Frogatto

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Zarel
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Re: Frogatto

Post by Zarel »

thespaceinvader wrote:I'd have expected better from you :P

The content is copyrighted. Copyright has nothing to do with writing, and everything to do with the right to copy. I know you know this already, but not everyone reading does :eng:
I've corrected Jetrel on that spelling before. I guess it's habit for him by now. :P

Copywriting does, in fact, exist (and it means "writing copies" like one would assume) and is distinct from copyrighting.
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Jetrel
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Re: Frogatto

Post by Jetrel »

Zarel wrote:See, that's the kind of low-discoverability limitation that should not be present in a game.
Yeah. I think I know how to fix that, and it should hopefully be trivial. I'll test tomorrow to make sure there are no regressions from the change.

We're so used to the moveset, we do it without thinking.
Zarel wrote:Show it all at once when you go to "New Game" (complete with "Next" button). Then, you only need "Left and Right to move, Up to open a door" in the title screen.
I've refactored the tutorial text into two paragraphs that switch back and forth on the titlescreen. Your complaints about the text changing on a timer are dead on, but we have no other option. User interaction to advance the text is not an option, because it's teaching the user how to interact. Like I said - I agree with the timer being badly in sync with people's reading speed, so I've done what I can to mitigate the problem, but at present, I can't see a better solution.

"Throwing up a dialogue" as you suggest is an atrocious UI design - it's actually worse than a passive bit of text on the screen, because it triggers an annoyance-response from the user and causes them to try and dismiss it to get back to what they were trying to do. I've seen games try to do it, it's universally panned in game design, and UI design in general. Just no.

Not only that, it'd be accessible only in the one rare case where they actually start a new game, and unavailable in subsequent launches where they load the save, rather than being available every time they launch.
Zarel wrote:Also: Having the whole game operable with keyboard-only would be nice. It's kind of silly that the Pause screen requires a mouse, when nothing else does.
Actually, two of the 3 buttons there are keyboard driven even in your copy. Pressing escape again unpauses, pressing return quits. That entire screen is only a week old, though, so we'll finish that later.
Play Frogatto & Friends - a finished, open-source adventure game!
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Jetrel
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Re: Frogatto

Post by Jetrel »

New, less crappy (far more readable) logo, at the bottom here:

Image


On a side note, I'll probably move this to "game dev"... later.
Play Frogatto & Friends - a finished, open-source adventure game!
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Re: Frogatto

Post by penguin »

Sgt. Groovy wrote:I would appreciate an option to reconfigure the control keys. As three of the arrow keys on my keyboard are dead, I haven't been able to try the game. :(
Well that sucks. What platform are you on? Certainly we want to provide configurable controls at some point, but for now I could fairly easily change the controls and make a special build for you.
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Iris
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Re: Frogatto

Post by Iris »

Jetrel wrote:On a side note, I'll probably move this to "game dev"... later.
Done with a handful clicks, now.
Author of the unofficial UtBS sequels Invasion from the Unknown and After the Storm.
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norbert
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Re: Frogatto

Post by norbert »

I just played Frogatto, finished it (with a tea party) in one run of - I guess - about four hours. I think it's best if I give feedback before I read this thread, so some things may have been written already. Here goes:
feedback:
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Jetrel
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Re: Frogatto

Post by Jetrel »

