Amazing Frog? News

You know what ? it feels really good to be putting updates out again. I mean over the past few months we’ve been dealing with some pretty complex stuff with V3 and V2 and iOS… getting our ducks in a row, as it were. But, today looking through recent screenshots for the new stuff makes me super happy. Also just messing around with content again is so much more fun that underlying systems and junk. I mean you can’t Instagram a feckin’ serialization process or a new design pattern that I created by accident while dreaming. I love my work, truly I do.



There is an element if chaos to how we go about developing things, but we are heading somewhere so don't worry. That somewhere is V3.

So, what was I saying? ... I’m really sorry about the mouse not locking and hiding thing, please let me know if you are still having problems after this update. This is the second of our October updates for V2. “The Other Blimps". Was going to call it A Blimp with more bite not sure why :) .







So be sure to check the in-game changelog… (I think I updated that …) there's some more stuff to find do and play with.

I’ll keep this post short, I did want to say thanks to everyone for pointing any issues in the last build. There are some which I Have not got around to resolving like the horizontal split screen I will get that one in the next update. So any outstanding issues please fire them at us.

Finally! we are in a position to start rolling out some updates, sorry it's been blimpin’ ages.

The first of a series of V2 updates is now available and this first one is called the "Leftfield Edition”

Let's be clear- this is a V2 update, We have reprogrammed the camera systems and UI, using techniques and code that we have been developing in V3 and implemented more stable graphics with less flickering etc and generally made it more stable, better looking and improved the underlying architecture to enable us to try out a month of rapid content expansion updates.  :)







So what's a “Leftfield Edition”? What an attractive looking question, Gaz. Thanks for asking… Basically, its called that because its pretty much the version we showed at EGX on the Sega sponsored Leftfield indie game booth thing. In terms of content, there is not a great deal of new stuff, this was mainly about presenting the fixed version of V2. In fact, you may find that some things are missing or even completely replaced. Don’t worry about this as we will be updating V2 multiple times in October and we have some interesting surprises lined up. Having said that Pocket mode is pretty new, accessible from the main menu and might worth another look...





For some time had been PONDering the possibility of Amazing Frog? V2 leaving Early Access, it's a weird situation, because we are also building V3 and you guys haven’t got your hands on that yet. We are not sure we even know what Early Access means anymore. We are going to be adding updates to both versions of Amazing Frog? for some time. You could say Amazing Frog? will always be in development, with that in mind we are not sure if “Early Access” applies to us anymore. What do you guys think?  We don’t anticipate that V3 will replace V2. We expect them to exist side by side for a while. For us, we are starting to think of it more like a sequel even though it won’t be presented as such. Ultimately it's just me and Hal, we don’t have anyone advising us, no publisher skimming the cream or twisting our arm to break our integrity, we just try and do what we think is right for Amazing Frog? and it's players.



On a side note - Online multiplayer for V3 has been going really well and we are indeed closer to dropping the V3 Online Beta, Hal and I have been doing to distance network testing and the results are pretty encouraging. but I am sorry to say that we are just not ready to share it yet.

Sorry if it looks like we have been away for a while…. we haven’t. I’ve still not started Mario Oddessy, Hal is still yet to face Ganon. Also, someone mentioned there was a cowboy game coming out soon, but it was only available on consoles so I won’t be playing that any time soon so get ready for some updates! We’re really excited to be able to have output again :)

It's been a while since Amazing Frog? devblog 025. There is a lot going on in development and it gets difficult to explain. I am sorry and I should update you all more frequently.  Amidst all the tasks we have been working on, it really doesn’t feel to us that much time has passed since the last devblog. Every day is Amazing Frog? for us.



My brain feels a little fried from working on 3 versions of the Amazing Frog? simultaneously, the sheer variety of types of tasks can leave you feeling all muddled up. It's important to leave a trail of breadcrumbs to find your way back to what it was you were trying to solve a day, a week, a month ago. Sometimes you just want to open your laptop and make weird stuff happen in-game and have a laugh, but in-between all that fun is a lot of technical problems that demand resolution. It's so important to think into the future when developing Amazing Frog?, especially V3. Our plans are big and I know I said it before but without the right infrastructure, we won't be able to realize those plans. In the past we have often sidelined some of the core system issues to fast-track new content. Often, when things were not quite right in V2 we would say, "well that will get fixed in V3". But as I mentioned before V3 broke everything and we started fresh. ............ somewhat as V3 being fully network-based and having completely new graphics has brought its own problems, so for many V2 issues we now thing resolve it in V2 so when it goes into V3 the transition will be smoother.

