Frog - A devlog for the devfrog!
Frog for NES - The joint effort of 3 programmers (@cacciatc,@dustmop,@eggboycolor) 1 composer (@kulor) and 1 artist (@2bitcrook) who had never worked as a team before.
This...is their story...told by the artist (who had never jammed before :D)
First time seeing Frog and haven't tried it out yet? You can download Frog and a NES emulator here!.
Quick pre-ramble
This was my first Ludum Dare/Jam and I really can't overstate how much fun it was! Playing so many games, leaving reviews and constructive feedback, seeing all the games (not just ours!) get played on a bunch of streams!
I can't thank everyone enough for playing our game and leaving a review/rating AND installing an emulator <3. We did want it to work in a browser emulator but it just sadly wasn't in the cards.
Pre-ramble aside - let's dive into how it all went down....
Our Team Leader Chris had the entire schedule planned out a week before, and it would prove to be a solid plan. We would chat throughout the day and have a meetup call at 9am and another at 9pm PST. (5pm and 2am for me but luckily I'm part owl :owl:)
72 hours remain - Dawn of the First Day
The jam began at 2am for me due to living in England but luckily I have the sleeping pattern of a raccoon. All 5 of us, like so many, were madly refreshing the ldjam.com page and waiting to see what the theme was. The craftier ones quickly went to twitter to find out the theme was indeed... Deeper and Deeper.
Once the theme was announced, we took a 30 minute recess of sorts to mull over and think of any ideas we could before jumping into a call to pitch them to one another. We batted around six ideas (actual notes from Team Leader Chris below!)
(1) kulor - Miner? Based on a C64 game that kulor played at PRGE--yeah that's right kulor hangs out a PRGE!
(2) eggboycolor - underwater exploration, go deeper but with limited O2. treasure its heavy. don't forget how heavy it is man.ANGRY SHARK!? ANGRY OCTOPUS!?
(3) crook - donkey kong clone with dragon and you go down down down. frog protagonist that uses tongue to pull items to you. single screen simple.
(4) eggboycolor - rogue-like, crawl and its hard.~
(5) dust "LAVA" mop - La Mulana type game. LAVAAAAAAAAA. Drain lava to get lower. Bats. CHR-RAM? Will you need notes?~
(6) bream - 1-4 player treasure hunter race. AI? randomly digging~
Then we held a vote and in a landslide victory, everyone had strong hopes for DK clone, but upside down! Or was it?
Even though we had settled on a platformer, AND a specific type of platformer as a basis (DK) we were still left to our own devices of what we actually wanted to do, and what we could do.
Half of the team (which is odd to think about when you're 5 people, so one person was .5 split? Sounds painful!) between being a DK game (goal is A to B), and a Bubble Bobble style game (defeat all enemies on screen to continue).Despite this, instead of worrying about it Chris made sure to note what everyone's plans were and if they were happy, and had something to do.
Chris, Eggboy and Dustmop dived into programming and speaking in hidden codes about "CHR BANKS" and "Overflows" and "Scenes", (you know, made up words (I kid of course! :D))
Meanwhile Kulor was busy studying Frog sounds and getting into the mindset of a Frog to design his music. I was then left to my own devices and fired up MSpaint and started working.
Frog's sprite would be the first to nail down and over the day I would slowly chip away at it, figuring out her style and overall design. The entire process looks something like this.
Before finalising the sprite, I did post this mockup in the group chat so everyone had a general image of what we were working towards and the kind of things we would expect.
At this point the concept of ladders were still in the mix, along with enemies and Spelunky style spikes you could walk through to avoid but would be deadly from the top! If you played Frog you'll also notice these spikes are a bit bloody! We would remove that near the end as it just didn't seem to fit the tone and general feel of a cute NES platformer!
At the end of day 1 we had gained a lot of ground. The title screen was in, we had a strong basic movement system with enemy actors lined up and ready, and the sprites were a flowing. Everything seemed like it was going great! We were on top of the world, it was all so simple and defined. We knew what exactly we wanted!
Narrator - The gang did not know what they wanted.
48 hours remain - Dawn of the Second Day
Day 2 rolled around and the big thing was to get most of the sprites into the actual game itself and working fine.
You could basically hear us all scream SHE'S ALIVE, SHE'S ALIVEEEEEE!! as thunder crashed in the background.
But so much of the game was still up in the air.
In the prechat for the meeting, Kulor and I began chatting. He brought up a great point from the Crash Bandicoot devlog/development about how they had most of the game planned out and Crash running around but something was just missing. Then inspiration struck when they introduced crates which fleshed out the entire game. Removing crates from Crash Bandicoot would take so much more out of the game's core identity than removing...say...coins from Mario. (Though levels would indeed feel a lot emptier without them!)
From this discussion I suggested that our hook be bubbles. (With the current plan to be still including game elements such as a tongue attack/whip, enemies, collectable fruit, a boss fight at the end)
With this in mind, we each soldiered on through the day. Surprising no one, it turns out that programming for the NES was not smooth sailing and a great deal of errors, crashes and audio issues took up Chris, Dust, and Egg's time. Kulor raised everyone's morale with tasty tasty tunes whilst I made a slap dash jokey titlescreen GIF that turned out to be closer to the end result than we thought.
