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 :droop:  So, let's get this show on the road; covering the ongoing development.  Mind you - you can get the game here - yes, it's post-1.0, and we use an open-source development model, so the game has always and does always have frequent public builds available that you can play right now.  http://www.frogatto.com/

Also, yes, it being open-source means you can get involved too - and you can use our engine to make your game, and you can sell it royalty-free.  No strings attached as long as you share any improvements you make to the engine with the world.


So, one big thing we're working on for an upcoming release is an alternate game mode; kinda loosely like "doodle jump" (or many earlier games doodle jump is ripping off, like NS-TOWER, or much more loosely, Kid Icarus), where you proceed horizontally or vertically, and the level behind you disappears - there's no story, it's just about more points the further you go.  We've cooked up a new, more modular tileset for this area;  a lot less organic than our current ones, but more flexible for making small tile arrangements:
(http://www.frogatto.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/arcade.png)


I've also been kicking on upgrading the forest area a bit, graphically speaking.  This is an older shot showing how the background got updated (for those who care, the background is some 4-5 parallax layers, depending on how you count) :
(http://www.frogatto.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/forestBackgroundComp.png)

This, then is the upgrades to the tree trunks and foliage.  I've still (grr) got a couple of upgrades to do to the trunks; especially trying to alleviate how the branches currently can only jut out directly-sideways.  But we're getting there!  This shot is also showing off one of the alternate palettes for the forest, used in the "autumn" section.
(http://www.frogatto.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Forest-Upgrades.png)

I haven't had a chance to play it, but boy it looks beautiful.

Dat there is one beautiful game thar, son

And what's this about a modable engine?

Yeah, I played it a few months ago.  It was a bit sparse, but even back then the polish is serious shine.  It's definitely got a good future  :beer:

Having beaten Frogatto, all I can say is...
Yessssssssssssssssssssssss

My only complaint with the game was sometimes spotty collision with enemies. It felt like I got unfairly hurt sometimes but I don't remember when so who knows.

Good luck and cheer!  :gentleman:

Frogatto's engine is open-source, under the GPL, so you can immediately use it to make anything you want with - for $0, and no royalties to us (as long as you share-alike).  The engine is not as flexible as Game Maker, but it's much, much faster, and it's suitable for nearly any "tile-based 2d game".  We're also partways done with adding some not-so-common "game kit" features like network-multiplayer.  And if you're uncomfortable with open-sourcing your game, we do actually completely own the engine, in a QT-style dual-licensing setup, so you could outright license the engine from us (that would involve some actual money, though).

We do have a level editor with some powerful auto-tiling capabilities; however, the GUI in the editor is still a bit sketchy.  Great for editing tiles,  great for placing objects/scenery, and you can set the bounds of objects that have them (like drawing a rectangle to define some monster's aggro range), but you can't graphically script behavior like you can in Game Maker.  We're working on that, but that's really hard (it more or less involves a complete, cross-platform gui kit, which is a significant part of an operating system, so that'd be very difficult to make).

What's an ace up our sleeve is that we have a really, really powerful scripting language we wrote, which is vaguely similar to Haskell; because it's a really high-level language, you're completely insulated from programming annoyances like "typing" or "memory management", and it prevents a lot of kinds of bugs that exist in C-style procedural languages.  It's also really fast - we tested it compared to python, and it's over 100x faster at some basic operations.  Because it's a high level interpreted language, you can do a lot of fun, crazy stuff on the fly - like composing a string that's the name of a function, and then using the string to call that function.  Also, knowing how "pure-functional" languages like it work is going to become increasingly important as a job skill in our massively parallel future.

Virtually all of the game logic is not written in C++; it's instead written in this language, which means that the entire game can be completely repurposed to do something else.  You could easily make a zelda-style adventure game, just by removing the main character's gravity, and making the up button walk north instead of frogatto's "look up" move.  We've already had one guy make a vertical-scrolling space shooter, and we've made pong, ourselves, without changing a single line of C++ code.



Mind you - we wrote this engine all on our own, but we're giving it away to the community; pretty much for purely altruistic reasons.  We would really appreciate if it gets used.  Our primary concern was just making our own game, but after that, we were kinda hoping to make a more general, "open-source" competitor to game maker.  But we need people to care - if they don't, we're going to lose heart.  (And tinkerbell will die.)



Regarding content:
The only thing we've "reserved rights to" in frogatto is some of the content.  Not all of it, though - a lot of it is free to share, and we're open to free-licensing anything that's not gonna amount to a cheap "dupe-and-sell" scheme.  Just ask.  In fact, we've already done so with some tiles - you can get a couple of old tilesets we've totally public-domained here:  http://opengameart.org/content/old-frogatto-tile-art


Also, everyone in this community should seriously get behind OpenGameArt - this site is your new best friend.  They exist for the sole purpose of collecting free art/sounds/music for indie game developers.  Help them, use them:  http://opengameart.org/

As many other people have said, the game has absolutely fantastic pixel art and animation, but the actual gameplay is a bit... boring, maybe? The game doesn't feature much variety to the run'n'jump'n'collect mindset, so even though the visuals are amazing, I didn't feel like going through it all.

Good luck with this, though :)

Yeah, but this should maybe get more attention.  I know some new indie devs have been looking for a different toolset from GM or other game-making devices.  I might pull this one apart and see how it works.

Also, don't we have a bunch of free assets from that assemblee compo?  Maybe one should add all that stuff to that mentioned website. 

i had no idea this was actually a tool semi-comparable to Game Maker. that fact should be advertised a bit more.

I know it's open-source, but what's the policy on someone making a game in your engine and then selling it?

