t a constant stream of enemies, and that’s a deep and very intentional part of our design – a central part of gameplay in frogatto is confronting some jumping puzzle, killing off the enemies around it so you’re not interrupted whilst you try to pass it, and then passing it. What generally happened in frogatto was that you would kill an enemy, acquire a powerup, and usually, most of the powerup’s duration would expire before you had a chance to really use it. In engineering-speak, this was a “perverse” design – not just a bad sequence, but the “worst possible” sequence we could have chosen. The best possible sequence with a setup like that would be “acquire the powerup, and then conveniently encounter a constant stream of enemies during the powerup’s duration”. That “best possible” sequence really could have only been managed by either making the powerups themselves cause the monsters to appear**, or by ensuring there are always a constant stream of enemies, and neither of these were really feasible.

What we’ve chosen to do, is to switch most of our powerups to a “mana” system; rather like zelda. Powerups are permanently acquired abilities (which will generally be quest rewards), and tapping a “switch” key (currently “D”) toggles between them. This ensures they now have optimal availability during the times when they’d be fun to use. Mana regenerates slowly, and the blue cubes (which used to boost powerup duration) now recharge a bunch of mana, quickly.

This also allows us more flexibility in designs, since quite a few designs work terribly with “timed duration”. We’re adding a few basic powers to the next version of the game – we’ve reconfigured the energy shot as one of them, and there’s a new, very short-range fire-breath. Any ideas you have would be welcome in the comments, or on the forums. We’re not removing time-limited powerups completely, but we’re likely to limit them to a scant few items like “invincibility” or “time-slowing” – and we’re likely to make them taggable items sitting on a level, rather than dropped items from enemies.

An example of what the new HUD looks like, with the energyshot as the active power:

* Our arcade mode is a LOT more like those shooters – you’re constantly forced onwards, and on a few levels, you run into a constant stream of enemies. Of course, you never could unlock the powerups before entering the arcade levels in the past. We might consider having a few “time-limited” powerups on the arcade levels, or flagging all the character’s mana-based powers as active before starting the level. One fun idea might be treating the mana-based powers you acquire in-game as achievements, and only unlocking them in the arcade levels if at some point you’ve unlocked them in the story mode, in the past.

** this actually isn’t completely crazy – in a game where there’s some inherent reward for killing monsters (like XP and EQ in diablo 2), spawning some unique monster could be a good thing – they did that with shrines. Doing some combo with a shrine that gave you a time-limited powerup, and spawned an enemy vulnerable to that, might be a cool idea, but in frogatto, we don’t have special rewards for killing random monsters. Monsters are just an obstruction, in frogatto, not an end in themselves.

I really hate having anything to do with politics mentioned on this blog, but this is so bad that attention needs to be drawn to it.

There are two bills going through congress that will allow America’s government to censor websites exactly like China and Iran do – via a new blacklist of “bad sites”. The reason argued for this is to stop piracy by allowing copyright holders to call for any site which they think is infringing, to be immediately taken off the net without proof. We feel that nothing can justify taking away free speech. The very thing that has made the internet such a powerful force for good in the world is its absolute freedom of speech. People can expose the wrongdoings of those in power, and the internet is a tool that for the first time in history, prevents their voice from being silenced. The last thing we need is america, the “land of the free”, to establish a dangerous precedent of censorship as a default – a precedent which other countries are certain to follow.

Furthermore, because there is no “due process”, that is, because sites would be taken down immediately without having a chance to prove they’re innocent, this would destroy innovation on the internet. Because there’s no due process, it doesn’t matter if you’re guilty or not; if some competitor with more money just doesn’t like you, they can get you taken off the net by making a false accusation. That’s fatal for any internet company – it turns off their entire business and income instantaneously, and could be repeated as many times as necessary to drive them bankrupt. Virtually every internet service we use today; google, facebook, youtube, twitter, deviantart, itunes, netflix, anything – could not have started up in an environment with these kinds of laws on the books. Some better-heeled company that didn’t like them, would have shut them down. In fact, all of these companies did receive severe legal threats from the entertainment industry as they matured – the MPAA and RIAA have repeatedly stated that they wish these companies/services didn’t exist (especially Youtube and iTunes). They only survived because there were no laws like this on the books.

At the time of this writing, these bills have received some temporary setbacks, but they are not dead yet. Do whatever you can to destroy them – free speech for the human race, and everything you like about the internet, is at stake. You can read more about these bills, and what you can do to stop them, on wikipedia. And yes, you can do stuff about them even if you don’t live in the US – follow that link.