So whats been going on? Well, there are 3 major channels of development for Amazing Frog? and from week to week we switch back and forth between which one of these we concentrate on, or indeed sometimes Hal focuses on one and me on another.

These Development Channels are:

• V3 : The completely rebuilt and online version
  
• V2 : The Definitive Version (an updated, enhanced and extended V2)
  
• V2 Pocket: our first attempt to package up Amazing Frog? and put it out somewhere else.
  

I think I’ll start with Pocket mode (The working title for the iOS version). If I was in your position, in our beloved Steam Community, I’d probably be thinking, "why are those two dum-asses working on an iOS version when they need to get us the V3 Multiplayer version out which has dragged on long enough already?" It's a question that comes up virtually every day between us,  should we drop it and move on? or keep moving forward slowly? We have a very clear purpose. A long-term purpose. A Plan. I may not always be able to explain what the plan is, but it always seems to make sense to me. I’ll try and explain why I feel we HAVE to do pocket mode and indeed more V2.

First off, Striking back and protecting our game. It drives me nuts seeing all the fake versions of Amazing Frog? on iOS and Android. It also bothers seeing all the fake versions of a lot of cool Steam Early Access games. I know people do worse things in the world, but it just grinds my gears when I think of people getting ripped off thinking they are getting Amazing Frog? when they're just paying for a fake app that shows you an add and crashes :( The two ways to solve this would be to chase each app legally or just release the real Amazing Frog? to this environment. We chose the latter.



Next, The Tech Clock is ticking.  Tech is changing every day, the big changes in Unity really threw us last year invalidating most of AF? development. Being so deep into V3 with all this crazy new tech (I’ll touch on in a bit), the temptation was to abandon V2 altogether and just move on, which is what happened to V1 (the OUYA version)… we abandoned V1 so we could progress in Steam Early Access. we want V2 to reach its potential, after all, we will be working on V3 for some time and the more success we can generate from V2 the more it will help the development of V3. This would also be helped by a more definitive and polished version of the V2 system.



For Pocket Mode we created a new landscape, simpler but more refined. Naturally, this will be available on Steam as Pocket Mode (and most likely on Steam first). Having a smaller less demanding island for Pocket Mode in V2 not only helps it run better on mobile devices and less capable computers but also allows us to create a slightly alternative experience, ie giving you more things to do in V2.





V2 Definitive and Pocket Mode are linked in development. Since Pocket Mode is generated from V2, but quite separate tasks. Overall with the V2 system, there were so many fundamental issues and things we needed to resolve. As I said earlier anything we skipped in favour of more content. The Z Fighting on posters the way the sea looks crappy from distances among other things required deep fundamental changes in how we do everything. Our first thought was: let's stick the V3 blimp in and fix those bugs once and for all. In the end that kind of felt like a good plan for pocket mode, but for V2 on Steam, we wanted something a little more special in this next version before V3 takes over. We just felt that apart from fixing it and making it look better V2 needed some fresh secrets, more experimental features and the ability to unlock some of the things you may have already seen but not yet been able to use. It's a big Update, with a lot of enhancements.



‘scuse the balloons, they really are the best way to get around when you need to take screenshots :)





We can talk about V2 when its ready….




Oh boy, I wish we could develop this faster. The more complex or detailed a thing the more time it takes I guess. It's funny, thinking back to the games Hal and I used to knock out in a matter of weeks to where we are now. I love it, I love building something that that is ours, that has so much scope. As a developer working for someone else you don’t always get the chance to feel that sense of joy from your efforts. Having said that, the newer versions of Unity have been really inconsistent environments over the past year, which has made things difficult and disheartening at times. We have often been finding ourselves progressing in one area to then find that another area has become invalidated. Thankfully everything seems more stable now. I guess Unity had to figure some things out.



