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.

Designed by Jetrel, implemented by me. There’s still some rough edges, but I really wanted to get it up. The site is now integrated with the blog as well, so the blog is our main page (we may add more to the main page as well), and the pages the old site had are on the left. Feel free to report any problems you notice that you think I might not know about.

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! 😀

Things we’ve been working on over the last month:

– cleaning up lots of little things in gameplay.

– scads of optimizations here and there (the game is liquid-fast on any modern PC, but handhelds like the iPhone are effectively like a decade-old desktop computer, and some aspects of the game needed to be rewritten to run quickly on that). An upside of this is that it considerably widens the scope of computers that can run this – practically anything with just basic OpenGL support, 40mb of free ram, and a >500mhz processor can run it just fine.

– additional cave and forest levels, mostly thanks to “shadowmaster”.

– some additional monster designs

– making locks into visible objects, and adding functionality to have to physically grab a key and drag it to the lock to unlock it.

– working on a few new cutscenes, and polishing up the game’s ability to handle boss battles.

– a new basement tileset (Attentive pixel-artists will note that this hasn’t been cleaned up to tile nicely, yet, especially on the background wall.)

– Last but not least, we’ve overhauled how we do dialogue – rather than having portraits for individual characters, we’ve switched to animating their sprites to convey emotion. We now zoom-in the game screen to make the animations visible, and we’ve changed the speech boxes to (stylized) speech bubbles to indicate the speaker.

We’ve upgraded the world-map’s logic; it’s now got text-labels on each of the locations, and rather than (in debug style) being accessible from the main screen, the map is accessed as we’d intended it – there are a series of magic pedestals you can stand on to be whisked away to the map; these offer a network of shortcuts between key points in the game, so that if you need to backtrack to finish a side-quest, or collect a special item, you can do so.

These are currently accessible by default, right off the bat, but we intend to make them something you have to unlock by completing a quest in the game.

We’ve cleaned up a bunch of the movement mechanics with ants, and frogatto spitting them – they now sit stunned on the ground for a bit, and flash when they’re about to recover.

We’ve also removed the “exploitable” behaviour wherein spitting an enemy into a wall at point-blank range would kill it – now, it simply reflects backwards, passing through the player. We’d put that in to handle that edge case, but (as we feared) it was such a convenient way to kill them that it was being used more often than the normal methods.

Long, rambling aside on game design:
Some designers might not care, but exploits like that, in my opinion, tend to break the ‘immersion’ of a game, because they’re a jarring reminder that it is just a videogame. They’re a bit like “a glitch in the matrix”, if you will. Most games have issues like this, and one or two won’t kill a game, but they do add up, and enough of them will cheapen the experience.

This example in frogatto was a fairly weak one; a much stronger one might be a classic RPG which happened to allow you to toss items from your inventory at enemies – and in which by whatever accident, tossing a shoe did more damage than the intended spears or knives. It’d be amusing, sure, but the key problem is that it robs the game of the intended experience, which is fighting with actual weapons. (I’ll leave arguing whether sticking to the intended experience is a good or bad thing to another post; generally speaking it tends to be bad, because it tends to have very shallow assets to it – the creators didn’t expect it, and therefore didn’t create art/scripting/custom-interactions/etc for it. It may happen to work, but it’s usually buggy, ugly, and sometimes outright able to crash a game.)

Another argument against it is that – if some exploit causes something the programmers and artists invested a bunch of work making, to get completely neglected, then their work on that thing is wasted.

On the flip side of things, accidental gameplay exploits like this can be an excellent way to discover emergent gameplay. Designers tend to have a kneejerk reaction of disparaging/correcting anything that didn’t fit their initial plan, but the ultimate goal of gamemaking is to have fun gameplay and “fun” is notoriously hard to invent. If you stumble across something that’s really fun, by accident, it might be worth changing the plan to accommodate it.

We have a cave background now. Woohoo.

This brings us most of the way towards having the cave environment done, although we have essentially no enemies/traps for it at the time being.

Like most things parallax, a still screenshot doesn’t quite do this justice; it doesn’t convey the sense of depth this has ingame.

Edit: I also drew a new font. The old font was quite typographically schizophrenic and just plain amateur; this font tries to actually follow rules like having consistent x-heights, and consistent ascender/descender lengths. The previous one was just a quick hack job to finish any small font at all, so we could implement the text-label object (which lets us place arbitrary text labels on levels).

It’s an overdue category, really, since there have been a couple of things I could well have blogged about in the past that’d fit it like a glove.

Recently, we’ve added several levels to the latter half of the seaside environment; these go right before the town. (Cred goes to a friend of ours by the nick “shadowmaster” for doing some of the heavy-lifting there.) These flesh out the area to be decently interesting to play in, and have a number of puzzles and secret areas in them, unlike the prior levels which are significantly (and deliberately) simpler.

Right before the town, we’ve also added a shop, with items you can purchase; the list of purchasable items is not considered final, because although they’re neat ideas, some of them might be destructive to puzzles and such. If so, they’ll be replaced.

We’re also hard at work putting together the town; we’ve already got a small “miniboss” fight working, where you square off against some of the henchmen of Milgram (known as the “Milgramen”), who (as you’d know if you’ve played our previous releases) has taken the town hostage. These soldiers are guarding the gate to the town, and ambush you as you try to talk your way in.

The town itself is also being worked on; the whole environment will be very different from the relatively free-exploring, fight-with-random monsters levels that led up to it; it’ll have doors to unlock, and puzzles involving the rescue of various townspeople (a term which is understandably used quite loosely). At the end of the town, you’ll be treated to the very first boss fight of the game. 😀

For many months now, the Windows builds have either crashed at random places, or crashed consistently in a particular spot. Yesterday I finally tried out MSVC++’s debugger, and squashed 2 buffer overrun bugs (which consistently crashed the game for me, but no one else). And today I helped Dave fix the bug that had been consistently crashing it for everyone (on Windows). It was another buffer overrun bug – some animations had invalid rectangles defined for their frames. Dave fixed it so it will now fail for everyone when that happens, and give an actual error message about it, saying what’s wrong.

All these errors were undetectable on Mac/Linux, but they were real bugs that were causing undefined behavior. I don’t really like using MSVC++ (I’m used to gcc and XCode), but this does show the value of compiling on many platforms.

Technical stuff aside: we finally have a Windows build that doesn’t crash on the 2nd outside level or the editor! Yay!

We’ve added an alpha-version of a world map to frogatto. Like in many classic games, you’ll be able to use this to also teleport yourself to the listed locations on the map. The graphics in this are really an alpha ‘sketch’ of what the final version will look like, but the programmed motion of the camera feels quite nice already.  Here’s a video of it thus far, on youtube:

We’ve updated the forest tree trunks to look considerably more organic, and to have more tiling possibilities for branches. As a result, we’re now starting to work on actual forest levels.