THIS, is such a sweet compromise! I wish models like this was way more common!
Any thoughts about the cost yet?
cheers!

Fuck Froggato the game, lets take a look at this easily moddable engine with level editor!

...although it would be sort of a waste, since I just finished my engine/editor.  :shrug2:

Yeah, that's an interesting predicament, but the good news from our end is we don't have 'sacred cows'.  I mean, besides not gutting the game, we're very interested in changing stuff up to make the game more fun.  Partly because I'm a tad iffy on some of it at the moment.  One of the big reasons we got the game out the door is we just desperately need public feedback - the worst problem we have is that those of us on the team are just so incredibly used to and insanely good at frogatto, that we might be calloused to significant flaws, or just not see the obvious.  I mean, we're in a new era here, because this is an online game.  We're not out of business because it was "okay but not perfect" the first time - we do this in our free time, and I've put enough time into this that dammit, I want to get it right.   ;)

 :-\  Mind you, though, we're very much aware that we can't please everyone.  One gamer's "perfect game" is another one's "meh".  (Like, if you were to try and fix a "street-fighter" clone into something I liked, you'd be in an entirely different genre by the time you were done.)



Specifics:
Frogatto himself is always going to be a kirby/yoshi like grab-and-shoot character.  But we're looking to offer some massively different playstyles by making two additional characters - nene, and pato, into playable characters; respectively, nene's going to be a contra-like run-and-gun character, and pato is a fighting-style character who attacks with melee combos.

There's also some dramatic flexibility we're going for in game-modes;  right now, you've got a story-mode, and if that's not your thing, you're kinda .. boned.  As I speak, though, we're halfways into an arcade rush mode where there's no story, and you're just trying to beat increasingly difficult platforming challenges.  I was just working on a level for that today.

Difficulty, I think is one area where we've really fallen down for hardcore players.  It's just so damn hard to judge what's right and what's wrong.  There are so many people out there who straight-up won't play videogames where they have to redo major sections of the game - even just a whole level, if they die.  A lot of people just don't have time for that; they have a real life; games are fun but the moment they see a "game over" and have to redo a whole level to reach a boss or something, they're gone.  As a community, we game-devs have traditionally pissed on these people, and decided they don't deserve to enjoy our work.  I don't buy that; I think we should make something they can actually play.  I think that's just jackass elitism.

But at the same time, we kinda blew it for the hardcore gamers - at any point where I was making a level I really enjoyed, that was usually a sign it was viciously, nintendo hard.  Frogatto is kinda fun for me during the bosses, but the rest of the game is a breeze.  I mean - maybe that's it?  Easiness is boring, but maybe that's the majority of the whole problem, right there.  We don't have difficulty modes, yet, and we can hopefully do them very easily via both a halo-like system, and via dropping the "respawn near where you died" noob crutch we currently hand out.  Maybe once they're in, the game will be much more engaging for the hardcore players, and that'll bring all the magic back.




I think frogatto's core mechanic, as a character, is pretty sound.  We tried a whole mess of stuff; from firing energy shots, to doing kicks and punches, before we settled on this pretty unusual "throw" mechanic.  I can think of a few games vaguely like it;  such as kirby or especially mario 2, but I think it's still relatively virgin territory (as compared to making a run-and-gun game, which .. well  :cavestory:  ).  It's really hard to come up with unusual mechanics, because the platformer genre has been mined to death.

I do have a couple of ideas.  One really cool one we're not doing ... yet ... is having frogatto able to fire his tongue, stick to a ceiling, and swing from it.  I'd love to do that, but it's hellishly complicated.  Maybe someday.  (I've seen it done in one rare japanese title; nothing new under the sun, but it'd still be a fun and unique thing.)

If you can code, (like, busting open actual object scripts in a text editor), it's actually quite comparable, however, the reason we're not 'advertising' it as such, is that we're lacking what's pretty much the #1 feature of "game maker" - graphically scripting together behavior, without editing code.  It's arguable that to make anything unique and worthwhile, you need to script anyways, but we'd just get shelled by some people for not having that, and I don't know if they're right.

I really need to evaluate whether that's a reasonable omission.  The idea of introducing "second system syndrome" into frogatto is something we seriously, seriously shy away from.  Like; we could put a text-editing line in the editor to add formulas for certain events, but that's prone to error, and when do you draw the line and say that's better done by a real code editor program?  Every bit you add plumps up your code and makes it more of a mess to deal with.  Go too far, and you've got a train-wreck like netscape 5  (the one they never released because it killed the company).



(GPL) Open source means you're totally free to do that - as long as all the code you make for it is open-source, too.  There are other kinds than the GPL, but that's the one we picked.

Typically, open-source isn't about commercial/non - it's about sharing the code.  Commerciality is fine, just not being proprietary.


Probably a small royalty percentage.  Alternately a few grand - honestly, we're totally up in the air about it.  No clue, really.  Most likely - you yourself probably shouldn't know if you want to do it until you're a ways into a project, and think you've got something you don't want other people "ripping off".

Coolsies. You guys have a really awesome attitude about this project.

I downloaded the game yesterday and played for a bit. Y'all asked for feedback, so...

Feedback!

The game's got a ton of charm and a ton of good ideas. Little touches like the zoom-in when characters are talking and the moving tail on the voice bubbles are those little flourishes that make a game special. Starting out in Frogatto's house and being able to return there at any time makes the world feel larger than just the story campaign. It makes me really, really want to like the game.

What's holding me back from liking the game more is the controls. A platformer lives and dies by how fun it is to control the character, and fortunately controls are easier to fine-tune than bad level design. But controlling Frogatto just isn't very fun. He feels a little sluggish, a little unresponsive.

