Since the last Devblog we have fixing a lot of leftover problems inherited from “The Big Switch” (see Devblog 008). Luckily, by its very nature, that process of “fixing” soon evolves into a process of refinement.
SwindonShire
Hal has spent a lot of time with the landscape, adding to its detail at a geological level, preparing it for a new layer of flora and fauna and subsequently, what we are most excited about - a layer of civil frog engineering. Also having the time to refine the landscape has made it possible to reduce the impact on the CPU .( i.e. making it run better ) We’re excited about this as, oddly, even though the landscape looks more detailed it seem to run more efficiently than before. We will most likely dedicate a whole devblog to this at some point.
Online
On the one hand I want to get a beta out as soon as possible for online frog activity, but i don’t want to just release the bare minimum. I have been getting a lot of questions about what shape the beta is going to take. It is an evolving process, like Amazing Frog? always has been. But, in terms of how the Beta will be delivered, we do not want players to lose the content from f0.2.8, so its likely that we will create a split build. This will mean that you can have both versions until the new one is ready to fully replace the Unity 4 build. We want to be sure that the new version is working ok before we remove the current version. Also this gives us some small opportunities to fix any outstanding bugs in f0.2.8c.
The features available for online will grow as we add updates. For example, right now I have no plans to set up a bunch of dedicated servers, its too soon to think like that. We just want to empower players to play online with each other and to give you as much control as possible on how to set up your online game. This week I have been looking at how to provide frogs with these controls. It will be done through the fPhone. The fPhone will need an upgrade in terms of controls and components, but it should give you the ability to play Amazing Frog? for a bit and then at any point decide to open your game to other players or jump into someone elses.
A Social fApp, essentially… I am sure you can have a guess at what we are going to call it. Growing the companies that exist in SwindonShire is something very high on our agenda.
We will be making specific game types and modes in time, but thats the format we are heading for initially. As I said though, this is an evolving process.
Stuff we are thinking about.
https://youtu.be/16rUOnsTgGY
There are loads of awesome Amazing Frog? videos that inspire us for all sort of reasons and we are really thankful for that, but I just wanted to share Pungence’s Olympics video as its a good example of a video that inspires gameplay and can help shape development. Often, when we are wrapped up in either fixing, building and developing its refreshing to think about how Amazing Frog? is being played. Its no secret that we haven’t added achievements officially, but we do know that there is a hell of a lot of stuff you can try or learn to do. After watching this video we spent a while talking about how you could set and possibly share your own tasks or challenges. Especially since we will be connecting players together through online, we started to think very seriously not just about what shape a system like that might take but also very seriously how we could develop it. It also reminds us of the many conversations we have had about a whole stream of activity that could be fitting of some kind of reward. Anything from how many exploded cars in a single jump, or longest airtime on a BMX :)
Questions from the community.
from that thread i posted last week ...
LegionOfSkeletron asked
are you guys planning to add some kind of plane? or are you sticking with blimps? also I would love to see some stunting mechanics, such as being able to stand on vehicles while there moving or, even better, some kind of just cause three style grapple. Btw, great work fayju! keep it up :D
First off - thanks. Planes- yes. We can't say when it will happen and it is typical of us to make a spaceship before a biplane, but we have a list or crafts that we are working on.
Stunting mechanics ... we have a few things in mind yes. on grapple - we did try out a tongue in the early stages of Amazing Frog development, it was very powerful but very glitchy. We decided to drop it back then and revisit grapple when the game was more developed...
Teemo asked
Will a debug menu or something similar to Skate 3s menu where you spawn items in such as containers, ramps and cars ever be added?
Usually something like this exists in a game because its something that the developers use while building the game. This is not something we have been using yet. Hal and I have often discussed how we could use more in game tools to help us to test things. We do have plans around this purely to help us develop, if it will turn into a feature i do not know yet. The movie camera is an example of an object that is derived from us wanting to do something for ourselves, we wanted to make screenshots and movie clips (not that we have got around to updating the store page). Besides, after the movie camera it was clear to us that we needed something more GoPro ish to get some trailer footage. Spawning stuff is not out of the question... we do have a major frog item that is as important as the fPhone in the works which I will talk about when unity 5 version is more stable.
Pootispaghetti9001
How fleshed out will the frogluminati be? When will story come into play? And also specifics on the UI and capacity of online and if there will be any other features that will be online other than multiplayer?
Firstly Pooti, what's the frog illuminati?
... :)
Online, currently we are all about making it work, it's not easy. A bit like I was saying earlier, we want to add features like survival modes and team stuff, sharing data, but we also don't know how this is going to evolve.
Zeron asked
Where will the garage where you park your modded cars be located in the map? Also, will it have a parts shop included in it or is it going to be separate from the garage?
