Freg, Fregg, and Freggy: The Last Band by Honest Dan
Latest News:
We hope we've fixed the most common crash! Let us know how version 107 works, please! We'd love for you to play and give feedback on our game! Sadly, the game will still crash occasionally. It doesn't affect everyone, but we are struggling to fix it. We hope it doesn't get in the way of your enjoyment of Freg, Fregg and Freggy! 🐸🐸🐸
Top Tip:
We've had feedback that it isn't clear what the cards do (thanks for the feedback!). We know it's not ideal, but the way to know is to check the tooltip that is displayed when you hold a card over the "drop card here to use" box.
FREG, FREGG, AND FREGGY: THE LAST BAND
Important Info
Quick Summary
- Travel deeper and deeper into the darkness to confront the cause of darkness: Melophobia.
- Combat is automated, though you can play combat cards to influence the battle.
- Playing an environment card will take your party on a detour to that area.
- Your party's route is displayed as tiles on right side of screen.
- Complete the quests given to you by Lady Elizardbeth and Sister Anolga to upgrade your lantern.
Story
(Note: The following story is narrated and written in-game, so feel free to skip the story section)
In the land of Pogona, music is a big part of everybody's lives. Well, almost everybody… Three Jazz Frogs - Freg, Fregg and Freggy - gave up their music as nobody in the village liked their brand of Jazz.
They buried their instruments and dreams, and vowed to never play again… until...
An evil dark force, known as Melophobia, despised the sound of music. Set on bringing silence across the land of Pogona, it dispersed its dark forces to rid Pogona of all of its music. In an event known as The Silencing, every instrument was destroyed. With no more music, Melophobia’s darkness was free to spread across the lands of Pogona. With no instruments - there was no music. Pogona had no way to push back the darkness, and fell into an endless night.
But… there were still 3 instruments that remained buried deep and out of sight... and Freg, Fregg and Freggy knew they had to end their vow to get the band back together again. Set out with their Saxotrumpet, Drums, Guitar and a lantern - they seek to push back the forces of darkness with the only weapon they’ve got - smooth silky JAZZ. However, they will need to go DEEP into the darkness if they are to confront Melophobia, who resides in the darkest shadows of the lands.
Bug Tracking & Info:
- Fatal Error: Very common crash at any point during road generation. Status: FIXED 🐸
- Fatal Error: Quite common, though not consistent. Crash at any point. Status: FIXED 🐸
- Game occasionally doesn't take you back to main menu if all three frogs die: Status: Still present 🐛
- Quitting via options menu causing crash: Can happen pretty consistently. Status: Still present 🐛
- Card text narrower on some cards: this is a minor visual issue, doesn't impact gameplay. 🐛
- Cards sometimes return to wrong position in hand: this is a minor visual issue, doesn't impact game play. 🐛
Struggling to fix the memory error. It seems to perhaps be hardware dependant. I (Honest Dan) get crashes, whilst Brainoid doesn't.
Please be patient, my freggy friends - Hot fixes will be worked on after some much needed rest!
Ratings
| Overall | 104th | 4.148⭐ | 66🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 242th | 3.867⭐ | 66🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 214th | 3.908⭐ | 67🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 902th | 3.654⭐ | 67🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 48th | 4.6⭐ | 67🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 36th | 4.383⭐ | 66🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 106th | 4⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 154th | 4.185⭐ | 67🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 48🗳️ | 25🗨️ |
Since this seems to be an AAA (Triple-A) Ludum Dare game :), let me make a few comments. Two things I missed in the game were:
- any sounds during the fight and
- what the individual cards do.
Some cards make it easy to guess their functions, but some of them are a big puzzle to me.
Another thing is that my computer was working very hard while I was playing, and it's quite new with not bad prameters, so there may be a problem somewhere with that.
On a different note, the first thing that came to my mind after reading the title was a cartoon Ed, Edd n Eddy :)
In summary. Great job with the game!
just bc i am curious: what engine were you using?
Also, zimny11 - I'm glad you got the Ed, Edd and Eddy reference!
The environment generation and tiling is also a really cool idea, although I wasn't sure why I was choosing one location over another.
The music was great! I loved the smooth jazz, and the fact that you made it part of the story was really great.
The environment generation was meant to be a bigger part of the game, but we had to cut back on features due to time. Essentially the quests were going to ask you to kill certain mobs in certain regions, so you'd use the card to "choose your path". Some tiles would have easier enemies, some would have loot. We also wanted the concept of placing the same type of tiles next to each other would create hard version of those tiles where the bosses could spawn. It was still fun to explore some of the ideas in the jam though for sure!
Fantastic work as always!
Really cool.
Amazing mood/graphics again, music is nice and suiting and fits the game.
Incredible how some teams seem to be able to make such amazing quality of games during a jam.