Many of the issues we have, which you mention, are known and planned to be fixed, but we really need to consider them post-1.0 fixes, because we don't want to be stuck in development hell (c.f. Duke Nukem Forever).
The end boss was (too) difficult and no fun. The spinning blades are a pain, and when you die you have to keep pressing a key to skip the conversation. The part where the end boss walks past Frogatto and Frogatto scratches his head is funny, but after a while it gets quite annoying because it cannot be skipped.
Indeed, our first major update will be to alleviate that annoyance on boss fights. The difficulty of our boss fights is exactly where I want it, but sitting through the cutscene over and over just sucks. If you die, you shouldn't have to see it again.
During the strange house stages I had collected a gray key. I thought I had to take that key with me through the whole house. I went to a lot of trouble to do this only to see the key disappear. Eventually I figured out I could simply take that key, exit the house and open the gate on the lower right.
Keys are a nasty issue I need to figure out. Our problem is that it's fun to carry them around and toss them at a target, but it's a game-breaker if you could carry the key with you, and potentially lose it down a well, or save it long enough to use it on another door which has the same lock. Hence the harsh "can't take them out of the house" business.
There is no need to save, unless you don't finish the game in one run.
saves are a bit vestigial. We implemented checkpoints at a very late stage in development, and yeah, they mostly obviate the need for saves.
The forest levels were a bit too repetitive for my liking, so I decided to stop collecting coins and to just run to the right while jumping now and then - which worked fine.
Yeah, the background graphics are unfortunately linear, and kind of force the level-designer to do linear designs. We want to fix that. We also want to add a forest town, and a couple forest bosses. We've run out of time for this release, unfortunately.
Play Frogatto & Friends - a finished, open-source adventure game!
Tonepoet
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Re: Frogatto

Post by Tonepoet »

It's pretty easy to put down the keys on the ground to fight, so if you toss them near a pit, that's your risk to take and your trajectory to figure out. I think if you're worried about people losing the keys unjustly the whole regurgitation upon hitstun thing is probably going to pose the greatest risk. Most of the time people are trying to avoid being hit, so if they are, that's purely by accident meaning they have no chance to plan what'll happen to the key. So say you're carrying it on a mobile platform and some bird swoops down and hits you, you can be pretty much screwed to the point where if the key was a good long distance back, you might as well be dead.

Got a little distracted from this due to a bit of a nasty cough but insofar as I've played here are a lot of misc. thoughts of my own.
  • Secrets are easy to find. I've spotted two invisible walls (one to a large coin, one to a chest) and a rather dangerously placed pedestal(as far as I've gotten), almost by accident. I'm not sure how hard you want them to be to find but I'm just sayin'.
  • The wall jumping is picky but this may preserve the integrity of platforming segments where you have to do things like wait for a lift to take you a short height.
  • Whilst pick up and go value might decrease the need for content divergence, if you expect the free version to sell commercial copies, it needs replay value. Short games don't often have much replay value because they don't offer variety, depth or both. Just how long is this?
  • Enemies: can you have more types in one area? It seems like I'm primarily only fighting only one or two, which gets monotonous.
  • The checkpoints seem very forgiving, perhaps too forgiving in certain instances. Respawning close to the pits minimizes frustration but if you don't want people to abuse them as ad hoc health restore points, make them earn reentry with a couple of enemies.
  • Frequent savepoints are good for progressively oriented handheld games. So say the gods of battery power and scheduling. Ever watch a gameboy game deinterlace right after you've finally achieved Acomplisment X? No fun at all. The same goes for needing to turn a device off because you've been called away to more important matters. Waiting room in the doctor's office anybody?
  • My windows version had a runtime error, then my save got corrupted. I was going from the mine shaft back to the forrest. It happened during a the scene transition when I pressed some arrow keys. I tried to save an error report but I couldn't figure out how to copy/paste.
  • Gamepad support for the P.C. version might be fun since controllers and sidescrollers have gone hand in hand since the days of. I could probably just use a keyboard mapper like Joy2Key for this pefectly well but theoretically, native support might slightly decrease response time since it's the difference between direct input and intercepted input.
  • Frogatto himself primarily appears to be a composite of the best actions of staple platforming elements rather swankily melded together. It shows a real love of the genre.
  • So long as people are making character comparisons Yoshi+Rayman+Kirby = Frogatto.
  • As colorful and quirky as this is, I can see this being extremely popular. Kudos to you good sir.
  • With the continuous map thing, what happens when you go through doors?
Htonsew Rof Elttab Eht is just too cool for school. I've got no words to describe it. Have any of you guys tried it? ;-)
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Re: Frogatto

Post by penguin »

Frogatto 1.0rc1 is out! If all goes as planned, we'll probably release it this weekend. :) Also note, that currently I'm making the Windows builds, but that hopefully loonycyborg will make the actual release builds, and I'll just do the periodic development ones, since I don't know anything about Windows installers and all that.

