Fifty Six LilyPads by dhim
Fifty Six LilyPads
I'm super excited to introduce my game for Ludum Dare 56 – Fifty Six LilyPads! My Game is heavily inspired by a boardgame I have at home (hey that's my fish), but instead of penguins you have tiny, cute frogs hopping from lilypad to lilypad in search of delicious flies and beautiful lotuses?
Once you leave a lilypad, it disappears, so the pond shrinks with every leap. You’ll need to think ahead, plan your jumps carefully, and outsmart your opponents to gather the most points before you run out of places to go!
How To Play:
You can either play agains the AI (as smart as jar jar binx) or with a friend!
First the placement phase: - Each player takes turn placing its frogs on lilypad that have Only ONE Fly.
Once everyone is set up, comes the Playing Phase You can jump along multiple connected lilypads in a "Straigth" Path (highlighted) for easy visualisation. Each lilypad you leave behind sinks into the water, making the board smaller and smaller. Points are scored by collecting flies and lotuses on the lilypads, but every jump requires strategic thinking. If you're not careful, you might trap yourself—or leave too many juicy flies for your opponents to grab!
Unlike a certain classic penguin board game (which inspired this entry), the lilypads in Tiny Frog Lilypad Hop form an organic, non-hexagonal graph (but each lilypad has at most 4 neighbours). This layout creates new challenges, as the board is less predictable, with unique patterns and jumps each time you play. Every decision counts!
Why You’ll Love It:
- Strategic Gameplay: Plan ahead, trap your opponents, or open up new areas to explore!
- Dynamic Board: Each game features a different layout, so no two rounds are the same.
- Cute Frogs
- Disgusting Flies 
- Cute sound of my daugthers and I making Croaks
- Awesome music, I forgot the mute button !
Tense Endgame: As lilypads disappear, the tension ramps up—how long can you keep jumping? I’m really proud of how it turned out, and I can't wait to see how you all tackle the pond. Can you out-hop your friends and become the champion of the lilypads?
Give it a try, and let me know what you think! 💚
| Link | https://github.com/dhmmasson/LD56 |
| Link | https://dhmmasson.github.io/lilyFrogs/ |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/fifty-six-frogs |
Ratings
| Overall | 141th | 3.583⭐ | 80🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 144th | 3.436⭐ | 80🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 139th | 3.468⭐ | 80🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 181th | 3.545⭐ | 80🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 165th | 3.532⭐ | 80🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 134th | 3.338⭐ | 79🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 194th | 2.794⭐ | 70🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 220th | 3.117⭐ | 79🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 53🗳️ | 115🗨️ |
@gnats, I have ideas to make the AI better, blocking your path and disconnecting islands (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biconnected_component), but I did not had the time to implement them. Maybe in a post jam version. The two players is really fun.
@custodi got the idea for generating the board from a keynote from the author of Townscaper, I did not expect it to generate so many circular paths.
I could make it end, then the strategy would probably be to try to end the game as soon as possible if you have more points than the adversary rather than maximizing the overall score.
Pros:
- Great and Clear Gameplay
- Simple and Understanding graphics
- Versus mode >.<
Cons:
- The music might not be to fitting to the game
- AI is very weak, need others to play against for proper hardcore battle :3
@nightmaresdev :
- yes I made the music before having the idea of making it around a pond.
- My whole point of making the game was to design an AI, but it took me too long to get to the point of having a MVP. I'll definitely work on the AI in the future.
- The music is definitely more Fate Stay Night than Cute Frog Boardgame lol
- The game design is interesting, I guess the boardgame doesn't have a setup that's like *this*, with (what looks like) randomly connected nodes?
- I can't really figure out the rules of where you are or aren't allowed to jump, like you can't "turn"? But also there aren't really straight lines? It's like half clear.
- This kind of game design annoys me in one way - counting up the amount of potential score between choices. Like these tiles are worth X and those are worth Y, is it worth me cutting those off for these, etc, which leads to a lot of counting. Not really an issue with the game design since it's basically what Hey That's My Fish is too. Just a gripe I have with these kinds of completely open game.
Great work!
As others have pointed out, I'm not sure the music fits the gameplay but is a competent work otherwise.
I do wish the AI was more competent, and a "clean it up" for me option would have been good after all rival frogs are stuck to avoid clicking on tens of tiles, but those are fairly minor and likely too much to expect for a 2-day project.
Great work, had fun with it!
- the underlying grid is quad based and they thus each have a "North/South and an East/West" directions, so if you enter from one side you have to exit by the opposite one. However the grid is not straight so you end up curving
- When I played That's my fish, I first I was aiming for the biggest score, but then realize than making islands inaccessible to other player was usually better in the end. My goal was for the AI to be able to do that, using some graph theory. I have the general algorithm, it was just to risky to implement in the last minute.
@seth-l: Possibly a bug, end game verification was one of the last commits... maybe you could still move. I didn't implement an automatic clean up (@bad-fetus), it would have been the same mechanism as the AI (basically, what move brings you the more points)
Thank you all for the reviews!
For now, I only played against the AI, but I'll try it with real people too.