Only possible improvement for me: the volume of the voices was a bit low, compared to the music.
Thanks for feedback everyone too, glad the crashes aren't preventing people from enjoying the game.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1003703630
great job! I also love the deck building elements and would love to see this grow into a full game where you can implement everything that you couldn't implement yet because of the scope of the jam
I enjoyed the card mechanics, but I didn't really understand the point of the zone cards?
The game initially launched Steam VR and played through my VR-headset. This seems to be a common problem with games made with unreal, does the engine default to launching in VR-mode or something? For anyone experiencing that issue, the workaround is to launch the game with the `-nohmd` command line argument.
Sadly I couldn't finish the game because of the random crashing. The furthest I got was to lantern level 3, but I would have loved to continue playing to the end.
Technical issues aside, overall a great entry, well done!
@janures you may enter Pogona's next reality music star competition to earn a spot as a fourth freg! You must become a frog and rename to something that includes Freg though. May I suggest Fregrick or Freginald?
thanks all for the lovely feedback! Part of us would like to make a nice post jam version - but to get the game as deep / strategic as we'd like, it'd take quite a lot of more time - which is something we're all short of! But yeah - we'll see... maybe we'll use what we learned from this and develop it in a future game jam!
I honestly really liked it, as you said I was able to see what the cards did by holding them over the "use card" region and the descriptions were very clear. Everything felt insanely polished for a LD game and the illustrations and models were beautiful!
The only slightly negative thing I have to say is that it was a bit easy in my opinion, but that's such a small critique that it doesn't even really matter
(I tried to play the game under Wine on Linux and it ran completely fine until a freeze at one point. Obviously I'm not taking that in account in the ratings, I choose to run it on an unsupported platform.)
Yeah, we really wanted to make it more difficult - but essentially we know that most people will give an LD game one or two attempts, and we'd rather people experience all of the content in those attempts. The balance of game would be different if it were not a gamejam entry :)
Haha, indeed - if we had our musician for more than one day, who knows - maybe we would have had more music! Glad you liked the two tracks though, I loved them!
Great to hear it ran on Wine - unfortunately making Linux builds in Unreal isn't as straight forward as it is in things like Unity!
Some things I missed:
- A way to get rid of cards (e.g. when I was wanting to be on cliff tiles for the one quest, I got forest and meadows cards that were essentially useless). In general, I wasn't really using the environment cards very much.
- Some form of control; to me it felt a bit too random at times. I.e. if you come up against a boss and just get a bunch of forest or healing march cards, you essentially have no control over whether or not you die. I managed to scrape by by the skin of Freggy's teeth in the final fight, but would have liked to have some tactical input.
- Some way to see how long things last and whether they are active. The stun one had an effect icon, but e.g. the reflecting of damage one didn't, as far as I could tell.
Anyway, overall, very very cool. Enjoyed it a lot.
The art, especially the hand drawn images were gorgeous. The sound effects during fights were fun and charming; hearing each note, strum and bump of instruments go along with the animation was well conceived and executed.
The music was so good that I sat on the menu screen long enough to find out it didn't loop :sweat_smile: So I restarted the game to keep listening. I love jazz!
The gameplay was intriguing. The approach of having the player not directly control, but rather influence the Freg brothers on their journey was an interesting one. I understand it may not be exactly how you planned it out but honestly, the idea shines through. If a post jam version is in the pipeline, let me know! :D
Really good work and concept, would be great to see more work on developing the strategy.
I did notice that one Feed the Fire card in my hand had the text on 3 lines, the rest has text on 2 lines.
I liked it a lot.
Using light as a dodge/crit mechanic was really interesting, along with using lantern fire as a resource. I think this could be explored even further as I haven't quite seen a game like this regarding light management.
I also liked the concept of saving your card hand between battles, so there was a sense of hand management there, such as saving your heals for out of combat or saving the big hit card for the boss. That's pretty novel to me as I normally see games like Slay the Spire where your hand/deck resets every match. This added an interesting layer to playing my cards.
I enjoyed the experience, I could tell you had quite a lot to do as the game is very ambitious. I'm always impressed with what you accomplish in these jams and this game is no different!
P.S. we actually ended up with mildly similar games in concept. Auto movement to the upper right and auto-ish party-based combat. I TOO wanted environment generation to be a thing but that didn't happen :P
Thank you so much for bringing this by my stream. Here's a link to the VOD:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1005666495?t=3h0m35s
I think there's a bug when all the characters die, nothing happened afterwards, I needed to manually restart the game.
The 2D art look amazing and the 3d graphics look good.
I can really see this becoming a full polished game!
Awesome work fun to play.
Especially those who battle through the fatal crashes. We have tried fixing them but unfortunately they are hard to track down to the source, as it seems rooted in our tweening library.
