Amazing Frog? News

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.

Firstly, OMG I can’t believe people found the Fly Hats. Furthermore, I am getting reports that the space fly hat didn’t appear in peoples wardrobes. How very Fayju :S Fear not,  if you have the message that you found the space fly hat in your notifications on the fPhone, I should be able to get it unlocked in a fix in the upcoming V2 update. (We really were not expecting people to go looking for them.)

It has been a bit of a January fix fest for both V2 and V3, now we are in Feb we are starting to see things more clearly.

After putting out a really exciting update just before Xmas we were looking forward to continuing at that pace into January. Unfortunately, it didn't turn out like that. One of the big disadvantages of being just the two of us really hit home in the first two weeks of the year. After Unity make some updates, it invalidated a lot of the progress we had made in V3 and we spent the first half of the month trying to isolate what went wrong and haven’t resolved all of the problems yet. Spending so much time searching for problems, isolating and fixing them, is something we are used to in game development, but for small teams, this has a massive impact on progress.



In comparison to V2, the V3 set up is now incredibly complex. Swindon has fully dynamic lighting to cater for the Day/Night system, high resolution texturing, where details are streamed in dependant on whats in view, PBR materials that react correctly to lighting, occlusion culling, a whole range of post-processing effects, kick-ass water, LOD setups, Network integration and a whole bunch of other components some that we made, some that we bought, some that are just complex bits of Unity that we need and had to learn to use. So when some or any of these complex components stop working for any reason .. (...often because we updated Unity… ) development takes a real kick in the Charlie's Angels. Spending all our time fixing rather than making is the downside of us being just two. Don’t misunderstand me though, we love the challenge and we are so excited about V3 more than I can say, even if it sometimes feels like its getting the better of us.

On the other hand, The Magical Mystery Toilet update reminded us of the advantages of being a small team. Because V2 has a more stable base and set of unchanging components ( also no more Unity updates for V2), it allowed us to rapidly put together a whole load of new content. If we weren’t spending most of our time building up a reliable base for V3 we would have been putting out updates much more frequently with V2 in 2017. That's why getting to a stable base in V3 is now so very important and our main priority.



We still recognize the value of V2. Having spent more time on it recently we were reminded that there are lots of issues in V2, most of which we had abandoned because we figured, "meh, that won’t be an issue in V3". Things like physics optimization, the flickering of decals and the stripyness of the sea at altitude (Z fighting) and sea not being great,  the lack of distance fog and post-processing effects and that the blimps are not great to fly and could be much better if they tipped less and carried stuff. All these issues we just figured would be resolved in the development of V3. Things are different now since V2 and V3 are very separate projects. They both have their own lives. So in the spirit of The V3 January Fix Fest, we figured, let's spend some time investigating the possibility of fixing some of these outstanding V2 issues. And we found a few ways we could make it better.



It makes sense that V2 could have a few things added and fixed and tweaked, it could help it stand on its own and not just on Steam. We often have requests to put AF? on other platforms not to mention all the scammers charging people for fake versions of Amazing Frog? on mobile platforms. We had considered this before and even made mobile versions of Amazing Frog? at different stages of development. But we always abandoned it because we didn't want anything getting in the way of V3. In fact one time back in 2014 pre Steam, we showed V1(from OUYA) to Nintendo, but at the time they didn't think it was right for their platform.



After the balloons and the lunar lander were added and we found ourselves flying around more slowly and it was more difficult to ignore the terrible Z-fighting and even though its V2 we had to do something about it.



There are still a few things left to do on V2 before its next release, with updates camera and rendering system also you may be able to spot some of the of the newer systems from V3 creeping into V2….  But that should drop pretty soon.





Feeling a little skeptical about V3?…. don’t be. We still work on V2, but we are all about V3. That's the mission.

It's been difficult trying to do everything at once in V3 and constantly spinning all the plates that keep SwindonShire whole has frequently got in the way of us reaching what we would think is a distributable standard on builds. Too much to resolve at once. Imagine Hal is “Slartibartfast-ing” SwindonShire, Messing with the sun to grow vegetation, but now he has to stop gardening because I need his help changing the lightbulbs in the Fayju building, because I can’t see what I am doing with the doors. It's a crude example… but there is a massive chain of interconnected dependencies in a large world and often major shared components either break or demand to be changed if they don’t fit with the latest addition.  Simply put, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.