There are so many topics on V3. SwindonShire alone is one of the biggest tasks we have ever committed ourselves too.  Building a sustainable, detailed and exciting world. We put a lot of thought into the SwindonShire. I’ve touched on various plans for the world over the course of these devblogs, and our plans can be fluid, but ultimately they hang around a core set of ideas. This image should give you a bit of an insight, it’s a map of SwindonShire that we use to discuss development in areas for V3 (a “redacted” version, don’t want to give too much away)



Although the landscape is essentially the same, Hal has been refining his process for the terrain. Now with a much higher resolution, it makes it much easier for Hal to sculpt detail, we’re so excited about it. I took these shots from a build I generated today. Currently, we have the terrain covered in a grid to help us understand things like scale not just in terms of size, but also in terms of movement so we can limit the physics etc. My version will probably be a grid for a bit, while Hal works on implementing all the details he has been working with. Like most of the development of the game, it's important to get a solid foundation that can support future iterations.



It took quite a long time for us to gain some control over the lighting. We almost abandoned a Day/night cycle altogether. Weird inconsistencies with multiple scenes, global GI not doing what we expected, I could go on. For V3 Day and Night was something that was really important to us. A lot of our plans for gameplay revolve around it. We needed to make sure that we were in control and we were not just getting "cool effects" that look great on one building but don’t translate to the area next to it.



Also, playability at nighttime is important, you have to be able to see what you're are doing...



Time like just about everything else in V3 needs to be defined and controlled by the host. Unlike V2, V3 is completely networked as a game. We have explored and implemented so many ways of doing networking over the past year. If I am honest with you, I couldn’t say that I am sure that the route we chose is the best one. It's probably more difficult, but It is most certainly the route we are the most comfortable with now. We tried third-party network solutions, we tried Unity's solution and they were all great, but we wanted more control over what was sent and to who. Things are a bit barren this week in V3 screenshots because I am implementing the host signing the objects to the scene. Everything dynamic or controllable needs to be allocated by the host. eg there is a box on the floor because the host says there is. It moves and the host has to be aware of that.



The great thing about that is that the host is always taking snapshots of data of the world, which makes it really easy to save data - just about everything in the game. ie it would be possible to play one day and come back to the same stuff the next day rather than a full reset like in V2.



I hope that's a good explanation of whats going on with development. Here’s a rundown of what my next few sets of immediate tasks are after posting this. in V3 Implement a moonlight (it's too dark at night), elbows ..there is something wrong with how I redraw the elbow and knee positions over the network looks kinda funky, touch controls sticking on IOS fix and test in another build.

So I'm going to jump to it.



Thanks for reading, updates coming real soon.

Hi, It’s been just over a month since I last updated you all on whats going on with development for Amazing Frog?. To be honest I don’t even know where to begin this devblog as we have been doing so many different things. Our core mission is the same and V3 as a whole is still moving forward. The V3 online Test world draws closer and a big definitive V2 update will come alongside it, After that, an iOS version and a run of V3 test updates will follow, all the while in the backdrop the main V3 Amazing Frog? continues to grow. So to follow on from the last devblog (024)- I still have not started Mario Odyssey and Hal is no closer to facing Ganon, but we have done a load of Amazing Frog? development. :)





The multiplayer code for V3 is coming along pretty nicely. Don’t get me wrong, it has been super complicated and I do have a tendency to over-complicate things for myself. Now I feel it coming together. I have restructured the whole process several times, as it has to form the underlying architecture of pretty much all aspects of V3 Swindon. There are many challenges involved, but one existing challenge is the logistics of testing.. there is only so much I can test on my own set of machines, so we are going to need some help with that very soon. There are still a few crazy things happening that I need to resolve first, but my confidence in the integrity of the system is growing. *farts..



Often when I look over at Hal’s screen I see crazy substance setups for all sorts of different surfaces and plant things. I Just think they look interesting so I got him to screen grab a couple for the blog.



We never really got to make the “SwindonShire” that we wanted to make before. We had always been too busy with other aspects of gameplay or world creation. But we are making "The world" a priority in V3. Hal has got a serious new machine for some intense world building and development shenanigans. We are very serious about it… but it is going to take time to create the "new world” in v3, but we think it will be worth it.



We first put a skeleton in a game in Goldilocks and the 3000 bears and laughed our heads off about it for ages. Goldilocks was a kind of ragdoll shooting game that we made a demo of a few years back before Ouya, and hope to return to one day. As V3 is so much more detailed it needed an update to frog anatomy. Heres an example of the new skeleton… but Hal didn't stop at just bones….There are going to be some squidgy surprises too.