So the area outside the hideout was always intended to be your "driveway" however we may have to build an extension, for reasons that may become clearer in the future. As for a parts shop, yes. The frog Milk Coffee Co. Shop was created to test out the whole shop thing and we intend to flesh out the entire high street with shops. Each shop can take us a few weeks and I will announce when we have entered our shop creation frenzy... It's not yet as we are focused on "the big switch" and online.
Also modding the cars - as esteban_da_good asked about the Tiny Poopers, yes all vehicles will follow... But it takes a lot of Hal's time to make all the custom parts so it will start with just the folvo, frog all other vehicles to follow.
Alex Costa
I actually have a question as I am a bit of a football fan. Will the Swindon Town Stadium be added at some point? I think it would be interesting.
Hmmm... We need a stadium, eventually. Where else could the ceremony of Claw-Plach happen? But as to its purpose, I'm not sure how grounded in the reality of Swindon a stadium would be. It is not as high on our list as many other architectural necessities, like a network of roads, for example and maybe more roundabouts.
And Finally from Hypnotoad
Can you guys add it so the police have guns to make them more threatening. And so that they also have a police helicopter please and thank you.
Thankfully in the UK the police don't carry guns that often.... But in Amazing Frog?
For me, your question is asking -will we see an update to the FrogLife™ system that allows frogs (including police) to carry guns. Yes. However as we move through all the components of Amazing Frog? Not just making them work in Unity 5, but also online ready, FrogLife™ is one I will not be able to upgrade until the later stages of this process.
Thanks for all the questions, it really helps explain the process, keep adding to the thread and I will try and answer all in due course. Also I need to condense the suggestions down to something manageable too to put into a post. Also thanks to you all in the community who help out, it doesn't go unnoticed.
Amazing Frog? Devblog 009 - Progress Update
Things have been moving on with Amazing Frog? But its difficult to decide what to talk about. Some things, like whats new beasts we are working on, we would probably want to keep to ourselves, as we don’t want to spoil the surprise. Other things like day to day development I would imagine could be a bit boring to read about, but I guess thats the nature of Game Development…bits of fun at the summits of mountains of hard work.
Lets start with the boring stuff.
The Boring Stuff
Most of my time has been wrapped up with Online and I am quite happy with how things are going (considering online rag doll physics is not generally recommended). If we had followed the recommended paths of game development I’m pretty sure Amazing Frog? wouldn’t exist. Even so, the process so far has forced an unavoidable restructuring of the frog. Originally, I was quite frustrated about this, as not only is restructuring boring as hell, its very demanding to keep track of where you are. When i look at the positives emerging from this restructure, its feeling very encouraging and I can see glimpses of how much I am going to enjoy playing it when its ready.
In the restructure I have had to look at how “split screen” works, how the controls are implemented and indeed assigned, how frogs are loaded, how scenes are “built”, what time of day it is and all sorts of customisable attributes. This is leading to players, ultimately, having more control over setting up their game experience. I want control over these variants while developing and now I have things available like the fOS and our UI system it should make it pretty straight forward to expose a lot of these customisable attributes in game. Bit boring to develop, but its going to be awesome to test.
Quality
Not sure if I have mentioned this, but we loves Unity 5… :)
There are so many graphical enhancements available to us now. And as much as the frog has been undergoing mass reconstruction for physics and online, So too has the Architecture and the assets. We know also that its imperative that we don’t cripple your machines, so as much as the graphics are undergoing improvements we are also considering how to address quality settings. We don’t want to lose the aesthetic of Amazing Frog? we just want it to feel more detailed and take full advantage of the new redesigned pipelines in U5. With the the day/night system its also important that all assets can work with varying light and environment conditions. I touched on this last time, its an ongoing concern.
Vrog
On a more exciting note, Car Modding is becoming a reality, Hal recreated the original Amazing Frog Car (the Vrog ) and in doing so has made all the other vehicles obsolete :) and put me in a position where building a system to fully customise the cars in game is now unavoidable. There is a high level of customisation available for this one car, with all manner of options that we are going to have a wicked fun time calibrating and testing. More to come on how this progresses, other vehicles will follow suit …and, of course, we need a car show room and mod shop.
Stay tuned, we are working as fast as we can and we really want to get some multiplayer tests out there as soon as possible, but there is still quite a lot to do, so be patient.
Amazing Frog? Devblog 008 – The Big Switch
Exciting times for us, we have been really busy with the Unity 5 transition. There is a lot to talk about so I won’t cover everything today.
As I have mentioned before, Hal and I have been looking forward to being full-time in Unity 5 and we have been planning toward this transition for quite some time. Things are going better than we had hoped and our initial tests show an uplift in performance, so It’s all very encouraging…. but its also a lot of work.
