Tess' Cool Finding Game by TrashCanHero

[raw]
made by TrashCanHero for Ludum Dare 54 (JAM)

Tess' Cool Finding game is about you helping Tess find frogs!

Tess's Frog Finder is a Window Game where the objective is simple, find frogs within a time limit. Each time you get a frog, you get 1 more second to look (and a little less space to look with). With the goal being to find as many frogs as possible.

You move the window with your mouse and click the frogs to have Tess catch them, the hand icon sometimes is off, just remember that it always uses the center of the window for checking the mouse position.

Programming: TrashCanHero(Midnight Syntax) and VoidRed

Art: "Katsu" Rian

Music: Trac3r

This was more of an experiment to test out making the window of the game itself part of the game. Not just being the window to the game.

There's not much more I can say here that hasn't already been said on the itch.io page so this will be more of my thoughts on it. The game itself was supposed to be a Wario Ware-like with multiple micro games to play. But the development of the windowing system took longer than we thought and we had to re-scope to just 1 micro game which ended up being the frog finding one.

This was a ton of fun, idk if I'll do the next one though simply because I don't know if I'll have the time lol.

See how many frogs you can get, developer best (and so far THE best as far as I know) is 49!

Ratings

Overall 359th 3.789⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Fun 386th 3.658⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 46th 4.289⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Theme 283th 4.053⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 624th 3.526⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Audio 502th 3.278⭐ 20🧑‍⚖️
Humor 418th 3.211⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Mood 644th 3.447⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Given 39🗳️ 13🗨️

Feedback

HangoverGames
02. Oct 2023 · 18:43 UTC
Finally can find some frogs by Wednesday

10/10
txomin
02. Oct 2023 · 20:41 UTC
Yeah i really liked it 👏. The window mechanic works and feels good to use! The sound hints are a good addition. Plus the intro with the sort of calibration stuff looks also pretty cool, I loved the music.
It looks like the highscore at the end keeps track of the previous frogs found so I had to relaunch the game at each try to aim at a true best score, best I got was 17!
![record.JPG](///raw/590/94/z/5dcb0.jpg)
OrdiNeu
02. Oct 2023 · 20:56 UTC
22 frogs! Very fun and novel entry! I liked the idea, and the theme fit pretty well. Love the main menu art!
Subsage
02. Oct 2023 · 21:43 UTC
Great concept. I have a super ultra wide screen, caused a few issues, but that aside it's nifty. Good work :)
soup and sandwich games
02. Oct 2023 · 21:43 UTC
Can't seem to run the application on MacOS? Any help with that?
🎤 TrashCanHero
02. Oct 2023 · 22:02 UTC
@soup-and-sandwich-games Unfortunately not :( nobody on the team has a mac. I was worried that something would be a problem but I have no way to test, what's the problem exactly though. I might be able to get a fix for it
Back2Zero
02. Oct 2023 · 22:30 UTC
Such a good game, but I can't get more than 16 :sob:
Edom Games
02. Oct 2023 · 23:34 UTC
Nice, I like it. I'm not sure how to get that screen effect but well done!
Human Writes Code
03. Oct 2023 · 08:21 UTC
Ooo-weee, we gon' have ahselfs a good ol' fashion frawwggg hunt! Although, they should probably not recruit me because the best I could do was 15 frogs. This is an excellent concept by the way and fun to play. I'm not even sure I understand how you went about technically implementing it. Very impressive and a unique spin on the theme!

Well done.
soup and sandwich games
03. Oct 2023 · 10:43 UTC
@trashcanhero It seems to download the correct file which then opens up into a .app application/game. Then when I try run the .app file it says that there is an error opening this file. Unsure if it is something to do with my MacOS personally or the .app itself but thought it would be worth commenting to let you know! :)
🎤 TrashCanHero
03. Oct 2023 · 15:18 UTC
@edom-games @human-writes-code The tech is actually surprisingly simple! The game was made with Godot and it offers a pretty good number of options for placing and sizing the window. The problem comes when the user has multiple screens or has a different resolution than my screen, putting the screen at (300, 300) for instance can be wildly different places depending on the setup. This is why the game has to have a sort of "initialization" at the start, what it's doing is making the window fullscreen and marking the position and size of itself. This makes it easy to translate normalized coords (0-1) to screen space. Beyond that was just some stuff for placement and animating the window, I even managed to get a pivot point that we could set if we need to (this was literally only used in the final placement in the intro animation when the window is in the middle lol)
Logan_Core
04. Oct 2023 · 06:16 UTC
Super neat concept! I love the artwork and the frog theme! Making the viewport smaller as the game goes on was a good idea. Good work on the game!

![Frog-Game-Windows_RdKhg9xR6Y.png](///raw/7e8/a5/z/5f821.png)
spooncats
04. Oct 2023 · 06:18 UTC
really clever use of window sizes! also love the art :)
Kitkii
10. Oct 2023 · 14:25 UTC
Wow, Loved the concept of the window sizes. I dont know why it didnt pick up my second monitor unless I made a mistake at the start and didnt notice but regardless even on 1 screen it was amazing. The shrinking size really suited the theme really well. Shout out to frog lovers <3 froge froge froge froge froge
🎤 TrashCanHero
10. Oct 2023 · 20:56 UTC
@kitkii Because of the insane differences in each setup, we limit the game to a single screen. Mostly because if 2 monitors have different resolutions it causes a ton of errors that we didn't really have time to deal with.
Odakine
12. Oct 2023 · 19:00 UTC
This was a lot of fun, I really liked the usage of the window size for the theme, music was great, love me a game where I can just find some little guys in a nice quick session
pumpkinink
13. Oct 2023 · 23:24 UTC
I really enjoyed playing this, I played it twice!! It's a really unique control scheme, and I like that it is a game that is really specific to a desktop PC experience, and wouldn't work the same on other systems. Also, it has frogs!!
Beeb GameCodeCompany
14. Oct 2023 · 18:35 UTC
Cute game, I wish it was longer though. Like maybe more of a time reward for finding the frogs, I felt like I didn't get to experience the full game because it went by too fast even when finding them. I also wasn't sure, but were there audio clues? It seemed like the audio got louder the closer I got to the frogs, if so that's a nice touch and helps contribute to the theme.
jdemattos
14. Oct 2023 · 21:27 UTC
The game crashed when I tried to run it, unfortunately