Frogatto & Friends

Frogatto sprite

Frogatto & Friends is an action-adventure platformer game, starring a certain quixotic frog.
We're an open-source community project, and welcome contributions!
We also have a very flexible editor and engine you can use to make your own creations.

Frogatto in 20 Minutes or Less

June 24th, 2020 by DDR

On 2020-06-19, UbuntuJackson laid down a very impressive speedrun, beating Frogatto in 19:36.21. Around the our virtual water-cooler, we all agreed that we were quite impressed!

As a developer, watching a speedrun of your own game is both humbling and inducing of a feeling of incredulousness. “How could we create this little content, yet include so many bugs?”

It also raises the question of what to do about the bugs. A developer of the game is both a tremendous asset and huge risk to a speedrunning community. When a run comes to the developer’s attention, critical bugs tend to get fixed and run times go up. Sometimes, the reaction of the community has been to run on early builds of the game, canonicalizing the release-day disk as the version the run is built on. (This is often a lot harder with heavily DRM’d games, as you have a much more tenuous ownership of them and can only play the most up-to-date version.) Other times, the community will shrug and move on, accepting a slower patch for stability and bifurcating the leaderboards to reflect this. With Frogatto, we are lucky in that we are a very traditional single-player game with no DRM. We do not have to patch exploits or force people on to the latest version.

So what about the issues UbuntuJackson has showcased for us? Some are fixed in the next release already. Some have simply gone away, as we replace older content with newer. The next version introduces two new act bosses; so we definitely don’t have to worry about keeping the times the same! So, we have to take a hand-off path; to marvel how broken our game is, and be honoured by the attention that has been paid to break it.

We look forward to seeing what merry havoc will be played with our next release.

Thank you.

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Progress Report

November 18th, 2015 by DDR

It’s been a slow month here. The only major news is that Jetrel has been working on cleaning up and polishing Frogatto’s (the eponymous main character’s) graphics. Here’s a recent example:
rendering-frogatto-compo
The onion skin view on github helps highlight the differences.

A huge part of this has been an ongoing effort to redo Frogatto’s core movement animations – some months earlier, he had taken on redoing our running, walking, and jumping animations, and now at long last, it was time to take on swimming (which was a lot more complicated because of the need for separate animations pointing in different directions – the others were able to get by with one mirrored animation facing to the side). This was recently finished up about a week-and-a-half ago. This is a gif showing what it looked like beforehand:

And here’s an animation of what it looks like now:

I myself have been struggling with our build system, and have been unable to build Frogatto for several weeks now. (I can’t get Frogatto to run on Ubuntu, since I’ve messed up something up dependency-wise.) Because of this, there has been no progress made on the inventory screen.

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The Tower 57 Post

August 23rd, 2015 by DDR

Today, we have a shout-out to Tower 57, whose kickstarter badly needs your support with roughly a week left. They’re close to meeting their goal, but your individual support could mean the difference between success and failure for their campaign. Get out there and pledge!

Tower 57!

1920s art deco. Dystopian future. Destructible scenery. Tower 57 is a twin-stick shooter where you go on an espionage mission to a rival tower, trying to keep them from declaring war on you.

Here are some pictures of it:

Grutin, incorporated, has a great art deco meets blue cybernetic look to it.

The factory. Something fishy here.

Tower 57 has 6 playable characters.

Playable characters.

A gentleman and his flamethrower. They light a turret on fire, and use it's now-fiery bullets to take out a bunch of smaller enemies.

“Smart Combat”

The art is all by Cyangmou, who has an active deviantart profile at https://cyangmou.deviantart.com. The kickstarter is at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/514621648/tower-57.

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Success!

December 7th, 2013 by DDR

Good news, everybody! We’re greenlit, we’re coming to Steam!

Greenlight Screenshot - 26648 unique visitors over 69 days - 10687 yes votes - 49% approval rating

The Greenlight Stats Page

In more practical matters, Steam will be getting Frogatto version 4.0 and up. We expect to be able to release this in half a year or so, by the summer of 2014. The new version will feature better graphics, two new bosses, and much nicer powerup system. Stay tuned for more information via RSS or Twitter.

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Chasm on Twitch.TV (Featuring Frogatto)

May 12th, 2013 by DDR

Hello everybody! We’re all excited over Chasm, and they’re having a stream over here for the next few hours! They’ve asked us to do a bit, so there’s a conversation you probably won’t want to miss. Link is: http://www.twitch.tv/discordgames. This is the last day of their kickstarter, over at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/discordgames/chasm.