This Devblog I will try and start to give you some idea of how we are going about it.
Atmospherics
We have been playing with Unity 5 features for a while. There are many features that we had always known that we wanted to introduce to Amazing Frog? but had, frustratingly, been forced to hold off until we were in Unity 5. One of the major changes is the way lighting and image effects are handled. This has so many, many …many areas of influence in the game, for now lets just think about how it works with atmospherics.
If you have been reading these devblogs, then you’ll know I’m not great with technical jargon. When I say atmospherics, i think i picked up that word from the Truman Show. What I mean is Day and night, weather, humidity and a big long line of stuff. Its not just for visual effect, it means more than that to us. We added the Weather fApp on the fPhone with intent…we just didn’t get the chance to expand on it in Unity 4, but we have a lot of surprises around the corner.
The Loneliness of Swindon Shire
It can get a little lonely in SwindonShire… its a Big Place. Its a perfectly reasonable question to wonder, why did we need such a large environment? what were we thinking?
Well, we always had Big plans for Swindon Shire and even bigger plans for Amazing Frog? and we never wanted you to have to play alone.
I’m not going to lie to you though, the road ahead is clouded with uncertainties, but also so many possibilities.
For f0.2.9, originally we were just going to do a kind of visual update, which would have been fairly similar to f0.2.8c, but with loads more detail and “atmospherics”. After some testing and careful consideration, we decided that now was the time to hit the "Online integration acceleration pedal" and devote our FULL attention to Online and therefore heading straight for f0.3.0. Now we are in the full swing of developing Amazing Frog? for Online and as part of this process, we are stripping out each of the assets and tinkering with them, and then reintroducing them with online compatibility and all their visual upgraded simultaneously.
Its going to be a pretty tough development period ahead, and, to be honest, that fills me with a sense of dredd, but we are so ready for this.
Amazing Frog? Devblog 007 [with f0.2.8c hotfixes]
We have just released a hot fix update to f0.2.8c after a frantic four day bug hunt. Last Thursday we released The Frog Milk Coffee Co. Update only to discover minutes later that pocket mode was broken on Windows and Linux. One thing led to another and we ended up fixing a few more things... It felt like Unity 4 was throwing us some last minute pain before we finally said goodbye and moved on.
Before I explain what was wrong I need to first say again about your DATA.
YOUR DATA
I have noticed that many players said that their Data was lost. Its gone but not lost. You can get a lot of it back. I know it is not very clear, but there was a button put into the Settings fApp on the fPhone just for this purpose called Reclaim Save Data.
There was some confusion here because I made a supplemental mistake where i did not increase the data allowance for Amazing Frog in the Steam Cloud. So this meant that it could not save the new data for some people, because it still had the old data taking up space. I resolved this over the weekend without the need for an update, but it was worth mentioning. Amazing Frog? saves two types of data, local settings and cloud saved data. Local settings are things like quality settings, population density and controller settings, these are saved locally on the machine you are playing. Cloud saved data is for game progression S.C.P. Unlocks, rewards, Trophies, outfits, cats etc…They are saved to your Steam Account in your cloud. This way if you are playing on multiple machines it should take your progression with you but maintain you hardware specific settings per platform.
PIG HUNT
So what happened? We were set to celebrate, because both Hal and I knew that as soon as we were done with f0.2.8c we could fully concentrate on the next stages of Amazing Frog? As is stands we spent the weekend chasing what turned out to be a PIG. We had no idea what the bug with pocket mode was and it took us completely by surprise. There was no error, nothing to read in the crash log and it only happened in windows and Linux builds. Pocket mode was deconstructed piece by piece until we found the crashing culprit.
When we finally found it …. IT WAS A PIG.
The material on the pigs was breaking the game… ( only in pocket mode ) and we still have no idea why. We recreated the material and threw our hands in the air and is if by magic… it worked again. I guess thats sometimes how game dev works. Pretty frustrating when it does work like that, but its all good. During the process of elimination of reasons why pocket mode was crashing we also sorted a few other things too.
We fixed some notification problems and improved the space flight simulation room.
Also by accident we discovered why sometimes holding a gun or an object results in jitters (often the frog attempting to touch what is being held). The process of fixing those jitters also helped us make the physics even more optimised for this last Unity 4 version. So this update is now THE LAST, but hopefully THE BEST Unity 4 version of Amazing Frog? Bring on Unity 5.
So whats next?