So we had to come up with a better strategy. After feeling really let down by the collapse of the project after the post-Xmas Unity update process, we decided it was imperative to form smaller environments to enable focus on independent chunks of the game. To protect ourselves from these kinds of issues in the future. I guess we had skipped this step before, as we know where everything needed to go in Swindon. We figure that if we begin releasing builds using test worlds, rapidly built for the purpose of bouncing about and shooting each other, it would help give Hal the freedom he needs to break and mold “SwindonShire”  and me the space to focus on bouncy shooty multiplayer stuff. Also in our new test worlds, we can both focus on each of the new asset systems with more clarity, like the guns, clothes, cars...





The asset side of V3 has been growing steadily. The all new blimp system in one of our next major undertakings in that area.



The Blimps have always been a major feature in Amazing Frog? We are building on this in V3





You may have spotted it in the new V2 pics too, while in V2 it won’t look as detailed, the blimps in V2 needed an upgrade so we thought what the hell.

So, that's about it for now. I’m sorry this devblog took so long it's been tricky. I actually wrote most of its last week, but when we got around to taking screenshots both versions were not compiling properly since I had completely changed the cameras in V2 and was sharing the code from V3. I didn't manage to fix either till Monday. Well, we took the screenshots today and it shouldn't be too long before we have something else to share.

Firstly, OMG I can’t believe people found the Fly Hats. Furthermore, I am getting reports that the space fly hat didn’t appear in peoples wardrobes. How very Fayju :S Fear not,  if you have the message that you found the space fly hat in your notifications on the fPhone, I should be able to get it unlocked in a fix in the upcoming V2 update. (We really were not expecting people to go looking for them.)

It has been a bit of a January fix fest for both V2 and V3, now we are in Feb we are starting to see things more clearly.

After putting out a really exciting update just before Xmas we were looking forward to continuing at that pace into January. Unfortunately, it didn't turn out like that. One of the big disadvantages of being just the two of us really hit home in the first two weeks of the year. After Unity make some updates, it invalidated a lot of the progress we had made in V3 and we spent the first half of the month trying to isolate what went wrong and haven’t resolved all of the problems yet. Spending so much time searching for problems, isolating and fixing them, is something we are used to in game development, but for small teams, this has a massive impact on progress.



In comparison to V2, the V3 set up is now incredibly complex. Swindon has fully dynamic lighting to cater for the Day/Night system, high resolution texturing, where details are streamed in dependant on whats in view, PBR materials that react correctly to lighting, occlusion culling, a whole range of post-processing effects, kick-ass water, LOD setups, Network integration and a whole bunch of other components some that we made, some that we bought, some that are just complex bits of Unity that we need and had to learn to use. So when some or any of these complex components stop working for any reason .. (...often because we updated Unity… ) development takes a real kick in the Charlie's Angels. Spending all our time fixing rather than making is the downside of us being just two. Don’t misunderstand me though, we love the challenge and we are so excited about V3 more than I can say, even if it sometimes feels like its getting the better of us.

On the other hand, The Magical Mystery Toilet update reminded us of the advantages of being a small team. Because V2 has a more stable base and set of unchanging components ( also no more Unity updates for V2), it allowed us to rapidly put together a whole load of new content. If we weren’t spending most of our time building up a reliable base for V3 we would have been putting out updates much more frequently with V2 in 2017. That's why getting to a stable base in V3 is now so very important and our main priority.



We still recognize the value of V2. Having spent more time on it recently we were reminded that there are lots of issues in V2, most of which we had abandoned because we figured, "meh, that won’t be an issue in V3". Things like physics optimization, the flickering of decals and the stripyness of the sea at altitude (Z fighting) and sea not being great,  the lack of distance fog and post-processing effects and that the blimps are not great to fly and could be much better if they tipped less and carried stuff. All these issues we just figured would be resolved in the development of V3. Things are different now since V2 and V3 are very separate projects. They both have their own lives. So in the spirit of The V3 January Fix Fest, we figured, let's spend some time investigating the possibility of fixing some of these outstanding V2 issues. And we found a few ways we could make it better.



