Frogs! | Devpost

Frogs Splash Screen

Inspiration

Frogs! is an incremental sim inspired by our team's love of nature and discovery.

What it does

Core Loop: Collect > Hatch > Earn > Upgrade

Players collect eggs from the large pond. They then return to their 'pad' to hatch the egg, which becomes a frog based on a player's luck stat. Players can keep up to 2 frogs at first, which earn coins over time. Players can then spend coins to upgrade their stats and unlock additional lily pads. More pads means more frogs!

Retention

Frog Factions > Using World Persistent Variables, we created a system that randomly selects 2 frogs. Players are prompted to choose a team on log in, and then the two teams are pitted against each other to hatch the most eggs. The team that wins gets a bonus for the following week, and two new frogs are chosen. This feature is fully automated and will engage and reward players every week without manuel input.

Daily Login Luck Boosters

On login, players are given a luck booster. This bonus is meant to encourage users to play on mobile, and while they still earn the booster in VR, they can only activate it when they are playing on mobile. When a player activates their luck boost, a timer will appear onscreen showing how much time remains. This is to encourage longer play sessions and reward players for their engagement.

How we built it

AI was used in very early prototyping of light platforming mechanics. Because we heavily use the asset spawning system, we also used ai code generation to help quickly create an asset spawner that nicely handles multiple edge cases of asynchronous code, supporting spawn queues, cancellation, and robust cleanup.

We also used the AI skybox generator as a starting point for our skybox.

Challenges we ran into

As is often the case with these competitions, time is the greatest challenge of all. There are a ton of features we would have liked to have included in the initial release, but for the sake of time had to limit the scope of this project (for now).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Everyone on the team has been doing an incredible job. The art team put a ton of soul and creativity into the dozens of frogs that were modeled. Our developer went above and beyond making the UIs feel snappy and responsive. I'm particularly proud of the frog 'reveal' audio and animation. Because it is the part of the game players experience the most, we wanted to make it feel particularly special.

What we learned

Scope management is critical. We initially had planned for a much larger game, but it quickly became clear we would have to reduce scope if we wanted to finish on time. That said, we were able to do a lot of the backend work needed to implement these features post launch.