A few specifics:

-Not enough air control. Jumping to the right and holding the left in midair will pull you back some, but not enough to really navigate. Makes landing far-off ledges difficult. Generally jumps feel hard to aim.

-Tongue controls. Frogatto can only shoot his tongue straight forward, but much of the time there are short slopes on the ground that crawling enemies like the ants go up and down. If there's a slope in front of you and an ant coming up it, you can't hit the ant with your tongue, but the ant will hit you when it's close. Feels unfair that you can get hit before you're able to hit the enemy, at least with enemies that are so common.

-Spitting controls. Frogatto can spit up at an upward angle, straight forward, or right down in front of him, but I think the angles need to be tuned. Maybe his upward shot needs to be more horizontal, because it seems most of the time no matter which way I spit an enemy I don't hit any other enemies. Been playing it long enough that I feel like I should be adapted to the controls by now, but it's still very hard to aim shots.

-Wall hug is maybe too sensitive. Trying to jump to the top of a ledge is often canceled because Frogatto grabs the wall on the way up and starts sliding down. Not sure how to tune that.

-Collision box needs to be more forgiving. When walking to the edge of a platform, Frogatto often falls off when it looks like he should have been able to move another few pixels to the edge to make a leap. Might be mroe of a flaw with the art assets. Generally, allowing for a little bit of forgiveness with ledge jumping is doubleplus-good.

Basically, I don't have any problem with repeating chunks of a platforming game when I miss a leap and want to try again. But when getting back to where I was takes a lot of trial-and-error no matter how many times I've been there, it becomes a slog. When just getting around a simple stage involves a lot of basic jumps that you have to try again, it's trouble.

By no means does that mean make the game easier; better controls can usually mean harder gameplay. In Dave Rosen's design tour of Knytt Stories (http://blog.wolfire.com/2008/12/knytt-stories-design-tour/) he says it best: "With better controls, you can make more complicated levels without making them frustrating or unfair. The overall difficulty of the game is a combination of the difficulty of controlling your character, and the difficulty of the challenges your character faces. And it's much more satisfying to have an agile character defeating complex challenges than a clumsy character defeating simple ones." See also: Super Meat Boy.

See, right now I feel like the difficulty curve in Frogatto isn't the game's design, only how long it takes to master the controls, which is too long at this point. Frogatto feels like he should be fast and precise.

But the design is sound and really compelling! I'm probably going to go back and play more presently. And I look forward to digging around in your engine!

this looks like all of those awesome mockups people never make as a game. can't wait for it.

The background art is beautiful, the characters are nice pixel art but just look too cartoony for the backgrounds IMHO.

It makes the characters really *pop* out from the background.


I've seen a lot of arguments for or against;  on some of my/others' projects, the sprites in question  have been accused of mismatching the background.  But if you make them mesh into the background, then people accuse the sprites of getting lost on the terrain.  Damned if you do, damned if you don't.   :laughter:  I've come to the conclusion that as long as they're reasonably compatible, it doesn't matter in practice.  If squaresoft can do this in half their titles, and have them worshipped as classics, it's clearly not something for me to worry about.

Respectfully disagree. I feel the graphics are impeccable. Nothing wrong in that category. But hey, that's me.

As much charm and polish as it had, I found the game terribly boring when I played it (maybe a month ago or so?). An easy game is not, however, necessarily boring -- and a hard game is not necessarily fun (this one is a little more obvious).

The way things are laid out, the player is generally fighting the same enemies many times over and in situations not awfully different from one another.


So put them in somehow! ):

There are a lot of people out there who like games. Why cater to those who don't enjoy what you enjoy? Why make a game only 'kinda fun' for yourself, one of those pouring time (and maybe love) into the project?

Maybe it's just... a different mindset, but if you enjoy something, there must be some others out there who enjoy it too.

Difficulty levels would be a great way of dealing with something like this too, though, if you'd do something like make two entirely different sets of levels (or at least manual modifications) for each. Cater to multiple groups and make it clear that 'easy' is for those who want to breeze through and 'hard' (or whatever you'd call difficulty levels here) is for those who want to enjoy nintendo-hard levels.

~

But like I also said you can make it a breeze and still fun. Right now the options open to the player seem pretty minimal, because all you're doing is... killing simple enemies via simple means, and grabbing coins. In (for example) Spelunky, there are many ways to deal with all sorts of obstacles. Does Frogatto even have any non-enemy obstacles? (Aside from... jumping over things.) I can't recall any.

I'd say some nicer things but I have to go now.

I remember playing this a while back and the biggest disappointment to me was the character's limited skillset. I mean he's a frog, so I expected hugely that his tongue grabbing ability would have many more uses besides spitting enemies at one another, or that that mechanic itself would have some sweet variations like having only certain types of enemies able to defeat others, or swallowing bullet-shooting enemies would let me shoot bullets or something. Anything, really, that differentiated spitting this enemy out vs. spitting that enemy out. I kept expecting to see something like this happen, but it all felt like an elongated introduction to something better that never came.

I didn't say the graphics weren't impeccable, I commented on a clash of styles. As I said before, the graphics are lovely.

Agreed. I played the most recent version of Frogatto this past weekend and while the game is simply freakin gorgeous and has lots of lovely little touches, the core gameplay feels a bit rough and unwieldy.

That said, most indies game devs could learn a thing or twenty from Frogatto  ;) And the engine seems quite solid, I'll definitely be peeking at it when I have some time.

I really would appreciate help brainstorming stuff, as suggested by the boldfaced text below.  This is probably the single best way you guys can help me - especially stuff like Xion's comment about frogatto's tongue doing different effects.