It makes sense that V2 could have a few things added and fixed and tweaked, it could help it stand on its own and not just on Steam. We often have requests to put AF? on other platforms not to mention all the scammers charging people for fake versions of Amazing Frog? on mobile platforms. We had considered this before and even made mobile versions of Amazing Frog? at different stages of development. But we always abandoned it because we didn't want anything getting in the way of V3. In fact one time back in 2014 pre Steam, we showed V1(from OUYA) to Nintendo, but at the time they didn't think it was right for their platform.



After the balloons and the lunar lander were added and we found ourselves flying around more slowly and it was more difficult to ignore the terrible Z-fighting and even though its V2 we had to do something about it.



There are still a few things left to do on V2 before its next release, with updates camera and rendering system also you may be able to spot some of the of the newer systems from V3 creeping into V2….  But that should drop pretty soon.





Feeling a little skeptical about V3?…. don’t be. We still work on V2, but we are all about V3. That's the mission.

It's been difficult trying to do everything at once in V3 and constantly spinning all the plates that keep SwindonShire whole has frequently got in the way of us reaching what we would think is a distributable standard on builds. Too much to resolve at once. Imagine Hal is “Slartibartfast-ing” SwindonShire, Messing with the sun to grow vegetation, but now he has to stop gardening because I need his help changing the lightbulbs in the Fayju building, because I can’t see what I am doing with the doors. It's a crude example… but there is a massive chain of interconnected dependencies in a large world and often major shared components either break or demand to be changed if they don’t fit with the latest addition.  Simply put, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.

So we had to come up with a better strategy. After feeling really let down by the collapse of the project after the post-Xmas Unity update process, we decided it was imperative to form smaller environments to enable focus on independent chunks of the game. To protect ourselves from these kinds of issues in the future. I guess we had skipped this step before, as we know where everything needed to go in Swindon. We figure that if we begin releasing builds using test worlds, rapidly built for the purpose of bouncing about and shooting each other, it would help give Hal the freedom he needs to break and mold “SwindonShire”  and me the space to focus on bouncy shooty multiplayer stuff. Also in our new test worlds, we can both focus on each of the new asset systems with more clarity, like the guns, clothes, cars...





The asset side of V3 has been growing steadily. The all new blimp system in one of our next major undertakings in that area.



The Blimps have always been a major feature in Amazing Frog? We are building on this in V3





You may have spotted it in the new V2 pics too, while in V2 it won’t look as detailed, the blimps in V2 needed an upgrade so we thought what the hell.

So, that's about it for now. I’m sorry this devblog took so long it's been tricky. I actually wrote most of its last week, but when we got around to taking screenshots both versions were not compiling properly since I had completely changed the cameras in V2 and was sharing the code from V3. I didn't manage to fix either till Monday. Well, we took the screenshots today and it shouldn't be too long before we have something else to share.

Firstly I hope you are enjoying Amazing Frog? : The Magical Mystery Toilet. The second set of hotfixes has now been uploaded. We addressed some problems we saw in some videos and of course the community has been really helpful in spotting stuff which has gone wrong.

Some of the things the new hotfixes resolved were cars exploding as they get flushed, jumping through withheld objects going a bit weird, no reward on red Megladon…various rewards not triggering. sorry.



We really do try and test like crazy, but its difficult testing a magical toilet that you can put almost anything in, also we added way more stuff than we had time to control…I mean seriously, we had "shark cannon" on the list…. Either way, we had an awesome time making The Magical Mystery Toilet Update and it just wouldn’t be Xmas for us without a last minute Xmas update.



It's been such a long time since we updated the store page too. not even sure what game I am looking at, we really need to update the store page artwork and trailer… heh and the Splash screen. There are so many great screenshots in the community I think we are just going to have to use some of these on the store page. That is if we can organize ourselves enough to do it... A couple of days ago I went through the screenshots of the f0.2.9a and I ended up downloading over 70 …There were loads more that I liked too! So that's why all the screenshots in this devblog are yours. The ones I downloaded from the steam community.