I guess in general the right game dev advice would be to move on from V2 completely and just go into V3. V2 its old tech, Unity don’t really support it anymore, but still we haven’t moved on from V2 and you may be wondering why.

It's not just about fixing problems in V2 like the Z-fighting on the sea and posters, or the lack of atmosphere and depth, there is actually a lot we are doing in V2 that we can move straight to V3. Also because V3 is moving so far ahead of V2 we just couldn’t leave it behind without tidying some things up. It's good that I got a new laptop at the beginning of 2018. I can comfortably have both V3 and V2 open simultaneously. Unity used to fatal when I was working on them both and I used to think that I was running out of memory. Turns out that it was just Unity crashing…. Thankfully things seem a lot more stable on that front recently. I did yet again have to completely rebuild the v3 project base from the ground up but things have been working well. Basically, there are so many game systems that I can prototype and build in V2 for V3.

Beyond that, we really wanted to make a definitive version of Amazing Frog? V2  One that could stand on it own as V3 continues to grow. Many graphical glitches have been solved, but at the expense of a bit of a restructure, especially to do with player assignment and cameras. This work has allowed us to implement v3 camera and player assignment systems and design a more stable structure on how to do that. Successfully prototyping the way forward in V3 gameplay.



I'm pretty sure I haven't covered everything today. Like the way the frog can hold a pose in ragdoll form in V3 when you jump and hold jump, I had been meaning to make some screenshots to show that.  Or that after a chat with Zeron last week I decided to push day-night cycles into the test worlds. Or that we tested a few good builds on iOS and its looking good, but it needs more work and the next Steam update will certainly come before that. Or that the new blimp controls are much more stable, but I still have a bit of work to do to ensure objects can be transported inside. I guess more next time. Thanks for playing Amazing Frog?

Yup, we spent most of our time in front of our computers developing and we haven’t been anywhere game related since 2016 (Steam Dev Days), in March we went out and met people, we even took business cards. That didn't change the problem that the development of Amazing Frog? V3 over the past few months has been particularly challenging. So this one is going to be a word heavy devblog…

We recently went to GDC 2018 (Game Developer Conference in San Francisco), we met a lot of companies and learned a whole bunch of Game Development Stuff. One of the main reasons we went to GDC (other than to feel like real Game Developers) was to discover and explore new technology to support the ongoing development of V3. In particular the two most important aspect of V3, the multiplayer networking side of things and being able to automate and grow a complex landscape, rich with vegetation and er… “stuff”.  We need as much help as we can get. We went to lots of talks at GDC, mainly the "how to make AAA games" talks rather than the" isn’t it great to be an indie” talks (as we got the gist of them in 2016). It was definitely good to get an insight into how some of these massive games are put together, even if we struggled sitting through a one hour talk about how a guy designed a brick wall in Mordor. That one was hard work, not sleeping through that while feeling jet lagged. We got through it and I think I may even have learned something. Most of the speakers we saw all came from big teams, in fact, we met a lot of big teams at GDC and it was interesting to see how they approach things. For us, it's about how we understand what they are doing and refit it to how we work when it's just us two.

As an ode to the guy who gave the talk about a brick wall surface for an hour, here is a snapshot of what Hal has been up to today. He has been working on procedural materials. Today it was pebbles. The first pass on his procedural materials for pebbles happened when we started V3 in Unity 5. Technology seems to move on faster than us, so here's what his new version looks like in comparison to the version we never even released.



For a reference of the V2 version of pebbles just imagine a greyish smudge. Basically, when it comes to SwindonShire, Hal has been dealing with an impressively large task. His main focus for V3 is now bringing the world of SwindonShire together. To help this process he has also been looking at introducing Hoodini to our pipeline - a very powerful tool for making game development tools, and we can use it with our core toolset of Unity, Maya, and Substance.

I have been playing with a few multiplayer solutions. Most of them I feel are only really needed after the first beta push since the betas will be small test worlds, but when we integrate to Swindonshire as a whole, we are going to need some bigger scale solutions. It was good to meet the people involved so we can move forward a bit and then reconnect when its time to scale up that side of things.