Well certainly the next Devblog will be about the Unity 5 stuff that we are working on, but in the meantime I expect we will probably spend a day or so playing the hell out of the The Frog milk Coffee Co Update as there is a few things we have been eager to try out. Maybe we’ll make some videos, and if we feel up to it… I guess we better update out completely out dated store page :)
Amazing Frog? Update -The Frog Milk Coffee Co f0.2.8c
Amazing Frog? f0.2.8c The Frog Milk Coffee Co. Update is now available.
It has taken a while to get this update released. If you have been following the beta, thanks for helping out. Doing a Beta has been a really helpful process for us. We have learned a lot from doing it and its going to prove really helpful as we move forward.
f0.2.8c has seen a whole bunch of stuff added and upgraded. There are more options for cameras, improved interaction with objects, zombies and ants are much more deadly, sharks can now bite things, the fOS on the fPhone has been upgraded, there are more stuff to unlock (… some things that people didn’t find in the beta) and even Fart Gyms has upgraded their fApp. I’ll just focus on some of the key features this announcement
but before that...
IMPORTANT NOTICE, fOS on the fPhone has been upgraded this means your save files will not load by default. But they still exist
SAVE FILE RECLAIM - If you don’t wish to start over you can reclaim data from version f0.2.8b and lower in your settings fApp on your fPhone by selecting Reclaim Save Data
Frog Milk Coffee Co.
As I said before, The Frog Milk Coffee Co. building and its Rewards fApp were being built for the upcoming Unity 5 version along with the rest of Swindon. You can complete tasks, earn Reward Points and buy coffee. We wanted to introduce currency into Amazing Frog? purely as a game mechanic. Its a starting point for us and the main reason why the operating system on the fPhone needed a big upgrade. We like the idea of earning rewards to purchase temporary consumable upgrades as it provides a system by which we can add all sorts of content in the future. Our plan is to continue adding more shops and services, so this is really just the beginning of the high street.
Gas Cannisters
We’re excited about the potential of Gas canisters, not just because they are so stupid and make us laugh, but because of what they may lead us to create. … Coming Soon Gold Gas Cannister
Knockdown™
You already have the TimeTrial fApp and GemSmash which, by nature, are more conventional challenge based fApps. Knockdown is a little more the mischievous, We’re really looking forward to playing more with it.
Pocket Mode and population density
Pocket mode is one of the more useful features of this update. It basically allows you to load Swindon without loading the entire 20km Map of Swindon Shire. Its great if you just want to muck about in Swindon with higher quality settings or with more player frogs in split screen mode or you wanted a go at the time trials with a better framerate… or wanted to see how high your system can push the population density. The idea is that should help you get more out of Amazing Frog? with less power. We always want to support as low a spec as possible for Amazing Frog? but at the same time we also want to take advantage of the power that new machines can yield. Making the game scalable is the only answer and as we move into Unity 5 we plan to continue with this thinking.
So there it is, we’re really pleased to announce that f0.2.8c The Frog Milk Coffee Co. Update is now available, enjoy and stay tuned for the Unity 5 Betas soon to follow… Goodbye Unity 4 :) Hello Unity 5, 64 bit and PBR!
Amazing Frog? Devblog 006 [with beta]
Is its friday again? Technically no I think it just turned into Saturday. Well, the update is pretty much done, apart from a few things, so I am updating the beta with our latest dev build :)
It should be much more stable than the last one…. I am just replacing the beta that was there. If you are in beta already, it should work like a normal update.
What have you been up to Gaz and Hal?
Good question, Gaz. Thanks.
Fart in a Jar
We’ve been planning to put the methane canisters in for ages. Like the sticky frog tongue, helicopter, skateboard and BMX, the gas canister is one of those objects we played with back in the early days of OUYA in 2013, but to this date have completed or never released anywhere…mainly due to stability issues…. :) Basically, its somewhere between a weapon and an object and a jet pack. Its great fun. However be warned that Frog Methane Can be highly explosive. The canister is now possible, thanks to all that nonsense I was talking about last week (devblog 005) to do with coffee cups. Also the coffee cups have been upgraded, they still will be tweaked a little before the official Frog Milk Coffee Co Update.
Shark Bite
After viewing some very educational material on YouTube, early this week, we started with some serious thinking about the Sharks. We had updated the sharks for the previous beta, but we realised that they were not too great. We set out to give the sharks more “bite”. I don’t really want to explain how the sharks er… think, but I would say that sharks can now draw certain objects into their mouth and bite on them. We started this system in the previous beta and now we have expanded upon this and in doing so we have made a certain larger shark more stable in the water… and more deadly. We have also been tinkering around with their swimming and “targeting”
Smile for me you son of a ….. :)
KnockDown™ fApp
We have been having a lot of fun with KnockDown. It is not particularly easy to measure, which is why we made the “rewards” accumulative rather target based. You can of course set yourself your own challenges… My personal favourite is a densely populated, pocket mode high street and Tiny Pooper at full speed. We have made Knockdown possible in Fart Gyms too, which is a bit chaotic. I’d be really interested to find out how every one likes to do knockdown. Now that we have the fApp it feels like something that we can expand upon in the future.