Only once you get into the dungeon, you finally run into some traps that attack you (swinging chains, retracting spikes, retracting floor blocks).  I'd like to fill the whole first 3/4 of the game with interesting traps.

Suggestions for traps, especially for how to destroy them are welcome.



Yeah; this is a problem I've known about for a long time, but I haven't had time to start addressing it until this last month, and it's gonna take a while, since making new monsters takes a lot of time.

It seems to me that the biggest way to make new enemies interesting is to give them very different movesets.  I've been doing that with most of the new forest enemies - I've got mushrooms that hop around and shoot their caps at you, floating mushrooms that spawn more of the former, and mushrooms that fly at you like guided missiles.

If you have ideas for new enemy designs, suggestions are welcome.


Interesting.  I kinda didn't want to go the "different effects" route, because that felt like it was derivative of yoshi, but I really should stick to my mantra of not being too afraid to kype good ideas - I mean, I don't want to be a straight-out kirby clone where swallowing an enemy gives you its power, but it'd be worth it to maybe take the yoshi idea in a different direction than SMB did.

For example, a few ideas that come to my mind are:
- some enemies are explosive, and give you a big AoE when they connect.
- some enemies are acidic/incendiary, and leave a ground-hugging trail of "harmful" above them.
- some enemies are spore-y, and put nearby enemies to sleep (e.g. putting them in their on-back position) in a very large AoE around the contact point.
- some enemies are fiery, and might ignite flammable stuff.  Could ignite candles, detonate explosives, and burn-up wooden traps (or maybe burn net-based traps?).
- some enemies are frosty, and become an ice-block you shoot out.


I'd really, really welcome any ideas you have for different effects.

An alternate idea is to do this as a completely different system:  instead of having the above be based on individual enemies, you instead unlock powerups as the game goes on, which let you do the above effects to specific enemies at will - a bit like choosing a weapon in cave story.  You select the fire ability, frogatto himself becomes a red color, and now, all enemies spewed out are fireballs instead of bugs.

 :'(  It's so hard to make major design decisions like this because they're such a huge commitment to go into.



Because as I said, that's jackass elitism.  That's just completely against why I do art (to me, game-making is an art; mind you, I am a programmer).  I do art to reach people who are different from me and give them a new experience they haven't had before.  I'd love to make a game I also enjoy, which is what I'm trying to figure out now, but I am absolutely not going to give them the bird, and make something they can't play.  This is non-negotiable.  I hold people who do that in contempt, and I don't want to be one of them.

I've been on the bad side of this; especially because I grew up during the 80s, there were tons of games I've played that were way, waaay too hard, and actually remain inaccessible to me, even today.  Like Ghouls and Ghosts/Ghosts and Goblins.  I didn't beat that until I had an emulator and could cheat.  That's just offensive; like a club I'm not welcome to join.  I can do that to someone else, but I'd be a total dick if I did.  No thanks.

  ??? Hmmm.  Here's an interesting idea that's so good I should try doing it tomorrow - you can swallow certain "lighter-than-air" enemies ... and your gravity reduces by half.  (e.g. you jump twice as high, are floaty, etc)


Seriously - everyone - help me brainstorm this stuff.   :handforkL: :eyebrows: :handknifeR:

Goodness this is a big topic unfolding in my head.

In my eyes, things are the other way around -- although perhaps my experience has been different, not fully enjoying several games as a child and growing up to best them years later... along with way too many games being cakewalks and having absolutely shitty 'hard' difficulty modes because the game wasn't really designed with them in mind.

Creating a game that is very easy is flipping the bird to those who get easily bored of those kinds of games.

Creating a game that is too hard for someone to defeat is, in my eyes, quite the opposite: Even one who is not exceptional at playing games can rise to meet the challenge.

You can't make yourself interested in a game that bores you, but it is very possible to improve and get better at a game that's too hard...

~~~

Also you have basically said that everyone who makes games is involved in jackass elitism, because no matter what you do -- a game will not be for everyone. 'Too hard to play' is not the only way to kill off interest from otherwise interested parties! It is, in fact, one of the few ways that can actually be overcome (I realize, however, that not everyone wants to do this, and that not everyone is at the right skill level to overcome it in a reasonable time).

~~~

Maybe I should just go make a thread about this instead of not helping you at all here in your thread :x

There's a difference between "difficult to complete" and "difficult to control." I still think the biggest obstacle I had was Frogatto's handling. Same-y gameplay is acceptable when that gameplay is intrinsically enjoyable. I think the game as-is has possibly more than enough mechanics already. It wasn't til after I'd won that I re-opened a save and bought the power-ups I'd skipped over. Energy shots, time slowdowns, invincibility... I didn't have enough to buy these powerups when I first came to the store, and didn't think about them again. The game's quite short, will packing in more stuff help?

I don't think everyone has the ability to rise up to a hard game. I can, and I do like hard games, but I know people that can't. If a game is too hard for them, they'll just stop and play something else.

Both options are flipping the bird to the opposite party. You can't make a game for everyone. If you try to fill everyones expectations, you will fail.

However, making a hard game isn't elitism. You aren't a elitist for what you make, but why you make it. If you make a game hard because people who aren't good at games don't deserve to play it, then that is elitism. If you make a game hard because you enjoy hard games, then that isn't. Someone can make an easy game, and say "Any hardcore gamer that's too good for my slow paced game doesn't deserve to enjoy it anyways." This is still elitism, although not as stereotypical.

Anyone who isn't good at games that plays a hard one will get frustrated by the difficulty and stop playing.
Anyone who is good at games and plays an easy one will get frustrated from boredom.
It's the same thing.

