Working his way up to become a great culinary artist.

Hey! Did some minor bugfixes that snuck past us, such as Frogbert eating his hat.

Check out the game here!

Hey all!

It's been a while since we posted something, so I figured I could share a bit about the concepts that Frogbert went through, from the initial idea to the finished concepts we worked off to create our entry.

Concepting the beginnings of Frogbert

When we read the theme, we tried out best to put down some ideas. It was fairly hard to come up with nothing, but while we were writing down ideas, our concept artist, Giraffalope, was drawing some cute frogs. Because who doesn't love frogs? Eventually she ended up with this chef frog, Frogbert. All of us on the team love cooking games and restaurant management games such as Overcooked, or Cook, Serve, Delicious!, or Diner Bros, so we figured, OK, let's do something like that.

You, Frogbert, start from nothing. Not even your chef hat! And the idea was (is?) to build up your restaurant, to upgrade and invent new recipes and continue adding new cooking stations and difficulty, going from your humble beginnings at the pond to a fine dining establishment. What we've made is a slice of that pie. But how did we want to present it?

At first, we were thinking literal conveyor belts - much like those in Overcooked. But it didn't quite fit our theme of a frog from humble beginnings.

As we continued to develop the concept, we exchanged the conveyors with streams of water with lilypads holding the ingredients. Giraffalope continued fleshing out the idea of the kitchen, adding the different elements, from customers to utilities to UI, which we then discussed amongst the team to figure out the scope of it and if we could do it in the time frame. This is our first Ludum Dare, after all!

At this point, we still hadn't quite figured out how we would start the whole thing. Because it didn't quite fit the theme of "you start with nothing". And perhaps it still doesn't really, but at least we made a bit of an effort! So we thought, OK, what if you don't even start with the hat? Perfect.

While Giraffalope was doing all these concepts, I was working on making all the 3D elements and setting up the environment in Unity. Our programmer, mathemagician, was making progress on the prototype.

From there on out, Giraffalope was drawing all of our UI elements, many which we couldn't even get around to implementing with the time constraints and our inexperience with Unity!

Here are the finished concepts that we basically made our game around. Unfortunate that we couldn't implement a nice system for the day cycle to move from morning to night. That's something we will likely want to implement later.

If you haven't already, check out Frogbert: Road to Culinary Stardom.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/frogbert-road-to-culinary-stardom

Thanks! -trmrddr

Even if you're cooped up inside, it's nice to get some fresh air, some light and to sing your stress away.

We had an issue where non-US keyboards couldn't type ? and ', so we fixed that by removing all of that! Who has time for proper grammar when there's business to be done?!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/life-is-hard-and-then-you-buy-a-cactus

Now go show your business boss what a hard working, outside the box and detail-oriented team player you are!