I love the theme, the mechanics is interesting, and I was quickly hooked to the game trying to get the highest score. Along the way, I think I maybe found a bug: once I scored 57, the end screen told me that my score was "NaN" (not a number):
It happened twice, on the first try I didn't watch the score closely but it was at 50 while I still had 3 or 4 moves to make. On the second try I did watch it closely and it was 57. I didn't happen to me on my first tries, when my score was lower (around 40 something).
Kudos for this great entry!
I have opened an Issue, I'll fix that post-compo : https://github.com/dhmmasson/lilyFrogs/issues/51
Did you win or lose, where you replaying or reloading the game ?
Thank you for review, do try with a friend it's way more enjoyable
I think destroying every leaf is too strong move, would like some more stronger leaves that survive 2 or 3 move through them. Other suggestion might be roaming insect changing cell every turn in some determined direction.
Different insects with properties would have been great as well (I should have gone with FIREFLY or butterfly instead of these ugly regular flies! I made them to realist)
- @kyllua - Thank you, the strategy really shine when playing with a friend
- @takhomasac - Thank you, the website is done using Quarto. I use it for my website
- @olddog - I place random points on the board, generate a voronoi diagram, relax it (cause no one likes a stressed out diagram), subdivide it to obtain quads, place a lilypad in the center of each quad, connect quads that share a border, remove edge lilypad and some more until just 56 (for ludum dare 56) lilypads remain
- @oldzombie14 - Thank You for the kind words
- @frontiersend - Thank you, I glad you liked it.
- @buzzydev - Thanks
- @diabolical-sloth - Thank you, the theme Idea came late though
On your other point, indeed the AI is bad:
- the Ai randomly selects a frog and hops to the highest value lilypad accessible
- it should use a biconnected component graph algorithm to determine how to split the graph in islands it can control (then systematically traverse them), or block you on low-value islands.
For now the game is best played against a friend
Don't have much to criticize, loved the game, keep it up :thumbsup:
- karamelika22, @bighatlogan, @harmadillo : I am really proud of these frogs, but the fly haunts me, should have drawn a butterfly or firefly
- @kirass, glad you liked it
THank you for taking some time to review my game
- @yancharkin Nice of you to take time to play my game, thank you!
The player has to put much thought into the initial placement of frogs.
Great game, well done!
- @googoobachoo indeed initial placement is key
- @loig having played the original on an regular Hex Board, what do think of the irregular, square board ?
Thank you three for playing and rating my game!
Good job making this cool game!
Unfortunately I was unable to play with a friend, which I bet would've been super fun! I still had a great time playing against the AI, though it couldn't beat me!
I think the art and audio for this game is really cute and really fits the vibe, you (and your daughters!) did a really great job with that!
Thanks for submitting this game, I had a lot of fun playing it!
- @robowarrior1982, @reecemungus, Do find a friend if you can, You can star the repository, I'll probably release a Better AI once the LD is over.
Thank you all for the kind words
I did the menu early on as I wanted to have levels and stuff like that (overscoping!). Then, I disabled it to quicken my tests. I just put it back on before submitting and it got no love... A real shame indeed. I'll put that in my notes for future Game Jam !
I should have done A Game-Over/Victory screen with Gfx as well.
- Getting close to lotuses
- Avoid clumping your frogs
- Count the number of possible move from each spots..
- @Kanity : thank you for the comments, I am guessing that the brutal jump to the target position is a bit jarring, I wanted to use some animation, but that was not fitting the existing drawing code (frogs belong to a quad, they don't have their own position...).
- @nickhellquist , @lightningst : Thank you for playing
- @budster16 Did you feel that the map were different enough ?
- I really liked the design of the board. For me it was all the time clear where I could go and what my steps would lead to. The visual feedback helped also a lot. Blinking frogs and highlighting the areas was very good.
- The UI is very simple, but fits to the game. The frogs look good.
- I also think that the music did not fit. But apart from that the frog sounds were also a little bit too much for me after a while of playing. You used different sound effects, which is a good thing, but maybe it was too loud or just too much, I can't really tell.
- The AI was not that strong, but what I really liked is, that you have a Multiplayer mode, which works well. Very cool!
Greetings from our Turn-Based-Strategy-Team to you. 48hours for this product...you've got my respect! ;)
I liked the little sounds the frogs make and the art is very cute.
Those who like to rate in a fair way have to think about all other games and how justifiable it is to give a rating higher than average, considering there are games out there that will do at least twice a better job in some categories. So it is quite possible that one person may enjoy the game but is still compelled to not give higher than average rating due to fairness to other games. Also, the sad truth is your game, despite being compo, will still compete with jam games due to some people not taking the compo/jam category into much consideration.
I completely agree with the necessity for pawn animation! I wanted the frog to hop from lilypad to lilypad! I had spotted a library to do so, but I had not implemented the frog position efficiently to add animation in the last hour of the dev... But yes, it's truly missing!
Good second comment: You win! I'll add that to my checklist of stuff to check when I am releasing. I tend to have the shortest game loop to efficiently test the game while coding, and forget that people only play once and need an ending! Next edition, nice end screen with a leaderboard!
I do agree with the rating process, and I am not sore to raters, I am disappointed not to have reached a top100 in some categories, but indeed, there are so many excellent entries above me!