Frogs vs. Cats by cincodenada
A short, woefully underdeveloped text-adventure side scroller featuring a frog and cats. Go play it in your browser now!
Controls: Move with the arrow keys, up to jump forward. Vertical jump (higher!) with X, use Z to inspect things.
The game is "winnable", if a little simplistic - keep an eye out for locked chests, as is tradition! If you need a hint, check out the URL of this link (the best I could come up with for spoilertext)! There's a credits screen and a little winning animation to be had.
There's also a link to the post-compo version that's still in progress but more complete down below, if you want to play a better version once you've rated the compo version :)
The inspiration for the game was a picture of an old Apple Newton that someone posted in Slack at work, which had a frog icon for a game that I initially thought was titled "Frogs vs. Cats". Upon zooming in and consulting references of Apple Newton apps, I was disappointed to find that it was in fact Frogs vs. Cars, and was just a boring Frogger ripoff, but the seed was planted. Frogs vs. Cats was born.
The areas/levels beyond the first couple are all the same boring, generic level - I ran out of time to put proper levels together. Those will come first, as the code is actually pretty flexible and amenable to adding the levels.
So please forgive the spartan levels and lack of any actual versus-ing of frogs and the cats, and enjoy this wonky little frog hopping about exploring this text-driven world. It's obviously undercooked, and there are some bugs outstanding, but overall it should be playable, if not terribly entertaining yet. I'm pretty happy with it, given that it's my first Ludum Dare, and I started Saturday morning!
Update: I did slip in a minor bugfix just before the sumbission deadline so the credits would roll. Cheers! Second update: Realized up+down may not be available on all platforms, so added X as an alternate. Also fixed a cat spawning typo bug, which may or may not be kosher. Done meddling now, I promise!
Second update: I've uploaded an improved, non-compo version. If you haven't submitted a rating for the compo yet, please rate it based on the released compo version linked below! After you've rated based on what I did during the compo itself, if you want to play a game that's a little more fun and fixes some of the issues in the compo release, including improved controls (added auto-jump for hills, up is now the high jump) you can do that too. Head over to this thread only after you've rated the compo version. I'll also continue to update this link as I continue to work on it.
Ratings
| Overall | 643th | 2.75⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 632th | 2.6⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 601th | 2.788⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 470th | 3.327⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 301th | 3.365⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 490th | 2.24⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 252th | 2.938⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 486th | 2.75⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 24🗳️ | 24🗨️ |
Raining cats was my favourite bit. I'm glad you didn't get around to making them deal damage!
Good job on making the game :)
First of all the usual suspect of controls. Sure, being a PICO-8 game, it was easy enough to guess the controls. But having three different jumps was just weird. And it took me quite a while to realize that I can jump through the platforms with the straight up vertical jump.
It was really lacking on sound department. I think you only had two different sound effects, the jump and collision (which played way too much on stairs etc). They got annoying and repetitive very fast.
The text portion of the game wasn't flawless either. The text was way too fast (at least for me) and had some weird positioning/repeating glitches.
Then the items. It would have been nice if there was some visual indication of the chests, keys etc. Well, it kinda takes me back to early 90s point and click games where you sometimes had to methodically try to click on every pixel of the screen.
Anyways, good job!
After playing a bit more with your comments in mind, I agree with you on the controls - there's no need for a separate forward hop and up-one-block hop, it could just automatically hop up the block when you run into them. It's definitely on my list!
The through-platforms thing is a callback to the old games where that was prevalent (the Keen games were a big influence on me!), but it's not as prevalent these days. I think I'll add a little intro screen demonstrating the moves/controls to make that clear.
Definitely could use more sounds! I actually disabled the collision sound in my latest version, cause it was far too prevalent. It should be just to indicate you've hit the edge of the world, basically (which it doesn't even do now, so :shrug_tone1: )
The repeating text is also high on my list - I just need to keep track of which texts I've shown already and not duplicate them. The text is intended to be "part of the sky", but your screenshot is a bad combination of that and another bug, where you spawn off-screen, it renders the text at the edge, and then it scrolls to you, which scrolls the text away.
I wanted to keep the items in the tradition of the old text adventures, where you pretty much just got a mention of a thing (stream, weeds, etc) existing and had to examine them. The weeds are a stand-in, and I might add an NPC so that if you're stumped you can ask and they can give you some clues. I *don't* intend for it to be the every-pixel frustration of the point-and-clicks!
I've linked an updated post-compo version that addresses some things, and I'll keep updating that link as I go, you've given me some great todo items!
@cowa @TomekS @croewens Glad the artwork won you over...the dorky frog turned out better than I had hoped, I'm not a very artsy person, and it makes me smile watching him flop around :)
@Zinkler Glad you persisted, and that you noticed the details! I tried to include some silly jokes.
Loved the credits :-)