A more serious focus for me was just generally polishing and adding more tiles. That mockup level went from looking like this.
To this.
Along with working on /designing enemies and their patterns.
12 hours later, everybody would roll into chat and come to an agreed conclusion. This project was kind of kicking our butts , and could it...could it be possible we bit off a bit more than our little Frog could chew?
There was still so much up in the air, and with only a day left I think I spoke for everyone when I yelled "The bubbles! Let's just focus on the bubbles!". We made the decision to cut out everything that wasn't the bubble, the tongue mechanic, the boss idea, enemies. We reeled it back and with this in mind, I think everyone shared the same image now.
A frog, and a bubble.
This meant a chunk of everyone's work was cut/scrapped. All of Chris/Dust/Egg's efforts on anything related to enemies and a HUD, all of my enemy mockups and lava mockups, and a chunk of Kulor's music (RIP ice stage theme).
At the end of the night Chris took pen and paper to hand and took hold of designing the levels that would make it into the final game.
Wearing a very handsome Wario Land tshirt if I might add.
Not long after the bubble mechanic was being implemented fully and using a frog in-lieu of a bubble, we frogspawned our way up to completing the first level. With this in place the levels came flowing with Dust and Chris working on everything and anything they could whilst Eggboy worked on the bubble code.
With Frog finally looking more like Frog everyone felt a bit better and got some rest...nearly. Eggboy did what Eggboy does and they went whole ham and coded through the night to get that bubble feeling the best that it could be!
24 hours remain - Dawn of the Final Day
The last day pretty much felt like a whirlwind. Everyone was testing levels, levels were tweaked, chunks rearranged.
Chris, Dust and Egg were working what felt like around the clock stitching the entire thing together, squishing down bugs and making sure the game didn't crash (until the very end which we left in! :D Can that be technically filed under an intentional crash if you know about it and leave it in? Up to debate I suppose!)
It was a mad dash to the finish but everyone felt a lot better. It was all coming together! Kulor and Chris went along with my mad idea of having a credit sequence, with Kulor doing that saxxy end song so many enjoy and Chris making it the entire jam goal to get a frog floating on a bubble, playing a hastily drawn saxphone.
And ultimately I think that was the real core of our team. Everyone had their strong points and if they didn't, someone else was right there to help them out. A real useful part for me personally was that Chris and Egg both have art backgrounds as well as programming which helped me a bunch throughout the 3 days. As for the font which so many praised that was from Kulor! I can't know 100% what went on with programming but from what I saw of the three chatting, it seemed like Dust, Chris and Egg all had their shining moments that helped this game go from some still images to an actual functioning game!
Dustmop even got to test Frog on an actual NES and take a picture of it :D.
Mmmmm CRT goodness.
Overall I had a blast with LD48 and will continue to play, rate and review as many entries as I can until it's over!
If you haven't checked out Frog yet I hope you do! I'm so thankful to everyone who has checked it out, rated it and left feedback!
Overall/Lessons/Advice
A good team leader is essential.
Really essential! A double edged sword to indie dev is the good side is you don't have a boss, but on the other hand...when the boss is away (doesn't exist)...the frogs will play (imagine a game with 20 levels, boss fights, collectable fruit, keys, a secret ending, tongue swinging mechanics)
Regular scheduled update/calls are very useful. Not just for pitching/batting around ideas but generally just having a bit of a laugh and chatting!
Try and focus on one thing, for half of the jam it was platformer with - bubble mechanic, multiple enemy types with attack patterns, behaviors and stun animations, 3 different themed areas with different obstacles like fire, ice, wind, collectable fruit for a secret ending, collectable keys as a mechanic to unlock doors and solve puzzles and a boss fight at the end. When you actually list everything out, it's too much for 3 weeks let alone 3 days!
It's cliché but have fun. If you aren't why are you doing it?
Every project, no matter how big or small, no matter how successful or "failure", is experience. You will use what you have learnt in future projects in some way!
Where does Frog go from here?
We currently plan on working on Frog more, and polishing that bubble to a fine lustre! (Or luster if you are inclined)
With a good amount of work, the plan would be to add around 30 levels, tighten everything up, add new environmental challenges the farther you go (magma/lava, wind and such) and finally ( and sadly) rename Frog to something more marketable/memorable and easier to find. We think we'd charge around $5 for the game in this state.
Above this would be doing all of that, adding thematic and more fleshed out zones, more player based mechanics like using a tongue grab or attack, different kinds of bubbles with different properties, and 30 more levels onto this, and finally an end boss/gauntlet. For this we're thinking we'd charge around $10.
If you actually read this novella of a post-dev write up, thank you! :frog: :saxophone:
*TLDR - How did 5 very attractive and modest people all work together so well? A mystery. But it was probably because they gelled well, adapted on the fly, lowered their scope when needed and focused on what was the core of the game. Also everyone had coffee. :coffee: *