More Criminals
It may be worth knowing that you can put more criminals away. I know carrying the NPCs can be difficult at times. Each week I do try fiddle the code a bit. After the Coffee cup thing, grabbing frogs by the head had to be adjusted slightly too. I think it may be easier, But I expect I will look at it again before the update next week. In an ideal world a frog would grab another frog by any limb… but things do get very unstable, very quickly when grabbing at any limb. We’ll keep iterating on that, the Physics in Unity 5 is forcing our hand on some issues, but I can talk about that another time.
So When Is the Official update f0.2.8c ?
We are in early access and we make the updates available, pretty much as soon as they are ready. We build it, then its playable. This update [ f0.2.8c The Frog Milk Coffee Co Update ] will be fully live and out of beta early next week. I’m pretty confident this time, because this beta is pretty much there. Have a look :) There are a few areas of instability that we need to address and a few bits that need to be finished. We have been getting mixed results with pocket mode, which is a shame as pocket mode is critical to the update. Ultimately, we want to throw ourselves fully into Unity 5 and start bringing you betas of that. Completion of f0.2.8c means just that. When its done, we are 100% in Unity 5 development, can't wait!
Amazing Frog? Devblog 005 Hold the Coffee.
The Coffee in the The Frog Milk Coffee Co Shop kind of lost its kick in the beta because the rewards points were not working correctly.
Sorry :)
If I am honest I knew the beta had a LOT of issues, but I just kind of figured that people wanted hands on stuff and considering we will be starting Unity 5 betas soon, I thought why not just provide the option to try out a beta build. While some of the issues, like the rewards, I've sorted the code, things like the effect of “getting jacked up on premium grade frog coffee” were not really fully complete any way, so you didn’t miss much. But I am working on that right now too… well now I am writing a devblog, but you know what I mean.
I really wanted to say thanks for the response to the beta, its been really helpful, I'm so glad we did it. We were not actually expecting many people to play it, but its great that you did. As the game grows its becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of all the changes and bugs between the two of us. Sometimes even one wrong line of code can cause multiple bugs that may seem unconnected, like when the keycard and the Key to the city did not work without restarting the scene… one line :/
This past week has been pretty much fixing all the problems you found and of course fixing some we already knew about. Most have been fixed, so expect the beta to be updated pretty soon, dependant on the following stuff in the Devblog.
Hold the Coffee
First up, I’ve been wrestling with a single coffee cup for the past few days. Reprogramming the way small objects are carried and/or interacted with.
So I think I have mentioned before how attempting to solve one little issue can lead me to create bigger problems for my self, like a butterfly effect... holding coffee is one of those. Currently, when you walk around with a coffee cup, a can of croak, a toilet roll or anything small that you pick up from the floor, it is held infront of you… as one might carry, I dunno, a full cup of coffee :). I wouldn't expect items like this to be carried in this way, if a cup was empty, you could run around with it like in the images above. There are a lot of items I would expect you to run around with as the image above including the smaller guns( when you are not aiming). It sounds really trivial, but how objects are carried is at the heart of a vast set of interaction mechanisms that drive a lot of the stupidity behind Amazing Frog?
Each object should be capable of "individual purpose”, but they should all be driven by a unified set of principles and systems. This would empower Hal and I to make a huge variety of stuff to mess about with quickly that all does different things. Something as simple as the difference between how you hold a coffee cup when either full or empty has forced me to re visit some old work that we had done to drive melee in some of our pre release test versions. I am not saying that you will be able to swing a baseball bat or sword in the next beta…But think of it like this - when you pick up a full cup of coffee and holding it upright and then hit “shoot” and drink the coffee by raising the cup to your mouth providing your frog with some sort of consumable powerup, it is done very much the same way as one might pick up a sword and perhaps press attack and expect it to swing in front of you.
in short, I have been modifying the way a frog holds coffee cups so i can get us one step closer to swinging baseball bats and throwing grenades.
FrogLife™ Ongoing modifications
FrogLife™ NPCS were created to phase out the old style NPCs that were basically the same objects as the player frogs… but with slight modifications. These were the original NPCs in Amazing Frog? It felt like the right thing to do (to have characters that were the same object as the player frogs ) but it wasn’t. It may come in handy for something else like more focused bots, but for the general populous, that process wasn’t optimised enough. They carried too much “baggage” from the player frogs. We always wanted more frogs. When asked should there be more frogs in Swindon our answer is always … yes. This is why the FrogLife™ system was created. Its not perfect, but it is way more optimised.