My advice is: "Who cares, make the game the way you would like to play it."

When I who cares, I don't mean "Who cares about the people who won't like it, they suck anyways", I mean "Who cares about the people who won't like it, someone will hate it anyways."

This simply isn't true.  Humans "plateau" at a certain point, and past that point, no matter how hard they try, they really can't get any better.  The thing that makes this harsh is that quite a few people think and react slower than other people; it's just how they were born.  This means that games built around high-speed twitch reflexes, which platformers are almost a canonical example of, are largely inaccessible to them, even if they like the genre.  Right now, the problem with games is that we typically target games at only the best players out there.

Just because a guy is 4'9" feet tall doesn't mean he doesn't like playing basketball - it just means he can't compete on a normal court with "normal" 7'3" players.  I mean, hell, NBA is a perfect example of what I'm talking about - it's a sport that only the statistical outliers, the guys who are freakishly tall, can participate in, and the rest of us have to sit on the sidelines.  I am not making a game targeted at some freakish niche of twitch freaks; I am making a game that everyone on the sidelines can play.  Now, yes, I don't care about making a game the kids on the shortbus can play, but I want to make a game that at least the vast majority of average people can play.  People with average "plateaued" abilities won't ever be able to play something only accessible to those who are exceptional.

A perfect example is starcraft.  I LOVE starcraft - it's easily one of my favorite games, period, but I have really, painfully bad macro.  I can't play the game above the "slow" speed setting.  I have been playing for over a decade now, and after my initial improvement, no matter how hard I try, I can't up my focus-change speed - I am simply just not biologically wired to be capable of that.  I have plateaued.  If blizzard decided the game should only cater to people who can play on "fast", I would effectively be unable to enjoy what's arguably my favorite game.  It wouldn't BE my favorite game.   :addicted:  In fact, AFAIK, blizzard kinda HAS done this for MP, since afaict, you're required to play on fast.  As a result, I never play online MP.  Think about how fucking messed up that is, really.

If you do shit like this, you alienate what could otherwise be 90% of your "foaming-at-the-mouth" fanbase - people for whom you've otherwise made the perfect game, but who can't play your game because it demands reaction/etc times they will never achieve no matter how hard they try.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/8/4/


If you just fundamentally disagree with me on this, please go away.  You will never convince me otherwise on this point, and you're wasting your time.  I know you think you're being "helpful" by trying to clue in this hopeless newbie, but you're not.  Please stop.

Sure you can.  Halo is a wonderful example of a game that scales - and I love halo.  Starcraft (aside from that bit about forcing the high play speed in MP) also scales wonderfully.  Frogatto doesn't have difficulty levels, and I think the solution really is that simple - just add difficulty levels!

 8)  If I'd added them before release, then we probably wouldn't be having this discussion.  Then again - I wouldn't have been aware of this being such a huge deal if we hadn't released.  (For example, virtually all of our friends who tested the alpha version, and most of the sites who've reviewed the game, have thought the difficulty was "just right").


I'm interested in making a game me and my friends can play.  This is non-negotiable.  I'm flexible about almost everything, but not this.  Making frogatto accessible to regular people is the one design point I will not budge on, period.  I have made videogames which I can't play with my buddies, and ... I am never interested in doing that again.



Regarding difficulty levels:
So what I'm loosely considering is doing a hybrid "Halo" type solution with a few smatterings from "Dark Castle" and a few other titles.  The main level track's level-layout will remain the same.  What will change is the damage of the player and monsters.  On hard difficulty, there will be more bad-guys, and there will be considerably more dangerous variants.

Right now, for example, we've got squirrels in the dev version who toss nuts out of their trees, at you.  We cooked up a version that is able to make aimed shots rather than just random tosses.  That, right there, might be the switch that gets flipped to make them "hard" - besides buffing their damage and HP.


Besides that, I'm mulling over making a bunch of nintendo-hard "optional areas", which are somehow indicated as such.  You can go there, but it's completely optional, although you'll be rewarded if you do.

I am not being passive-aggressive. I am not dancing around the point, here.

How did you get "Droqen thinks he is being helpful and considers me a hopeless newbie" from me saying "Maybe I should go away and stop not being helpful in this thread about your game"?

I have, in fact, realized that perhaps we disagree on a fundamental level. I was already stating that, you know, maybe I'd stop talking about this here, because I am not being helpful.


:/

... 'Freakish freaks' aside, I'd like to point out that you have not at all touched my point of "You can't make yourself interested in a game that bores you" but have rather focused on a very extreme aspect of only part of what I was saying.

I think I will leave and do my best to let our differences lie where they may.

Best of luck to you!
(Also, keep it up. I'm sure there are many who appreciate the game you're making! -- Including many in this thread.)

Your game looks nice, although I haven't played it.  (dial-up)
Oh, and calm the hell down, dude. :facepalm:

I meant ignore people complaining on the internet. Making the game easy for the sake of your friends is a great reason.

I wish I didn't feel the need to argue with people, because arguments on the internet suck. Unless anyone has anything very important to say on the matter, let's all shut up, and get back on topic:
The game is repetitive.

I think having moves you unlock throughout the game would help, as you would always be doing different things. I think expanding the shop to have more upgrades would be cool too.

Drogen:  Thanks.  Apologies for the confrontational response; I've just had some guys get ... scary obsessed with convincing me of stuff in the past (e.g. wouldn't leave me alone for months, even after bans and such).  I figured that if I just directly explained why I'm passionate about that, you could respectfully disagree with it, and I appreciate that you did.  Wesnoth has a very addictive, but very compelling core mechanic, and it's brought out the crazy in people:
http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=29308

I think most games out there are missing the mark by a surprisingly short distance, rather than being something essentially unpalatable to them, and impossible to redeem by any means.

