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Godot Version
4.7.2
Theme Interpretation
My idea was to draw pictures inside of normal maps to signal game mechanics to the player.
Wildcards Used
The first wildcard (description pending)
The second wildcard (description pending)
The third wildcard (description pending)
Discord Username(s)
@f_c_r_
GWJ Participation Level
2
Team Size
1
Generative AI Disclosure
Thanks for playing! And hey, I wasn't directly inspired by that, but one of my favorite animation creators online is Aaron Blaise, who worked on the Lion King, so maybe I've finally successfully absorbed 0.00001% of his immeasurable talent! I just love that people on his level make videos covering their process at all so we can learn from them.
And oh boy, the announcer was such a fun character to record. My game VO debut hahahaha, I've been hyping myself up to try getting over the fact that I don't really want to hear my own voice while I'm testing my games and finally gave it a go.
Yeah, the flashlight signals to you which frog has a key in each wave, and I kept thinking it was too obvious what it was for and how to use it and kept making the signal less and less clear until I ended up realizing the flashlight had become almost useless and it was too late in the week to go back or add a progression that starts with it being extremely easy to see what it does. Oh well, I can add that later if I make a full game out of this! Glad you liked the audio design, that was kind of the centerpiece of the jam for me this time.
Awesome! Glad you had fun, even with the firefox lag hahaha. A lot of the theme stuff ended up not quite being player-facing. So there's stuff in there in the back end of the game that's related to the theme but I didn't have time to finish presenting it clearly to the player, so I genuinely think I deserve a low score in that category. There's always next time! Thanks so much for playing!
Thanks for playing! I'm glad you liked it. I had basically resigned that I wouldn't have time to do the announcer voice, but after testing it for awhile I decided it would be such a fun addition that I pushed it to higher priority than a lot of the powerups. I wish I had time for both, but I'm satisfied with my decision! The voice was SO FUN to record and doing it ended up being a really nice break from programming.
Thanks for playing!! The flashlight forces the frogs to signal which of them has a key in each wave. It's unclear enough that I wish I presented it differently, and it's much more punishing to miss a frog than it is to not get a key, so you found a balance issue that I didn't have time to address. Hope you had some fun regardless!
As for the lag, after being perplexed by some people with great systems reporting that they're not having a smooth experience, I've found a common thread in Mozilla Firefox of all things. The game runs like crap in it and I genuinely don't understand why. So if I had to guess, I'd guess you're on Firefox, but if you aren't I'd love to know what browser you're on (assuming you have a great internet connection, which I'm assuming you do if you can afford a good gpu in this day and age hahahhaha). Anyway I appreciate the feedback and I'd like to know more about where you're playing, since this jam is the first time I've found out the browser can be a serious problem in this equation.
I've been using and loving Vivaldi as my web browser lately. After the jam I'm going to test and see if it's Itch's SharedBufferArray support setting, which is marked as experimental but seemed to greatly improve my game's performance. I wouldn't be surprised if an experimental setting on the host platform wouldn't play nicely with every setup. In retrospect, I may not have needed that after some other optimizations, but I'll have to live with my decision until after the jam. Anyway, thanks again for playing, and your game is up next in my queue! :D
Thanks for playing and for the kind words! I'm quite happy with how the audio and visuals came out for this one! And I agree with your critique, though I don't think I realized how off-theme the game had become until the last day of the jam, since my initial idea was explicitly based on the theme my intent with it was still there. As I was working on it and trying to find the fun in it, I think I lost the plot a bit and nearly all the things that were obvious matches to the theme had disappeared from the game. It can be so hard to realize that's happening sometimes!
Basically, the flashlight makes a frog in each wave signal that they have the key, and the keys open chests filled with bugs that signal Froglet's location. I had another half-baked system in mind where you would help the frogs signal to each other how to avoid predators, but that very quickly became out of scope haha. I decided the game seemed like it would more fun overall if you didn't get punished for catching the "wrong" frog (something I intended to add later as part of a difficulty progression), and I ran out of time so the Froglet pickup ended up in a chest just like other loot, without player-facing information that monitored the connection between finding Froglet in a chest and collecting the bugs. I think I ended up with something that was a bit more fun, overall, at the cost of really losing track of keeping the theme front and center. So yeah, I think I'd actually give myself a one or a two on theme for this jam, even though the "game" that lived in my head before I started was closer to a four or a five. Oh well.