The last place where FrogLife™ was not in effect was in Fart Gyms, so one thing we did do this week was update the gym frogs there. While there are certain things that are currently not possible with FrogLife™ NPCs like riding them, there is more that is possible and each update the system is growing. We try to refine elements of the FrogLife™ system as often as possible, such as how frogs react to explosions and gun activity or what attracts their interests . Also each of the emerging personalities are gaining attribute governing their reaction, like the police, crims, gym Frogs, business, king, ants and zombies. I knew they they were not reacting properly in the beta so we have spent some time tweaking and improving this.
Your Old Data
Your old data from f0.2.8b still exists, so don’t worry. It is completely separate to the data saved in f0.2.8c with the new save system and updated fOS. If for example you sign out of the beta and default back to f0.2.8b it should continue as normal.
As I had said in a previous post, I did not want to try and run an automated process that converts your old data as it would be a bit risky. In the end I went for quite a simple process of collecting specific data from your versions lower than the beta. So for example if you got half way through collecting the cats you can "Collect f0.2.8b Trophies" and add what you collected before to what you may have collected since you started in the beta. SCP on the other hand is set as a restore. e.g., if you had 500 SCP in the early version and since being in the beta you had collected 600, you probably won't want to hit the restore button.
Community
Its really difficult to keep up to date with whats going on in the discussion when i’m so wrapped up in development. I’m doing my best, but I have to thank a lot of you that help players out with their questions. A lot of the time providing better answers than I do :).
Its been pointed out to me from various sources, that I might need to make moderators. The fact that I haven't so far is not that I don’t want to, I just don’t know the ins and outs of it yet and I really want to focus on getting the definitive version of f0.2.8c out as soon as possible.
Its been really exciting to do our first beta and I’m glad we did it. We’ll get an update to that beta as soon and possible and hopefully that should be pretty much the f0.2.8c update.
also its odd, I’ve not seen any massive bits of shark sushi yet….
Amazing Frog? Devblog 004 with Beta build
Welcome to Amazing Frog? f0.2.8c - The Frog Milk Coffee Co. Update, Kinda… I’m making a beta available, The official update will come this week.
Sorry its been taking so long, I hope you will find it worth the wait. Its practically done. But there are things that I still need to fix and that may take a few more days. So what I’ve decided to do is make a beta that is not password protected - Its called Preview you can opt into it in 'Betas' in game settings on Steam. That way if you cannot wait a few more days for me to resolve the rest of the issues in f0.2.8c, then you can switch to beta and preview it. Also if you experience any craziness or crashes, you can let me know and hopefully I can fix it. Just a note: It will not effect any of your previous save data from older versions, but it will not load any of it in either, so it will start you from the beginning.
Preparing the Builds
Since the last Devblog (003), the past couple of weeks have pretty much been trying to wrap the update up , so we can get it to you. This is always our priority, but it rarely goes as planned. While we can play around in the editor with new features and experiments, when it comes to the build process there are so many things that can go wrong. The size of the project also contributes to this problem. Time seems to move at a strange rate during build weeks. I started writing this devBlog yesterday ( Friday )afternoon and actually had a build ready for public beta. Unfortunately a couple of hours into play testing Swindon, I realized that some important features were not working, like buying coffee and so had to fix and rebuild. Its now 8 am on Saturday morning and I am reuploading another build. (I will have to test it on the three platforms first so fingers crossed)
Preparing builds for release from our current setup in Unity 4 can be a long process, one that I know can be improved. Happily, I can say we are about to upgrade our kit which should help there also we know from making builds in Unity 5 that the process can be more reliable.
The Butterfly Effect
There is so much code in Amazing Frog? its pretty easy to get lost with one small change that can create a butterfly effect which ripples through the whole system. Often I am confronted with a mess left by my past self and immediately i become frustrated and angry with his lack of planning, only to realise that this "previous version of myself" had, in fact, put safeguards and structures in place to help the presently, frustrated future version of me deal with that mess.
Its like walking around a vast mansion and you walk into some rooms and think I don’t remember this one… but some one left me a present here… oh its from me, how nice.
With so many details to focus on we have too keep reminding ourselves what the bigger plan is, frogopolis, frog park , swindon on sea, the moon, online etc etc . Detail is often our downfall in Amazing Frog? We know we should spend more time checking our spelling and there are many textures that need upgrading. But we knew this when we decided not to go for small and refined and headed out into vast and unpredictable.
