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[crimson_penguin]

After 2 years of development, Frogatto is out!

An old-school 2d platformer game, starring a certain quixotic frog. From the creators of Battle for Wesnoth comes this exciting jump-and-run platformer. Frogatto has gorgeous, high-end pixel art, pumping arcade tunes, and all the gameplay nuance of a classic console title. Run and jump over pits and enemies. Grab enemies with your tongue, swallow them, and then spit them out at other enemies as projectiles! Fight dangerous bosses, and solve vexing puzzles. Collect coins and use them to buy upgrades and new abilities in the store. Talk to characters in game, and work to unravel Big Bad Milgram's plot against the townsfolk! At over 30 levels set in 4 different environments, Frogatto is not a flash in the pan, and has the play-time you'd expect from a real videogame.

Frogatto was made by a group of big-time fans of classic videogames, who are hoping to bring back the magic in a new, original game design with unconventional gameplay mechanics - a fun break from the usual clones. We're a small group of indie developers, hoping this game becomes one of the definitive platform games on the iPhone - and you can make that happen!

It's currently $2.99 for iPhone and Palm Pre, and free for Mac, Windows, and whatever you can compile it on (there are packages for many Linux variants). The game is Open Source, and we are welcoming contributors (join us in #frogatto on irc.freenode.net). Though the game is released, we are still actively working on updates.

Technical details:
Frogatto is written in C++, using OpenGL, SDL, and Boost. The engine is extremely flexible, with all objects scripted using a new Pure Functional language called Frogatto Formula Language, making it possible to create an entirely different game without recompiling the executable. There's also a powerful built-in level editor accessible by pressing ctrl+e in game.

[Sir Raptor]

Isn't this old news?
Also you need to introduce yourself first.

[raleigh]

Visuals are great and it's fun to play too. Polished game all around.

It sucks that it hasn't done better on the charts than it has... To me this is another example of a good game with decent coverage that gets lost amid the crap on the App Store.

Or have you been happy with the sales?

[crimson_penguin]

Isn't this old news?
Also you need to introduce yourself first.

It's a couple months old, yes, but... better late than never? I'm betting there are a lot of people here who hadn't heard.
As for introductions - oops! Sorry, I'll do that now.

Visuals are great and it's fun to play too. Polished game all around.

It sucks that it hasn't done better on the charts than it has... To me this is another example of a good game with decent coverage that gets lost amid the crap on the App Store.

Or have you been happy with the sales?

Sales were good for the first month (we were featured in New & Noteworthy, What's Hot, and then What We're Playing), but after that they've been... insignificant. We've lowered the price just now to $0.99 (from $2.99), so that we'll either make more from increased sales, or if not, it'll at least get more exposure.

[Jetrel]

Visuals are great and it's fun to play too. Polished game all around.

It sucks that it hasn't done better on the charts than it has... To me this is another example of a good game with decent coverage that gets lost amid the crap on the App Store.

Or have you been happy with the sales?

Yeah, it's honestly been pretty disappointing.

The light at the end of the tunnel is that we haven't advertised at all, yet (besides a lucky stint where apple featured us), and our other game (which we're not getting paid for), Battle for Wesnoth*, did actually take off quite nicely with advertisement.

The other big concern is that frogatto doesn't have much replayability at all.  We're looking to remedy that; we've got a semi-random level system being worked on (where levels can be assembled from premade, hand-tuned chunks).  This is a lot like what I hear Diablo 3 is doing, and should hopefully bring us a lot of the benefit of how incredibly replayable diablo 2 was (compared to most of its genre), but without the "boring monotone" that usually comes from procedurally-generated levels.  We've also got a bunch of minigames behind hacked on, and are looking at multiplayer.

If those and advertising don't goose sales, we're pretty well boned.  


*  Why we're not getting paid for wesnoth is a long story, but basically we've chosen to commission new work, rather than paying existing team members for past work.  Biggest reason is that that'd simply be a rat's nest of who is owed what, given the hundreds of people who've made minor contributions.  If anyone cares, we're actually not minor contributors to wesnoth;  dave, frogatto's code lead, was wesnoth's founder, and I'm also wesnoth's art lead.

[deathtotheweird]

perhaps this has been answered elsewhere, but why were the mac/win/linux versions free?

[crimson_penguin]

A few reasons, the first being that we all came from Wesnoth (free, Open Source), and I don't think we even thought of selling it in the beginning, we just wanted to make a game. It does seem like selling a game for computer on your own is hard to do these days (with it being so very easy to pirate). Having it free does have its advantages though:
 * Publicity for the paid version(s).
 * Way more people will play it, which means way more potential contributors, which means more value on the paid platforms (this worked very well for Wesnoth - it has a ridiculous amount of content, and that's a big selling point for it).