Usually when I find people who dislike a genre, (like me disliking street-fighter clones), it's not because I actually 'hate the genre', but because the current status quo in the genre doesn't offer enough strategic depth to be interesting to me.  Sometimes this is just simply "the right formula but not hard enough".  Final fantasy is a very good example for me because...  I want to like it so bad, but the complexity of battles in e.g. FF5 is just too simple for me.  Although they graphically look very different, when you really sit down and crunch the design, FF5->FFT are very, very similar games (stats, job classes, etc); the latter just added one key feature that made all the difference for me:  "position".  Because that requires completely new art assets, and a completely new UI, rendering-engine, AI, and a bunch of other stuff, it was a colossal feature addition in terms of changing an actual written game, so big it merited another whole game.  But just to the "design document" itself, it was a fairly trivial change.  In a sentence, it was like "why don't we do FF5, but put the players on a rectangular grid and give them varying movement abilities?"  And just that one change, turned the game for me from "unplayable"->"awesome".  I loved the core genre idea of "turn-based battles in a story-driven fantasy world", but the strategy just needed to be deeper to make the game fun.

FF5 is a combination of the simplicity collapsing strategy (buy enough potions to outlast the enemy's DPS => win; ergo I find the game easy), and it's also a combination of replayability.  Because the game model is so simple and constrained, I can't run into the emergent, unusual situations that always happen when I play position-based strategy games.  A fight in FFT can be so many things based on who moves where; you can have ambushes, divide-and-conquer, flanking, distractions - a fight in FF5 is always ~4 guys in a row fighting a row of monsters.



Street fighter is very similar for me;  I love the core genre idea of timing-based hand-to-hand combat with combos and all, but the positioning and terrain are either very simple, or non-existent.  The game that did it for me was Bungie's Oni.  It was like street-fighter, except with completely free "WoW/GTA"-style movement, which meant you could have massive fights against whole gangs of guys, where you had to crowd-control who you were facing at any given time, and could even use enemies as melee weapons (such as in a throw).  Unlike FFT;  Oni failed to fully execute  (in this case, including SF's key feature of multiplayer), so I've basically been driven away from the genre unless someone else does something similar (wolfire might be doing it with Overgrowth (http://www.wolfire.com/)).  I think there's a huge opportunity there; a hit waiting to happen if someone hits all the right notes.  I mean, GTA would be so close if it had street-fighter style combos and throws.  It could happen.

This is part of a larger phenomenon, and I really agree with Daniel Cook's article on the subject - I was blown away how closely his thoughts matched mine:
http://www.lostgarden.com/2005/09/nintendos-genre-innovation-strategy.html

tl;dr is that market forces drive genres to standardize on one set of mechanics to the expense of all others, and that all but a minority of players need other now-unsupported mechanics to enjoy the genre.  Once they're standardized on that one set, the majority of people lose interest in the genre because it's no longer doing what's necessary for them to enjoy it.


I really think all genres are fundamentally enjoyable.  So yeah - I think you CAN make yourself interested in a game that bores you - it just takes some small tweaks to the design (which as in the FFT example above, might be some huge tweaks to the actualized game, which of course speaks to an epic benefit from prototyping).  I think the best opportunity with frogatto is that I can do it without breaking the game for the many people out there who want to like platformers, but can't play at a high level.



Yeah.  Right now I'm really kinda  :shrug2: on the current contents of the shop, since some of the abilities seem to be kinda messy tech-demo experiments.  I'm very, very tempted to move to a mana-based system like in Zelda:LttP, to handle ability usage, because getting an ability right after you kill an enemy generally isn't so useful...  because you need it before that enemy - so you can actually use the ability anywhere where there are monsters that aren't clustered.  Anyways, though, I personally just think far and away, the same-ness of the monsters is the absolute crippling factor that makes the whole game so redundant.

The next release won't solve this.  It's targeted at implementing arcade mode.

But the release right after that is meant to overhaul the forest, and add in a ton of new enemy types for the forest - my goal is to not recycle a single enemy type from seaside in the forest, and in fact to have most of the guys in the forest have completely unique movestyles, and threat-methods.

I unfortunately won't be getting to the cave for that second release; limited scope and all.

I think a mana system would be neat. You could have a key for using them and a key for switching them or have certain combinations of buttons use them.

Another way of doing it is you still pickup powers from killed enemies, but instead of a time limit, you have a powerup button that uses the powerup you have, and limited uses. You could only have one at a time, and picking up the same one wouldn't stack, just refill. This way you still get them from enemies, but you can use them when you want to, instead of having it run out right away.

Although you could just combine both methods and use a system like for metriod's missiles and super missiles. This would probably be a good choice, as it's been proven to work, but they would feel more like items than powerups that way. (Unless you like the sound of that.)

To riff on that, a neat idea would be to treat some powerups vaguely like the bombs in Raiden II.  That game was a top-down plane shooter, and killing enemies sometimes spawned these bombs you could stockpile.  Typically, you'd have 4 or so, IIRC, and maxed out at seven.

Screen-clearers would qualify nicely.  Seems to me like the ideal ones for individual items, rather than drawing from the mana pool, are things that have some single, big effect, and things that might have "bad contention" with the mana pool.  What sometimes happens if you have powers A and B, and using A is "nigh mandatory", B will typically get neglected if it draws from the same mana pool - even if it's a great power.  Whereas if it's just on, like, a cooldown, or an ammo system, it's much, much more welcome to be used.   A loose example that applies for me is the 3 battlecruiser powerups in SC2 SP; they contend for the same mana, but unfortunately are all only useful at the same time.  For their ridiculous price, I was hoping to benefit from all of them.  I don't mind contention when it's a choice between similar things (yamato cannon or missile pods?), but when two things (missile pods and defensive matrix) would be complementary, it's kinda lame.