[edit] Event’s over, now. It was good. It was funny! Luckily, you can now watch the whole four and a half hour video at http://www.twitch.tv/discordgames/b/402407399. The bit where they play Frogatto is near the beginning, after some Castlevania. The show features an extended interview with our very own artist Jetrel; and our musician Ryan drops by about half-way through the game.

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Cube Trains Released!

December 7th, 2012 by DDR

Cube Trains 1.0 is done, and available for download from http://cubetrains.com. It is a puzzle game about laying train tracks through a city, in 3D. It’s also free.

There is no limiting mechanism on the number of pieces you can place in a level, except for how many you can fit into a given area. While some games, like Isoball, will give you a set number of pieces to solve the level with, this merely limits the fun. Cube Trains lets you build as much as you want. Of course, there is some difficulty — it’s quite hard to actually beat a few of the levels, as there is barely enough room for you to build what you need to. In addition, each piece you use raises your score, and you may want to complete levels with the lowest score.

The game also features infinite undo and redo, along with the automatic placing of “obvious” pieces. This makes things much more convenient, in the long haul. If you’ve ever wanted to undo the last action in Sim City or Civilization, this feature is dedicated to you.

Cube Trains was made with the Frogatto engine. Because of this, it should be able to run most everywhere Frogatto runs. Currently, however, it is only really available for Mac OS X or Windows as you have to compile it yourself on Linux.

Download it here.

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Realtime Images

September 3rd, 2012 by DDR

Recently, we’ve added a brand-new feature to our editor. Images now get reloaded in real-time, while you’re playing the game in the editor.

If you’re an artist and you’ve spotted a tiling bug with some part of the ground, you don’t have to stop playing (and loose your position) to fix up the error. You just edit the source image, save it, and there it is in-game. This is especially useful when creating animations, since you can see the animation as it is played in its natural environment. It’s also quicker – animating with a live preview is much better than animating in a situation where you have to wait for everything to load before you can see the results of your efforts.

This also has implications if you’re prerendering your art. I’ve been working on a little project for the past few months which uses Blender 3D to render the graphics. In the following video, I demonstrate the results of telling Blender to output its rendered images to the game’s graphics folder. (The change is a bit exaggerated, but it’s to make a point.)

Although there is a bit of a delay in rendering, the time cut off having to start up the game to see the results are very nice. This technique also works with spritesheets, although the script to compile the spritesheet has to wait for all the images to be rendered before compiling the final image.

This is all free, open source software. The Blender file, the game, and the Anura engine can be found over on github. If you’d like to get started using our shiny engine, drop us a note on the forums or talk with us via internet relay chat.

An early beta of Cube Trains is available from http://ddr0.github.com/.

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Cube Trains

May 8th, 2012 by DDR

Hello.
Over the past half-year or so, I’ve made a game using the Frogatto engine called Cube Trains. It’s a 3D puzzle game based around building tracks in the confines of the city. You can visit the website over here: http://ddr0.github.com. A picture is worth a thousand words, they say, and I’m not very talkative. Let’s make this post 2153 words long, shall we?

First screenshot of Cube Trains.
Second screenshot of Cube Trains.

Beta video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7OMc4HwYS8&feature=channel&list=UL
Alpha video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7OMc4HwYS8&feature=channel&list=UL

Just a side note, in the 0.2.0 release for windows and linux, you’ll need to remove any Frogatto save-files you have saved from their save folder. Cube Trains expects there to be none there when it starts up the first time, though you can rename the save-files and put them back when you’re done. (save.cfg -> save1.cfg, save1.cfg -> save2.cfg, and so on) This problem does not affect Mac users.

The code is available in the cube_trains module of Frogatto, in the more recent git versions.

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Fork-Bombing Frogatto

February 29th, 2012 by DDR

Thanks to Marcavis, we bring you this great video tutorial:

The management does not advise introducing the results to Australia.

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Moving House

June 21st, 2011 by DDR

Today, we have switched from our old version control system, SVN, to a GitHub repository. (If you’re not a programmer, you may want to skip to the next paragraph.) The GitHub page can be found at https://github.com/frogatto/frogatto. Why, you ask, did we bother moving from a working version control system? Quite simply, Git makes branching our project much, much easier. By allowing branches of the project to be worked on independently of the main release, we’ll also be able to release more often and make bigger improvements in those releases.

Oddly enough, our wiki has been hosted on Google Code since the beginning. Since we’ve moved to GitHub, we have decided to finally move the wiki there as well. Unfortunately, the wiki codes between Google and GitHub are slightly different. So, if you have a spare moment, please give us a hand cleaning up the new wiki! (For example, `code` should be {{{code}}}.)

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