And I try to be strict with myself for not making adjustments after everything seems to be working well, but oh gosh did I want to break my rule on the last day and significantly increase the point penalty for missing a chest. I TOTALLY agree that missing frogs was the only thing that even slightly felt like a problem in the final product hahaha. There's always next time! I almost reached out to you to see if you still needed help with your audio montage but decided to just stick with my own game this time. Would love to do a jam with you sometime in the future!
Thanks for playing! Out of curiosity, what browser/system are you on? I'm still relatively new to trying to make stuff work nicely in a browser and trying to triangulate the source of the issues a few people seem to be having. One person found that the game was laggy for them in Firefox but not in other browsers, so I'm wondering if there's an issue with the browser being used or something. I hadn't considered that the browser could be the problem, and being a big dummy I only tested the game in Vivaldi, which isn't exactly a common web browser choice hahahhaha. "Oopsie-Froggie" (that was my favorite voice line to record hahahhahahaha)
So the flashlight is most obviously used to light up the play area, but less clear is that it signals which frog has a key in each wave. My thinking was that by shining a light through something like a frog, you can (probably? I imagined this without testing it on a real frog haha) see through the frog and see what's inside it and stuff, kinda like when you shine a light through your hand. So the idea is that if you're quick enough you can always use the flashlight to find a key in each group of frogs. I did feel like the game eventually lost the plot of the theme of the jam, but my original concept was about signaling game mechanics to the player in an atypical way (I hand drew the keys into normal map textures so there's no magic shader or texture swap happening to make the flashlight-signals-key thing work, it's all just baked into the lighting system). It was really fun to build and I think it looks pretty cool (if subtle) even if it didn't end up being the centerpiece of the game that I expected it to be.
Dang that might be the highest score I've seen! Nice!
The game ends when you run out of nets. It feels like it keeps going forever because the chance of finding nets in chests increases as you get closer to losing, admittedly by a slightly higher margin than was reasonable, so the game seems to just keep going even though it doesn't. One of my to-do items I didn't get to was to make a more obvious animation for losing a net (they're tracked on the left-hand side of the screen next to your juice counter). I didn't really catch that the spin and disappear animation I was using didn't really read when you're focused on the gameplay until it was too late in the jam to make changes.
Thanks so much for playing and for the kind words about the music and sounds! Learning my way around in the guts of the audio integration tools in Godot was my main focus for this jam so I'm glad to hear that you think it paid off :D
Thanks! I had way too much fun recording the voice lines and eventually had to stop myself from adding more after my third time sitting in front of the mic and shouting insane made-up frog themed words hahahaha.
I thought that's what was causing it, but I also realized that my expensive shaders are mostly already running before the game starts, and I'm thinking now that it was my use of lights for the glowing frogs and glow of the reward chests that may be causing it. I'm glad you specifically commented though, I was actually already thinking of asking you about your shader prebaking. Your game still had a small amount of lag in the browser, but unlike mine, yours was running stuff that in my head is just impossible to do in a browser game, so I would love to know more about your process getting there; it felt like absolute sorcery to me. Are you using a system you built, or a template that includes strong preloading sequences? I'm not sure if you have much to gain from it but I'd love to learn about your process and do a jam with you in the future if you'd be open to it; your stuff looks VERY fun to score and/or sound design.
I have a template with a bunch of systems and subsystems I usually reuse, built around my own code architecture and custom methods, like:
I've been building and improving it with every jam I participate in. A lot of things tend to repeat, so that let me focus in the game.
There's also another template on the Wild Jam page where I found some interesting ideas, like input mapping.
But getting to the point!
For web builds, shader compilation and resource loading can cause some nasty stutters, especially since threading is more limited in the browser.
What I do is keep a list of all the objects, materials, resources, and particles I need. During the loading screen, I instantiate them in front of a camera on a layer that isn't visible to the player, but is still rendered internally. This forces the renderer to prepare the materials and shaders ahead of time.
That way, when those objects actually appear in the game, most of the expensive work has already been done, and they're ready to go!
On desktop, you have more flexibility to load resources on the fly, but on the web, I prefer to prepare everything before gameplay starts to avoid stuttering.