There are so many that are great for all sorts of different reasons. Some show achievement and dedication, some show off the game well, some alert us to bugs and some just make us laugh like crazy.



Also, its a great place to see the weird and wonderful things you guys have been getting up to in Amazing Frog? Often there is a lot of activity we hadn’t even thought of.



(this feels like it almost simulates soft bodies)



(This is one of my favorites, not just as a cool screenshot, but as I was shocked to see you can pick zombies up by their legs… I mean I must have programmed it to do that, but I had just forgotten. I may have to make it so you can pick up the other NPCs by there feet too.)



(…)

We’ve been making hotfixes, and billboards etc, but we still slowed down a little over the Holidays and these past few days gave us a chance to reflect on the past years development. It was fun being back in V2, in fact, we had a lot more fun than we had anticipated. We had been so wrapped up in the newer looking graphics and more capable physics of V3 that we had almost lost sight of fast-paced nonsense. Developing V3 is a much more careful process, demanding more time and precision, but working in V2 reminded us not to lose our fluidity. For example, if I want balloons I should just get on and build it and not worry so much about if I am going to break everything (I mean it did break a quite a few things, but not everything). V3 is our main focus and will continue to be so as we enter 2018, but there are some items on our V2 Update list that didn't make it to The Mystery Toilet update and hotfixes and I don’t think we are going to be able to resist the temptation to make them a reality in another V2 update very soon. Even if we just spend a bit of time here and there on V2. Also, since we have built better controls and input in V3 it's really been bugging me that you can’t click on the menu or phone with a mouse in V2. So I may need to do something about that in the near future as well.




For the most part of 2017, we have been intently focused on the development of V3. We did not venture out of the studio at all in 2017. In 2018 we are planning to get out a bit more, although before we can do that, we have some development targets we need to hit.

The most important first target is to get the V3 online beta playable. We want to have both V2 and V3 playable. So V3 will not replace V2 it will be downloaded with it. Every day we progress V3 feels more and more like a separate game. (A separate game that Steam Early Access players will always get.) As we move forward its likely that the first V3 beta releases will be test modes and we will shut off the main game until we feel its ready.  Much of the progression in V2 was built retrospectively and it's not very clear that there is a purpose (i use that term loosely) or direction ( another word I use loosely ) Essentially, we felt that we made mistakes as we made in V1 and then subsequently more mistakes in V2 and we want to make sure V3 benefits from our recognition of those mistakes.

Its been a great year, though. We are really excited about what we have made, and what we are working on, but without the release of Amazing Frog? in 2017 as an Online Multiplayer game, it feels like something is missing...



Its close, real close, but it's not today. We wish everyone a happy new year, Stay tuned for some more updates in Early 2018.

Amazing Frog? f0.2.9a The Magical Mystery Toilet this is a V2 update for Xmas.

So we made a toilet and tried to flush everything down it. Seemed like a really good idea at the time, then after we were half way through we were like… what the hell are we doing? You can put anything in there... But we persevered and saw it through..mostly. Its probably one of the strangest and most experimental updates we have made. Since it was a V2 update it made sense for us to lean towards the more experimental. If I am being honest we have not tried all the possibilities with the Magical Mystery Toilet (there are so many) so we expect to make some amends additions and changes.



I haven’t had time to fill out the change Log, sorry so it might be difficult to know what to look form but thats all part of the mystery, but at least there is a new “Need Help” fApp on your fPhone :) That should guide hopefully guide you a bit



We’ve fixed a lot of stuff from f0.2.8e The Swindon Space Program. We’re very sorry about  these things. For example the grapple hook having an undo button really helps get more use out of it as a tool. It was bad that we left them like that for so long,  its just that since the last update we have just been so wrapped up in V3 which is a completely different environment. (Wondering what V2 and V3 means? please check out the previous Devblog 021)



I won’t write too much now



Just some images…I’ll write a proper devblog after I have done the hot fixes.



Without going into too much detail, since most of this update is focused on experimentation and secrets. We will most certainly expand on this,  we really had a lot of fun making it. Its been healthy for us to have a month where we have focused exclusively on messing about because when building V3 we had to be very strict with ourselves not to get carried away and its imperative to get the foundations right..

Happy Holidays All, I hope you enjoy.