This past several days, I’ve been engaged in polishing up the forest background. The forest background that shipped with 1.0 was unsatisfactory to me; many elements of it were barely better than sketches, and the far-distant portion of it was a boring monochrome. However, we shipped with it because it didn’t affect gameplay, only aesthetics, and we believe in RERO (release early, release often).

Here, you can see a side-by-side comparison. (Click to zoom in.)

Probably after our upcoming update, I am looking into doing some major additions to those interactible/standable trees, adding a much larger variety of branch elements, and if I have time, perhaps even adding some variants on the tree trunks (wider, thinner ones). I’m also planning to flesh out the foliage tiles a bit.

I’m well aware in writing this that I haven’t written that primer post I’ve been meaning to write describing what MTPs are. I’m going to try and pretend I’ve done so already so as not to clog up this post, and will fix that retroactively.

To sum it up, though a “multi-tile-pattern” lets you define a tile pattern that’s drawn across more than just one 16×16 tile. It allows us to draw elaborate set pieces that will be put onto a level if the underlying tiles are laid out a certain exact way. For example, it’s what allows us to draw the “obviously larger than one tile” corners of the house interiors. Remember – everything in frogatto is auto-tiled, so this means those large set-pieces will just “appear” if you arrange the tiles the right way.

A key problem we ran into was scaling for the work-time of the guy scripting them (me). These multi-tile-patterns had to have each individual tile in them, specified by hand. For a little 2×2 house corner, this was trivial. For a huge 3*5 layer of plants, with two layers of graphics, and with an alternative graphic option, this time-cost exploded exponentially. This, for example, is the tile pattern for a center section of grass (as seen in the first section of the game):

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And moreover, they’ve been doing that for the past 2 weeks.

Seen at http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/games/

In fact, holy smokes, it’s even on http://www.apple.com/downloads/ 😮

If anyone involved in making that happen is reading this – THANK YOU! You guys kick ass!

We’ve made a few banners people can put in forum sigs and such. Feel free to link to them, just point them back here. In most forum software, this would get done by typing:

[url=http://www.frogatto.com][img] (the image address) [/img][/url]

And you can get that address by right-clicking on the image, and selecting something like “Copy image address” in the menu that comes up.

We also have a snazzy new forum set up, which is woefully empty at the moment. I’m sure you know how to fix that. 😉 The link to the forum is over on our left.

Besides that, I encourage you to read the post just below this and test our release candidate.

We try to put the horse before the cart, here, so one of the last things we’ve bothered to put effort into is our logo, since without a good game to slap it on, a fancy logo isn’t worth anything.

I’ve made a new logo for frogatto (hand-pixeled, drew the letterforms from scratch). I think it’s about the same level of charm as the previous logo we had before, but is a lot more readable. In the attached image, you can see the progression from old-> new. The website will be updated shortly to reflect this.

We’re within a stone’s throw of a release candidate. Any day now! We’re just tying off the very last loose ends.

If you’re interested in beta testing, or spreading the word, please do get in touch with us. We’re just a small indie team, with no marketing experience, so we could use all the help we can get.

I realize our contact page is a little anemic at the moment, and more traditional means of communication, such as an official email address for our dev team, might be in order. 😐

We’re getting quite a close to having a finished, releasable version of the game. Here are a few major bits I’ve worked on recently:

New dungeon graphics: There’s no background at the moment, and there’s some level of cleanup, revision, and additional transitions that I need to do. We have enough to build levels with, though.

We have, likewise, begun work on animating milgram for his big, final boss-battle.

New version of the mushrooms: As you know, the old ones were quite garish and ugly.

New version of the world-map teleporter: That old one just didn’t fit in. I’ve also redone the FX on it to look much smoother.

Significant new feature:  “Palette Swapping”.  For performance reasons, we can’t do this in realtime (e.g. using it to make colors shift and change, like things are glowing or whatnot), but it’s enough to change the color of a whole level.

We’re planning to use this to recolor a few areas in the game for variety.  The first caves in the game will be the above color-set, to match the exterior “seaside” rocks which are also brown.