GPU particles are still a bit tricky, though. I haven't fully figured out how to prewarm those reliably yet!
But feel free to ask me anything :D
Oh that seems like it should be such an obvious solution but it's very clever! Dang, I'll have to keep that in mind next time! Thanks for sharing. I still need to rebuild my event bus system in gdscript; I have some of those systems built for myself in C# but I've been using gdscript for jams to have functional web builds. Anyway, I really appreciate the info!
Awesome, so glad you enjoyed it! I had such a fun time recording it. It's kinda fun feeling absolutely crazy shouting stuff like "OOPSIE-FROGGIE" at your microphone after a week of actively avoiding human interaction to make the rest of the game hahahaha!
Glad to hear that it's reading the way I intended it! I was playing the first prototype without audio and was like "hehe FROGTACULAR" and then was like, oh I should have super busy arcade-y text popups, so I added that. Then I was like, you know what, what's another day to do a bunch of insane voice lines? And oh boy I had SO MUCH FUN recording them ahhaahhaha
Thanks for playing! So I know that the tutorial images in the title screen could be clearer, but the flashlight is the core mechanic of the game and the frog catching is kind of there as a fun way to keep things frantic. When you shine the flashlight on frogs you can see through their skin and identify which frog in each wave has a key, to basically remove the rng element. If you decide to give it another chance, I recommend going to the settings to turn the voice acting off and to turn on "contrast mode" which significantly increases the visual clarity of the flashlight mechanic (as shown in the third screenshot on the game's page). I slightly regret not having the contrast mode as the default, as the flashlight mechanic is actually the part of the game I put the most effort into tuning haha.
Btw your game was one of my favorites so far! As a total analog synth dork I could practically hear the input of that oscilloscope, and I'm glad you put background music in instead of the raw wave forms I know I would have been tempted to use hahahaha. Did you use an addon for the dialogue system or did you just make all of it from scratch! I was really impressed with how polished the game was for such a complicated production.
For what is worth,t's clear where the effort went in. I really thought I was playing a 3D game until i read the comments on how you were faking everything using normal maps. I think this is a case where you should disincentivize players (like me) from completely foregoing the flashlight, maybe some frogs leave you a bomb instead of a key so you have to at least confirm you're not picking up something nasty.
Thank you! The dialogue was made using the Dialogue Manager add-on, I would strongly recommend it to build anything except a VN.
Yeah I actually had considered putting bombs or something in some frogs, but I was running out of time and decided that since I was already a bit worried the flashlight mechanic didn't come out as clear as I'd hoped that if I added some type of negative feedback it would feel to some players as though it was just "random" losing. I also considered putting bombs or poison or something in some of the cheaper chests, kinda feel like that wouldn't have been very fun though.
And awesome! I'm looking at Dialogue Manager for a long-term RPG project I'm working on. I'm really impressed with how yours came out and it looks pretty quick to work with in the demo videos the creator has up. Thanks for sharing that part of your process!
Thanks for playing! btw your game had I think my favorite name of the whole jam, "FROGG" is just so... cool
Thanks, Francis! We brainstormed a few different ideas, such as Fwog and Froggy, before settling on FROGG. We felt it was unique enough to stand out, and it has a little extra meaning behind it too, with “GG” standing for “Good Game.” Depending on how people interpret it, it can also be read as “Frog Game,” which we thought was a pretty neat little bonus! :)
Thanks for playing! So the idea is that you can find keys in frogs by shining your flashlight "through" them, and then you'll know which ones are worth more points and let you open the chests. If you had trouble seeing the keys and wanted to try again, there's a "high contrast mode" in the settings menu that makes the game much more clear. I probably should have made that the default! I liked your roomba game btw!
And oh boy, as far as hours this took... I was up until 4am the last three nights of the jam, and probably spent 8-10 hours on both the music and recording my voice. I barely talked to my friends last week. Man. Probably something horrible like 60 hours. :-/
Thanks so much for playing! By the end of the jam I was kinda feeling similarly actually, except that I realized it might just be generally more fun as a mobile/touchscreen game. So hey, maybe I'll fix up the touchscreen controls and add some more collectibles and powerups and keep going with it. I also REALLY wanted to add a leaderboard but have no idea where to get started with a shared hosted leaderboard; I'm pretty new to web app stuff.
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