Overall we came away from GDC feeling positive and recharged, but I have to say of all the companies we met, the most disappointing was Unity3d…One of their guys laughed at the fact we were using Unity 4 for V2  Amazing Frog? I explained how we had had to re-develop the entire game over the past couple of years as they had changed so much. A game that had taken us over 3 years to get the feel of the physics "right". I don’t really know what I was expecting talking them, there really is no point talking to “evangelists” most of them don't seem to have development experience and I have always found it hard to connect with Salespeople. It felt very much like Unity was more interested in getting new users to subscribe rather than helping existing developers. It was just difficult to deal with since V3 development recently has been very challenging.



gulp....

I know… I KNOW,  that there is an element of us making things difficult for ourselves by being overly ambitious and honestly I am OK with problems we make for ourselves, that's all part of the journey. We have always been big supporters of Unity (and still are) and what it stood for, flexible scalable development, but I just find it odd that the most stable version of the Unity Editor that I work with is still Unity 4. I can’t even begin to process how their editing environment has become less stable with each increment. I mean seriously, I have been through multiple hardware setups and platforms and it gets less stable. I think what Unity can empower you to do is truly amazing, but it seems that all that glorious awesomeness comes at a price. Ultimately, they expect you to be in bigger teams. I think you need at least one developer to flag Unity bugs and converse with them on a regular basis on how they are going to fix it. Unity 2018.1 ( the new version coming ) looks very promising and much more futureproof than what we have been dealing with up till now. Thankfully, all the physics that we had to rebuild for V3 do work in the new beta, so all seems OK on that front. It has even fixed some things which broke in version 2017.3 like my UI for handling online connections. But the beta editing environment is still far from stable … it likes to crash a lot. Anyway...



I shouldn’t really rant about Unity too much, (if you want me to, I can and for hours) we still love it (the software) and V3 is still moving forward and when it works it just feels so exciting. We’ll just have to find a way of expressing our anger in a mature and responsible fashion …like maybe hiding a Unity shaped turd in the upcoming V2 update. That's how we deal with our issues... yeah…and maybe when you put it in the toilet it crashes the game :P


We have no intention of stopping V2, aside from the new blimp and the camera improvements that we mentioned in the last devblog (023) we’ve actually got quite a lot of interesting things going on with it. I was actually hoping that I could be writing this devblog alongside a V2 update, but it's not quite there and we don’t have a title for it (sorry).

One of the things we had been improving in V2 was pocket mode. I wanted to establish it more separately. I often get emails from players who have accidentally turned on pocket mode and found the floor outside the wall is missing. We set out to make it so it was on a smaller island with less physics stuff and I am setting it up as a completely separate mode rather than a toggle in settings.

While we were in the Hotel in San Francisco we thought, what the hell, let's see if we can get the pocket mode island to run on our iPhones,  it did, just fine as well. Even the main game ran just fine. We had thought about making an iOS version loads of times before, but we had never sat down and made it happen. So then we thought, what the hell lets make some buttons.



After a very depressing chat with Unity, it seems putting V2 on either Switch or Xbox or Ps4 seems like a real longshot. They certainly won't help us to do that, So I think we may just go ahead and make an IOS version of V2 pocket mode. This is something we can control.

I mean our hopes are for Amazing Frog?  to make it to other platforms eventually, like Switch (I love my Switch) But I think that we will have to wait until V3 is more developed on Early Access. (Thank you Steam for being the awesome-est platform in existence)

It just makes sense at this stage to put at least a part of V2 somewhere else, while we can. We get many requests for it on iOS and Android and in theory,  it could help support future development of V3, especially if we need to employ someone to locate and identify Unity bugs related to Amazing Frog?  :)


I know it's been about 3 months since I last updated you all on whats going on. In development time 3 months is not that long, we struggle to find the time to do everything we want to do, but I do understand that it is a long time when you are waiting on an update, (If it helps, I still haven’t started playing my copy of Mario Oddessy and am still trying to avoid spoilers ) Here is the rundown of whats coming soon (in no particular order)

V3 Online beta test worlds (not to replace V2 but be downloaded supplemental)

V3 insight into the new Swindon Shire (we can't release this too soon we need to get the landscape right)

V2 Pocket mode on IOS.

V2 Update with some cool new physics features and a big blimp that won’t suck (I mean seriously, you should be able to fly this one and potentially drive a car into it and drive it ... well I haven't fully tested that bit yet but seriously better blimps all round ).

We have a lot on. I know this, as it feels like crunch time,... It's time to get our Frog on.