Amazing Frog? News

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.

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.