Brainstorm:
- screenclearers
- reflex
- hp-based shielding - a shield that can only get hit X number of times.  Might just be an impenetrable bubble, might be the "rotating orbs that each break individually" thing.
- time-based shielding (e.g. invincibility)
- time-based bodily lethality (mario's star power)
- screenwide stunning (not a time stop, but triggering every monster to get knocked on it's back).
- ethereality (ability to walk through physical enemies/shots, but vulnerability to energy/magic)
- fear (enemies run away from you;  unlikely to be done because it'd be hard to code)


High-frequency stuff like energy shots should probably draw from a mana pool, mostly because they're similar in purpose (usually dealing damage), and contention between similar stuff is fine.  I think I want a fairly controllable cap on the maximum damage potential of your mana - amongst other things, just to help keep balance easier to do.

Brainstorm:
- the usual damage dealers;  c.f. kirby
- a shockwave that sends all enemies flying away from you - hopefully in such a way as to knock a bunch of them into a pit.

I really don't feel a whole whack of new abilities would be necessary.

IMO you just need to make Frogatto's current abilities more enjoyable to use. He has a LOT of neat little abilities, most of which are mostly useless and/or difficult to control. Even his tongue is not very fun to use.

For example I would try to think of some way to allow the player to hit things on an angle with his tongue. I know you are somewhat following Kirby's example here, and I'd like to point out that Kirby is fun to control because his movement is super tight. He is agile. And his main ability of sucking things in, analogous to Frogatto's tongue, is done in a 'cone' area of effect in front of him. So things on a tiny slope in front of you are not impervious to attack.

Similarly it's quite frustrating to use the hyper-crystal shoot ability. Ignoring the fact that it 'locks' out the tongue and so you can't pick up any items, it has the same limitations as the tongue in terms of directional weakness. Frogatto really has very little ability to deal with enemies that are directly in front of him but a few pixels lower than him, which feels wrong to me.

Repetitiveness is definitely an issue but again, if you're looking to the Kirby analogue, a lot of enemies got recycled heavily in that game. I feel like the effort could really make a much more positive impact focusing on the Frogatto control scheme.

Other little abilities of Frogatto's that I love but which seem to get limited/no use in the game:

- When you duck and 'somersault'. Is there a purpose to this? I love the animation.. but maybe he could slink along the ground to get through small openings? (a la DKC)
- His 'twirl' attack. Seems handy to do damage to the occasional enemy which is impervious to normal jumps but also feels superfluous 90% of the time

Improving these to their full potential would make a world of difference.

Standard my 2¢ disclaimer, etc.

Progress:
- a couple more level stubs for arcade mode have been added; some related bugs got fixed.
- implemented that 'swallowed enemy affects gravity' idea
- bunch of polish on the tree trunk parts; added some significant new components.



Dave's argument was that it being only a direct line (as it is with yoshi, as well) makes aiming a fun challenge;  if it doesn't matter if an enemy is behind stuff, then you don't have to aim your tongue.  It's like a shooter with regular shots, or guided shots.

Nevertheless, I totally agree fixing up the tongue angling is something we need to do.




Actually, I'm probably going to remove them, energy-shot included.  Running down the list;  the duck+roll existed because it was gonna be a big puzzle-unlock.  You'd have to gain the roll ability in order to roll through certain tiny passages.  What sucks about this, is that ..  it's this big "one-off" thing.  You use it for just that one thing (getting through passages), and it doesn't have any other real use in the game.  We could make it have other uses, except we've already got moves for those - like the slide.

The dive-attack is a direct-damage attack; it might work better if we switched it from that, to being a damageless knockback, or a damageless "flip-enemies" AOE ability.  In fact, I'm attracted to the latter, because I'd like to make a number of environmental elements spawn spittables (and regen them every time you leave the screen) - and if you "slam" near them, they might trigger dropping the spittable.  Just adding a general "thwumped" verb would be a really useful thing to have in several situations.

Shots will probably be ditched because shooting is more nene's thing.  Frogatto firing shots dates from a very old version of his design where frogatto was basically a contra/metroid-like.  Frogatto is neoriceisgood's (our other artist's) OC, and he's basically been pipe-dreaming the thing for the last decade.  Only once we actually made the game, did we end up trying the tongue thing, and found it was much more fresh/interesting than being "yet another contralike".


I really would love to do that thing I mentioned about the tongue basically being a "hookshot" which can let you swing from terrain.  There was some really obscure japanese game that did that - I should go find it...

Found it:
http://users.telenet.be/twin-dreams/Super_Famicom/Umiharakawase.html
http://users.telenet.be/twin-dreams/PSone/Umiharakawase_Shun.html

So many possibilities...

 :addicted: The rope physics are a bit scary, but such is life.

I get the feeling frogatto as a character could be much more acrobatic. Kind of like in Umi Hara Kawa Se but almost trapeze-like, and using the same motions to gain a tactical advantage in combat by, say, using his tongue as a kind of pole-vault to get a higher jump, or swinging from a collapsible ceiling tile (stalactite/icicle/whatever) and then letting go, leaving it to come crashing down on foes.

Speaking of icicles it would be hilarious if there were cold blocks/tiles that your tongue would involuntarily stick to for a moment or something.

it can be, but here it isn't. Due mostly, I think, to the absolute abundance of slopes and jumping enemies and situations where this kind of thing happens in the levels. If it were a rarer occurrence it might be more tolerable, but when you have to do it for almost every enemy it becomes a huge chore.

