Hell comes to frogtown

Dev diaries
#1

Hey! Me and my friend started a little cozy defold project a few weeks back with really humble intentions. I’ve mostly made small gamejam games previsouly, which are obviously fun but rarely gets finished. So the plan for this game is to keep things very, very simple so that we could eventually finish it in reasonable time :slight_smile:

The mechanics and scope is fairly simple:

  • 2d platformer, very small and contained levels
  • Multiplayer, either coop or versus
  • Rope swing mechanics for boosted movement, great for adding chaos to gameplay
  • Jump-n-bump:esque attack (jump on opposing players head to crush them)
  • Use frog tongue to either grapple or “suck in” other players to eat them

Here’s a small WIP on current progress:

19 Likes
#2

Jump n Bump was the greatest game ever. I played that for hours.

Looks interesting, hope it goes well!!

7 Likes
#3

Cheers mate! Yeah, one of my favs for sure :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#4

Small update:

  • Added head jumping
  • Added tongue pulling on other players

It’s obviously pretty bug-riddled right now, but as far as a prototype goes it’s pretty fun to just move around on the map :slight_smile:

6 Likes
#5

Looks really cool! What platform(s) are you aiming for?

When read literally, this could be a decent idea—eat flies in order to gain HP, or similar.

4 Likes
#6

Thanks Axel! Desktop and local couch play primarily, and then see if it’s fun enough to warrant other platforms :slight_smile:

Ah, haha yeah the bug Idea is pretty neat. Some kind of powerup could be nice, like temporary unkillable if you can grab them or whatnot. Cheers!

3 Likes
#7

Latest wip:

  • better wrapping/unwrapping around edges
  • more stable tongue-grabbing
  • wip death explosion

Next up: rope swing momentum and new graphics!

7 Likes
#8

What if the frogs were able to pick up different helmets/hats that could work as some kind of extra health, ie able to withstand one “head injury”? :slight_smile: I would love to see a frog with a construction hat!

3 Likes
#9

Haha good Idea! Yeah i had something similar in mind: different playable characters with various accessories - tophat/glasses, space helmets, hardhats etc. So i might just incorporate your hit point Idea aswell :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#10

Might I suggest a frog in a red cape?

4 Likes
#11

Aaah, of course - genious!

Frog-Prince-Wearing-Red-Cape-ST9007

3 Likes
#12

Hypno toad boost!

5 Likes
#13

Hey! We’ve managed to find some time to do a bit of work done on the game lately :slight_smile: Here’s some chaotic gameplay from yesterday:

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Also, we started on player hats aswell. Not sure how or if they will have any specific mechanics in the game or if it’s just for visuals. Guess we need to figure out win conditions and general gameplay flow first…

hats

14 Likes
#14

Makes me think of Duck Game. It has a grappling hook in it that works pretty well. Might be worth looking at for inspiration.

2 Likes
#15

Cheers! Haven’t heard about it before but it looks interesting, thanks for the tip!

1 Like
#16

Hey guys! The nice weather that we’ve been having here kinda halted our progress a bit, but since it returned to normal rainy 16 C summer again, we can get some work done! :slight_smile:

  • Blood splotches added now when the “death chunks” intersects with the environment. Very WIP, need to rework this system a lot, but at least I got the stencil rendering to work yesterday, yay. Next up is shading the splotches a bit better and maybe see if I can get small blood streaks to slowly move down a bit if it isn’t super inconvenient to implement…
  • Reworked palette and background, much nicer contrast! The clouds should move around a bit to bring some more life to the game
  • Different characters in progress as well, based on real life frogs!!

ezgif-1-c32b3ff533

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Happy weekend!

10 Likes
#17

New sprites!All%20frogs%20move

10 Likes
#18

Very nice! :raised_hands:

4 Likes
#19

Small update! Tweaked the blood streak shader and added a few small animations :slight_smile:

image

11 Likes
#20

Started experimenting with a character select screen, not 100% satisfied yet but I think something like this might be cool if I can nail the timings down a bit more :slight_smile:

ezgif-2-178c6f516de1

14 Likes