Ok, I thought I had more than 2 points, but... they are pretty significant. I'm curious actually, how it's going for indie game makers selling games for computer via the internet? Is Steam the way to go now? It seems like there's more money to be made in all these DRM'd systems; iPhone, WiiWare, Steam, etc. But I don't really know.

It's also nice to be able to tell your friends (or some random person you just met) about this game you made, and they can just go play it.

[Jetrel]

perhaps this has been answered elsewhere, but why were the mac/win/linux versions free?

Amongst other things, because unless we signed up for steam or something, doing sales alone would require "a sales guy".  Some dude manning an actual phone number (which would be ... awkward since it's not like we have a company office, or even live remotely near each other), handling actual registration codes, writing the code to track registration.

Essentially, either we'd get a new guy, or we'd have to split our own time, and our own time is pretty pathetically spread-thin as it is, with us having trouble dealing with "secretarial/PR" tasks as they are.

   I hate to sound corporate, but those are unambiguous and useful terms.

It's also nice to be able to tell your friends (or some random person you just met) about this game you made, and they can just go play it.

This a thousand times.  You don't make rabid fans unless they can play your game pretty deeply.

It's just a theory, but I tend to think - especially in the days before multi-million dollar budgets and mass advertising anywhere outside of gamer magazines, that most of the classic computer games that became huge blockbusters did so only because of mass epic piracy.  Games like doom, civilization, starcraft/warcraft2, all of maxis's old "sim" titles.

Same with all of the old 8-16bit titles, now being enjoyed by millions of people who never actually owned the consoles in question.  Back in college, I can count dozens of friends who were rabid fans of e.g. chrono trigger or secret of mana, and perhaps less than 25% of them were ever lucky enough to have had parents who bought a SNES for them when they were kids.  The majority played them on emulation.  That's a level of publicity for squaresoft that money can't buy.


So, by making the game free on computers, we're hoping for a similar effect.  We're paying it forward, and hoping the internets work their magic.

* Way more people will play it, which means way more potential contributors, which means more value on the paid platforms (this worked very well for Wesnoth - it has a ridiculous amount of content, and that's a big selling point for it).

This is the other big thing, and it's actually starting to pay off.   We welcome mod content, and in fact if it's as good as the core game, we'll put it in.  Thus far, we've successfully attracted translators, code patches to allow translation, and a pile of bugfixes.

[deathtotheweird]

A lot of people sell games on the internet without a sales guy.

You don't need a phone number, as long as you have an e-mail that's easily accessible and frequently monitored. There's never been a time where I had to contact any indie developer for anything via phone. I've hardly ever felt the need to email them directly either, as forums are often good areas of support. Plenty of developers do it, which is why I find it curious you guys decided not to (if your real reason is because you think it would require more work?).

You also don't need DRM or serial registration either. Sure the game would have been pirated, but the money you would have made if you sold the game would have been greater than the money you made giving the game away. I guess.

No big deal I guess. You can't take it back. Well actually the guy who made Love+ did(took a freeware game and made it shareware), but you guys arent him are ya.

[Jetrel]

Sure the game would have been pirated, but the money you would have made if you sold the game would have been greater than the money you made giving the game away. I guess.

It's our observation that (for non-AAA titles) the reverse is bizarrely true.

It seems extremely counter-intuitive, but it worked for both wesnoth and cave story.

[deathtotheweird]

Perhaps, but it's a completely different story for Cave Story.

Anyways it costs nothing to put a paypal button up, so why not place one on your site?  Give people without an iDevice (like me) a way to support you if they want.

[Jetrel]

Perhaps, but it's a completely different story for Cave Story.

This makes no sense whatsoever.

Anyways it costs nothing to put a paypal button up, so why not place one on your site?  Give people without an iDevice (like me) a way to support you if they want.

We had one and removed it because no one was donating.  I suppose we could do the work to get it back up, but it almost seems like a waste of time.  Wesnoth has had donations, too, and they didn't amount to jack.


Addendum:  we didn't have the bank-account verified, so we just took it down once we realized it was bouncing the few donations were were getting.  But in the time we had it up, which was over a month IIRC, we got all of seven donations, which is almost 3 orders of magnitude less than we got from sales.  I've had quite a bit of experience with donations, and know a bunch of webcomic artists who run on donations, and they just typically don't seem to work unless you're begging your audience for help meeting house payments or whatnot.  And we're not in that situation - we're not gonna lie to our audience about that.

Once we get around to it - which is a low priority, we'll probably try and get some donation system up.  But it's not a high priority for us, because in my experience, audiences typically aren't as generous as we all like to think they would be.