@jaco-van-hemert some great feedback. We wanted to add a burn card mechanic, where you can drag them to the lantern to get 1% fuel back. We also had bigger plans for environments and path ahead - but weren't able to deliver on it. Agree regarding the RNG nature of it. Ideally, since frogs earn cards in different ways - we would have liked if you could re-order your party in order to utilise their card drop triggers (freg for example gets a card when delivering a final blow). If we tied the category of cards you get to specific frogs, it could have lead to the idea of giving some control and strategising.
@peachtreeoath I will play your game then, will be interesting to see the parallels! Thanks for the detailed feedback. I think we had some good design ideas, but for them to truly shine they need to be implemented correctly and the game have a bit more depth than we were able to get done in 3 days.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHHf9F08qig
Gameplay I didn't like so much. Froggies walk on their own, fight on their own. Playing cards is all good, but not complicated enough to require any strategic thought or much attention (no interactions between the cards themselves, no need to deeply analyze the situation on the battlefield and so on). As a result, it feels like the game plays itself, it's not engaging. But because it is not engaging, I had a lot of time for observations, analysis and noting stuff down while I played. So here it is (lucky you ;)):
* Nothing epic happens when Lantern charge drops to 0%. Froggies (I imagine that's the name of the band ;)) just continue on their quest like it's all fine. With how focused the story is on the lantern, I'd expect at least something to happen. Well, to be honest, I expected to just fail. But barring that, at least something would be nice :).
* You can use Healing Hymn even when your lantern charge is 0.
* Feed the Fire fuels the lantern by 10%, except it will never fuel it to 100%. Not sure if that's a bug, or it's by choice because 100% would not fit nicely on the UI space allotted for the lantern charge number ;)
* Second Dazzling Solo you cast always stuns the same 'random' enemy as the first one. 'Always' means I tested 3 times. So you can stun and already stunned guy. That severely decreases usability of multiple copies.
* I'm not sure how you spawn the quest boss exactly (I speculate it's in the next suitable area after enough enemies were killed, or just in a random suitable area) but it seems that the Safety Dance can totally bug the quest. I used it on a Canyon while on the Canyon quest (had a healing march on and wanted it to work a bit longer) and I think it's possible that I used it on a Canyon in which the boss was supposed to be. Cause afterwards I was traveling for 45 minutes and met no boss. I finally gave up and restarted. On the restarted game it all went fine and met a boss within a few minutes.
* Would be nice if card description were more specific on their numbers - how long are durations etc. I calculated about 20 seconds on the Bounce Back and Lantern Scorch (is that about right?), but it's not so easy with all the cards (like Igniting Flourish).
I had two crashes to desktop with 'Fatal Error'. But I saw that those you already have in known bugs. The story itself was simple and pleasant. Charming even, I'd say :). And all of Pagona rejoiced!
- tooltip to be on the cards, not during draging them into the middle of screen
- having the option to just click the card rather than dragging it. (unless you can drag it onto specific frog - which is something i didn't notice being possible?)
I really liked how you can affect the biom generation, tho i had no information what were the pros and cons of each of them (i take different monster spawn?). Frog's crawling back after being defeted was a really nice touch! :)
Now i encountered only two bugs. One of them was an app crash when starting new game. The other one wasn't exacly a bug, but Unreal Engine turned on my VR with the game (i guess it's some UE option that can be disabled?)
I would really like to see an update to the game with more cards and better tooltip! :)
I really like the presentation! A whole intro that presents a universe, characters, with dialogs It's charming, and gives a lot of personality to the game. Alos, _Jazz!_
The game itself is also nice! I didn't figure out immediately that I had to drag'n drop the cards (maybe there could be some sort of indication at the beginning?). But once that was figured out, it was fun to play! Maybe a bit too random though: at some point I was ignoring all destination cards, and immediately placing every card that was relevant for combat. Maybe the system can be adjusted to presents an interesting difficulty. But it has very solid foundations!
Once again, y'all's games have an undeniable charm. The unique mechanics, wonderful art, and bumpin' music all tie this together into a wonderful little package. I think given a little more time you could tighten up the player onboarding/tutorial (making the tooltips appear on hover instead of drag, for example), but that's just a minor complaint compared to the overall experience.
Looking forward to seeing where you guys take this if you decide to expand on it!
(PS: Congrats on being the only Unreal game that I was able to successfully run on my dumpy computer! :pray: )
I played in my stream last night but my videos don't save! I had a lot of fun with this there's so much charm in the music, art, gameplay, and story <3
The tooltips for the cards are a good idea, though I feel they would be better if they appeared while hovering over the cards in the player's "hand" rather than making the player drag them into the drop area to see it; also, it's not always clear what effect the card is going to have, and when an effect is in play, some kind of timer showing how much longer the effect will last would go a long way :smiley_cat:
Great entry, well done!