Tonepoet: Thanks for the post. Any chance you could give us your corrupted save?
Lastmerlin
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Re: Frogatto

Post by Lastmerlin »

Hello,

I tried to get it working, but faced some problems.
1. Source package link did not work. I got the SVN version then
2. You might add ccache and libglew to your dependency list in the INSTALL file
3. Compile run failed when compiling custom_object.cpp

Code: Select all

src/custom_object.cpp: In member function »virtual variant custom_object::get_value_by_slot(int) const«:
src/custom_object.cpp:1554: Fehler: »class game_logic::map_formula_callable_ptr« hat kein Element namens »reset«
src/custom_object.cpp: In member function »virtual void custom_object::set_value(const std::string&, const variant&)«:
src/custom_object.cpp:1869: Fehler: »class game_logic::formula_variable_storage_ptr« hat kein Element namens »reset«
src/custom_object.cpp:1870: Fehler: »class game_logic::formula_variable_storage_ptr« hat kein Element namens »reset«
src/custom_object.cpp: In member function »virtual void custom_object::set_value_by_slot(int, const variant&)«:
src/custom_object.cpp:1889: Fehler: »class game_logic::formula_variable_storage_ptr« hat kein Element namens »reset«
src/custom_object.cpp:1890: Fehler: »class game_logic::formula_variable_storage_ptr« hat kein Element namens »reset«
Maybe g++ version might be useful:

Code: Select all

~/frogatto$ g++ --version
g++ (GCC) 4.2.4 (Ubuntu 4.2.4-1ubuntu4)
Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Dies ist freie Software; die Kopierbedingungen stehen in den Quellen. Es
gibt KEINE Garantie; auch nicht für MARKTGÄNGIGKEIT oder FÜR SPEZIELLE ZWECKE.
Tell me if you need further information.
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Re: Frogatto

Post by Dave »

Lastmerlin: your version of the Boost library is too old. Try a more recent version of Boost.
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penguin
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Re: Frogatto

Post by penguin »

Lastmerlin wrote:1. Source package link did not work. I got the SVN version then
They're the same currently, so you're fine on that count - but thanks for letting us know. It was a capitalization issue; "frogatto" not "Frogatto".
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Feufochmar
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Re: Frogatto

Post by Feufochmar »

I finished Frogatto in 2 or 3 hours. I like the game.

I have some things to say :

* In the INSTALL file, you should add the following dependencies to build Frogatto :
- ccache
- google-perftools (frogatto is linked against libprofiler)

* A option to change the control key would be welcomed : the "A" and "S" key are not necessry close on the keyboard (such asdvorak layout)

* How do powers-up work ?
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Zarel
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Re: Frogatto

Post by Zarel »

Jetrel wrote:"Throwing up a dialogue" as you suggest is an atrocious UI design - it's actually worse than a passive bit of text on the screen, because it triggers an annoyance-response from the user and causes them to try and dismiss it to get back to what they were trying to do. I've seen games try to do it, it's universally panned in game design, and UI design in general. Just no.
"Dialog" is probably the wrong word.

Something more like another screen like the title screen, but with more instructions on top.

I dunno, this isn't my area of expertise. All I know is that nearly anything's better than a marquee at the bottom. You could have a "Help" door? That'd fix the "only shown first game start" problem.
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Frogger5
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Re: Frogatto

Post by Frogger5 »

The game was short, which isn't such a bad thing. But the sense of achievement wasn't that big for me. :|
And the fact that didn't help was that after you finnish the game the potato dude at the start hasn't finished cooking lunch. :D

The controls and movement suited the frog perfectly and the versatility was great fun to play around with.

My negative:
:eng:
After playing Wesnoth where there are portraits on the dialogue to indicate who's talking, I got a bit confused with only the point of a speech bubble to tell. This could be helped by making the characters style of speech more diverse. If it's your first time playing and you cover the speech bubble point you probably wouldn't be able to tell who's who. Pretty much everything you see about the characters is in their speech, so it needs to be full of unique, interesting character. Of course you can't over do it that would be ridiculous, but different accents, or habits in speech or any characteristics, would really help. I see indiverse characters a lot in wesnoth ad ons, but in my opinion, you can get away with it more in strategy games like wesnoth.
Platformers however are less abstract and are more involved in the story.
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