Technical reason why we can’t do realtime:  We’re not a nintendo, and our images are not stored on the graphics card, in indexed mode;  they’re stored in absolute color.  So we’d have to go through each entire image and change every single pixel to do it in realtime, which would collapse our performance.

“Yeah, but you could do that with this shader…”  No, we don’t use shaders.  Using them would dramatically raise the system requirements – notably, the iPhone doesn’t support them (neither do any other widely-used handhelds atm).

Added some new, but only “sketched” enemies.  Mostly “milgramen”, which is to say, Milgram’s Minions™.  We’re trying to move to that as a process, instead of meticulously drawing a fully-detailed, fully-animated enemy and only then working on implementing it in game.  In coding circles, this might be called rapid prototyping.  There are tons of reasons to shoot for this as a process – in fact entire books have been written on the subject as it pertains to programming.

Sketching in art has one primary purpose.  SPEED.  All it is, is just drawing the bare minimum amount of stuff to visually suggest something; especially, to suggest the macroscopic shape/pose/layout of some object.  The idea is to do this, before working on all the putzy, time-consuming details, because if you do the details and then find out the pose or overall shape of something is wrong, you’re wasting tons of work.  To correct the pose/composition/layout, you have to destroy a bunch of your detail work to rebuild the more structural parts of the drawing.  Animation works exactly the same way, except multiplied by however many frames long the animation is – and given the average videogame animations, this means it’s easily around 10x as important than with just still drawing.

So what does this have to do with frogatto?  By sketching monsters, and trying them out in game, we’re better aware of which animations are needed, and which ones are superfluous.  There’s nothing worse that wasting a few hours making an animation, and finding out it doesn’t do much good in-game.  Or finding out it looks awkward when the game character is being slid across the screen (many body motions look different when the body has inertia).

Also, and perhaps more important, it removes “fully done art” as a bottleneck for creating new monsters, meaning we can test monsters for several weeks and make them fun – or even, try out monster concepts and avoid making the concept entirely if it turns out to be a dud.  We’ve had a number of cases where we’ve drawn complete monsters, but then discovered that the idea we’d been working with was very hard to make fun ingame.

Also, we’ve created several new levels.  Description is a bit futile, although you’ll notice an airplane boss in the first area of the game.

Bosses now show hitpoint bars, making boss fights seem much less hard (no indication can make some bosses seem like juggernauts).

We’ve added several bits of new furniture.  You’ll notice a new prop that is a fountain outdoors, with an indoor equivalent of a water cooler.  Drinking from this will completely replenish your health.

We’ve also got new parallax houses in the town that really give it a sense of depth, and make the town feel more populated.  As with all things parallax, screenshots do no justice.

We’ve done a major update to the brown rock tiles in the seaside tileset – it gets rid of the vast majority of those ugly “seams” which plagued use of it under quite a few common arrangements. Words don’t convey it, here are screenshots.

Before:

After:

Should speak for itself. 😀

Release plans:
Frogatto is (probably) going to be released in what we call “episodes”, but which are basically nicely self-contained games like the early Sonic the Hedgehog, or Mario games. We will share graphical/audio content between episodes, such as tilesets, and we’ll improve any existing episodes by porting in new content as relevant (if we make new interior props, we’ll put them in episode 1’s houses, for example). It remains to be determined whether we’ll actually sell these separately. We might have everything in one app as a one-time payment, and just add new episodes for free. We might have extra episodes as for-pay DLC. We might sell them as separate games (although I think this is rather less likely than the DLC). What is certain is that each set will be separate storylines, and the levels of them will not be connected in any way.

Anyways, the point of explaining this is to note that we’re getting close to the intended content set for this episode, in terms of tilesets. We were planning to have:

Seaside
Interiors (sunny)
Interiors (basement)
Forest
Cave
Dungeon.

Dungeon is the last one left to do, and we’ll start on it in ~ a week or two. When those graphics are done, we’ll be able to fire on all cylinders to create the remaining levels for the game, and then it’s done! 😀