Maybe you could let the shorter-ranged tongue attack be more forgiving, with a wider range, and let there be maybe a further-reaching analogue that gives the same precision challenge.

unrelated: it could also be interesting to give enemies specific weak points, like an armored or shielded enemy that can't be swallowed and is only vulnerable from behind but turns around slowly, or location-specific enemies against whom you need to use the environment, like an enemy that's invincible except against spikes you have to push them into by spitting things at 'em.

Another related idea is the possibility of your tongue reflecting upwards off of slopes in front of you.  This might not be compatible with the "hookshot" tongue idea, though.


Anyways, in other news, we've finally got the arcade levels actually wired into the arcade room that's right off the titlescreen.  We've also got another level or two, there.  Gameplay isn't totally put together on these, though;  you don't die from falling off the bottom (kid icarus-style) yet.  Still trying to decide if we want the level to slowly encroach on you or not.  We might do a rising-acid thing to give players a second-chance if they stumble into it momentarily.


Also, with that snazzy new "progress icons" thing;  I'm gonna name this thread after each release milestone, and go from 0->100% on each one.

along with making the tongue a hookshot, you could be able to hold enemies at the end of the tongue and whip them around slamming them into other enemies and the ground to damage them.

i think that would be cool

Played the demo!

Really cool looking project. The graphics definitely pulled me in, but the gameplay didn't keep me for very long. I didn't really enjoy using any of the abilities, but I did love all the tilesets.

I feel like the game needs a clearer direction that makes the gameplay more unique. Like if the platforming required use of all the abilities.

-Dan

It's definitely a cool idea.  Not sure how workable it is for regular enemies (how one would control it is the scary bit).

One twist would be for frogatto to be able to pull oversized blocks (2-3 tiles square).  Slowly, with exertion, but maybe enough to drop them from above.


My feelings exactly - it'd be best to end up with something like kirby, wherein all the abilities are central to playing the game.  Especially, kirby's flight and enemy-grabbing feel joined at the hip, even though it's only graphical justification.

Huge note:  we have semi-weekly dev builds up here: http://www.frogatto.com/download
This means you can actually try out the changes I'm yammering about, rather than relying on idle speculation.

At the moment I write this; the windows one is almost a month old.  Check the timestamps, I'll get ben to update them.


Arcade Progress:
- Arcade levels are now actually accessible from the titlescreen of the game.  We only have two varieties; horizontal, and vertical takes on "getting as far into the level as you can, and getting more points the further you get".
- vertical arcade levels auto-scroll and kill the player if you can't keep up;  this speed can procedurally increase over time
- arcade levels can include optional elements - including entirely optional segments, that only appear further in.  We don't use this yet.
- we don't have a nice presentation when you die and it tallies up your points.  Doing this kind of stuff is unfortunately awkward because we don't have a way to do it, yet, without doing a hardcoded dialogue layout in C++.  We'll get there.

Other Progress:
- I've refactored the entire damage system in frogatto, because there was a ton of stuff we just couldn't do.  For example, all the stuff we talked about in this thread.  A few key examples:  we had no concept of damage type; no way to react differently to different kinds.

We also couldn't cap the DPS of enormous streams of shots - consider exactly what happens when you attack a boss with the fire-breath in kirby.  Your damage is only dealt every second or so.  If literally every shot (every individual little puff of fire that makes up the attack) dealt damage, the boss would be dead almost instantly.  It's actually kind of amazing just how many shots get spewed with an attack like that.  It's dozens of times higher than my intuition told me.

Previously, we had sort of a half-implemented thing which tracked the "source" of the damage, and rendered a target invulnerable to that specific attacker, until some set time in the victim elapsed (and this time was really arbitrary, usually when the object entered a new animation).  This had no provision for giving the attack, itself, control over the cooldown.  I ripped that system out, and replaced it with something much simpler:  when a character gets hit, they mark when.  Every attack has a numerical cooldown value.  When it hits, if the time between now and when the victim last got hit is less than this value, the attack is cancelled.  From this, it has the nice side-effect that if an attack is set to zero, it always hits (which was a must-have feature).


- Also, I've begun a new copy of the player character which experiments with some radically different physics, trying to make the character much easier to control.  This is accessible by entering the editor (control+e), and opening the level "test4.cfg".  This is hugely a work-in-progress, so you can expect severe screwiness at times.  I'm abandoning most preconceived decisions we had made (such as the character sliding down during wall-clings) in favor of just free-experimentation.  Not everything may be plausible in the real game; some stuff might be game-breakingly powerful.

In this new player, there's a fire-breath attack accessible by pressing "d".

FYI, I put up new Mac and Windows builds yesterday.

As part of a really offbeat experiment, I just hacked together an RPG character in frogatto's engine - thus far, just able to walk around on a map, like zelda/chrono.  This did not take a single line of C++.  It's not in the latest public builds crimson_penguin just posted, but if you're able to compile from trunk, it's visible on the level named test5.cfg  (if you can't compile from trunk, you could still conceivably grab the associated level, image, and object file, and they should run in the previous build.

This is the core control code thus far;  if you're interested in any explanation, ask away and I'll explain.  Those interested might not that this took, start to finish, maybe 30min of coding/testing.  In just 30 minutes, I was able to implement the heart of a completely different game.  Frogatto's engine isn't good for anything that's not "2d sprites moving over a tiled, square background", but if that describes your game, it's damn near a glove fit.  (We still have a few things that aren't generalized, but if anyone needs them to be, we can quickly get them to that.)