Why I Like Pocket Mode
I won’t go into so much detail about f0.2.8c I will leave that to the official announcement this week. But I am excited about pocket mode, so I shall try to explain why. One of my biggest regrets and oddly the best things we have done for Amazing Frog? was to create SwindonShire. When we made the decision to go with 20km island from version f0.0.1 as the foundation of the world, we were deeply conflicted. We were worried that if we create such a large expanse it will take a long time to populate and having such a large area to render will take its toll on the other processes that are really important to AF? like the physics demand. We just couldn't resist it. Even now we find ourselves getting lost in SwindonShire. The potential of the landscape convinced us it was the way to go. As with most "executive decisions" on Amazing Frog? we went with our instincts and carried on moving forward regardless of how foolish our optimism may have been. Having a huge island surrounded by water did take its toll on how SwindonShire can run. FPS would drop on slower machines, split screen 4 player would only really work on faster machines and things like the population density slider when put to 100 would just cripple things. Not any more. The great thing about pocket mode, a final thing I can thank my old crappy Laptop for before I upgrade, is that 4 player split screen in Swindon is now much easier on slower machines, population density doesn’t have to be set to 0% on slower machines and can easily run on medium machines at 100% which will certainly help your scores in Knockdown. It opens up more gameplay in Swindon not just for slower machines but also provides more options for faster ones too.
f0.2.8c
I will come back soon with the official announcement for f0.2.8c The Frog Milk Coffee Co. Update. This is set to be the final Unity 4 version, which is a huge mile stone and I can't wait to abandon the shackles of Unity 4 and its memory issues. We just wanted it to be right, before we start hitting your guys with the exciting Unity 5 stuff. So again sorry its taking so long. I'll start a thread about the beta and that way you can post problems about it directly there
Amazing Frog? Devblog 003 Late Again...?
Late again… The Frog Milk Coffee Co. Update is going to have to slip to next week. We came pretty close this time and its almost ready. I’m going to keep this Devblog short because we need to keep momentum going to get the update out as fast as possible, but I want to keep up the practice of DevBlogging so we can keep you posted of what we are doing, thinking … farting etc.
FrogLife™ Knockdown
This week there has been a lot of modification to the FrogLife™system. Mainly because of a new challenge fApp called "Knockdown". The FrogLife™ System like many of the underlying systems in Amazing Frog? is always growing and undergoing optimisation. Some of the functionality behind the behaviour induced by the new fApp influenced much of the NPC activity. We were not planning on touching the Zombies in this update but change to one system can be infectious to others. So the Zombies got a pretty big rework too. We felt the Frog Zombies of the last few updates were not that aggressive or intelligent anyway. As it goes Updating Zombies also means updating ants.
FrogDead™
Cones and Gas Canisters
Here are some things that you can expect to see in the next Update. Like before, made for Unity 5, but downgraded for Unity 4. We are really excited about these Gas Canisters. OMG ….we have been meaning to get them in the game since we made the very first Red Barrel all them years ago.
Eggs
Hal has been using Substance Designer for while now and it really made a huge difference , not just to how much detail he can add, but also to how we think about constructing systems in Amazing Frog? whether it be the NPC costumes, the car skins, building components or any of the new assets. Substance Designer is literally empowering our ability to generate variation throughout Swindon Shire. This will be a lot more evident in Unity 5 as we switch to PBR rendering. For now here is a Substance that Hal created for generating Fried Eggs.
Why eggs?... Lets hope we get the Update out before the next DevBlog and you can see for yourselves.
Community
I often get questions about performance from various sources, I’m pretty certain pocket mode should help there. I know its not completely obvious how the quality settings work, some systems can benefit from lowFi quality, some from lower population density and others just need a lower screen resolution. This is the nature of developing a game on Steam. It can be very difficult resolving issues or even diagnosing the cause of a problem when there is such a huge variety of systems with a variety of hardware specifications. We are so grateful to everyone in the community who help people out when things are not working correctly for them. You are an awesome community, you really are.
We want the game to run on as many different set ups as possible and making the game run more efficiently, is at an ongoing concern. Like in the FrogLife™ modifications I have been doing this week, I have been trying to make it run better, by looking at how many operations the NPCs think with, dealing with their physics more efficiently to make it run faster and with frogs, zombies…. and ants :)
To round up, most of the questions this week have centred around when the update will be released, today or next Friday. I’m sorry it slipped, I guess I knew it might, but I really hopped it wouldn’t.
Amazing Frog? Devblog 002
I’m going to try and keep writing DevBlogs (and calling them devblogs instead of devlogs). This seems like a good way to keep you all updated on progress and to answer some of the questions floating around the community.
Firstly, The The Frog Milk Coffee Co. Update is much closer now. We are aiming for next Friday, but it may well slip to the following week. Its a pretty big update as it is our exit from Unity 4, a big step that will allow us to focus completely on the Unity 5 branch that we have in development.
Thanks to everyone for your feedback to last weeks question with regards to saved data. Its so helpful and we really appreciate it.
This is what you can expect for your saved data in f0.2.8c - We are making it so some data will be reclaimable and some will not. The fSport App will have to be completely refreshed, thats unavoidable, and other things like your current appearance will not save. However, for other data we will create restore buttons on the fPhone. This is so you can restore some types of saved data like SCP or outfits to what was unlocked or collected in version f0.2.8b. This will be your choice.
So what have we been up to this week? Well I won’t tell you everything because that will destroy the surprise of the stuff in the Update. I want to tell you about egg timers, for example, but I won’t. I think thats partly why we had not written Devblogs before... for fear of spoiling upcoming surprises. These days there is so much going on each week thats not such an issue.
Bouncy Castles and Cake
Here are just a couple of fun things Hal has been creating this week. Cakes and the Bouncy Castle refresh. Here are a couple of editor screen shots.
This was exciting because we both felt like the bouncy castles had lost a lot of the impact of the original ones that we had made back in the early days of Amazing Frog? So when Hal recreated the model for Unity 5 it seemed like a good time to revisit the bounciness of it. (Thats what I refer to as fun programming). So on Wednesday we took the new model of the bouncy castle and downgraded to work in Unity 4 for The Frog Milk Coffee Co. Update. We felt much better about they way frogs flop around on it.
The Camera System
One of my favourite distractions this week has been the camera system for Amazing Frog? We introduced “Easy Cam™” a few versions back, but had never got around to implementing this for when you are driving a vehicle. So we have put some more options for the camera in the controls fApp to provide a bit more flexibility and to customise the Easy Cam™. Personally, I much prefer it when the camera moves behind a vehicle, Hal not so much, but with more settings we can both be happy. The plan is to set Easy Cam™ as the default, but those who know their way around the fPhone should easily be able to set it to Pro Cam™ for complete control of the camera. While messing about with the camera code it seemed like a good time generally tidy things up a bit and have a go at improving the first person camera a bit.
Community
We do frequently check the Community discussions and screenshots. It gives us a good impression of how Amazing frog? is being played. We are not big fans of metrics and data analysis, we are more interested in your individual experiences of Amazing Frog?. We do our best to keep track of it all but it can be tricky. We are so grateful when we see you helping each other out. By all means, if you have questions you want me to comment on, send them my way and I will try and address them in future DevBlogs.
So heres a few comments on some subjects that have caught our attention.
VR. Both Hal and I are massive fans of Virtual Reality. I know VR worked in previous versions of AF? but there have been so many changes in the way VR is done it has been hard to keep up, especially after the Oculus SDK didnt support OSX any more. Between us we have a HTC ViVE and a Oculus CV1 but unfortunately no PC powerful enough to run them on (…yet) lol, but we will and then we will re-integrate VR into a later version from the Unity 5 branch. I am guessing the demand is not that high of VR in Amazing Frog? and its currently a luxury add on.
More Detail in unity 5 - As you saw last week and here with the cake and bouncy castle above, all new Amazing Frog? assets are made with increased detail. I just wanted to clarify that this does not mean that the Unity 5 version will cripple your machine. The great thing about the Unity 5 version is that we are streaming things. In the Unity 4 versions when you load SwindonShire you need to load everything, every texture, every model, all at once. This has been a major problem for us, especially as we have wanted to add so much more. But in Unity 5 we have been streaming not only the textures, but the models too. This allows us to deliver more scalable content at higher resolution for less CPU and graphics cost. Which is empowering us to keep creating more buildings, shops and grow things outside of the wall.
The other costumes - With reference to the other costumes pictured on the wall in the hideout. We are not intentionally keeping them from you. The time just hasn’t felt right. The boba frog costume is my favourite of all the costumes... but, I would hate to use it without a functioning jetpack. Yup, we can holster things at the moment, but having interchangeable functioning items that you can “wear” on your back, its just not ready yet.
Amazing Frog Online? - I often see the questions when is online coming? No one is more excited about online than us, I don't think. We can’t wait to play it with you all, please be patient with us. It will have to be delivered in stages, anyway. Don't expect to see the first Online tests until we are outputting the betas from the Unity 5 branch. We have done some tests and it looks good, but we also have to make sure other foundations are in place. When we commit to live online play it will take over so much of what we are doing and we need to make sure the scene is set properly. Everything we do is leading towards it.
Finally I just wanted to share this. There are so many great youTube videos all the time its so hard to keep up to date with them all. We really do try. This is why we put youTubers in the game because I feel we are all in this together. But check this out.
