Hey, it's been some time! If you want to know what we've been up to, make sure to check out Wholesome Direct on June 6th :) In one of the previous posts I described how the villagers navigate around the world and in this one I want to talk a bit about how they decide where to go and what to do. Let's take this woodcutter hut for example: There's a tool rack containing an axe, a few trees around…
In preparation for Game Garden and in the time afterwards we've spent some time on polishing how placing objects works. Placing objects is one of the main things you do in this game of course, so it needs to feel good and be intuitively understandable. There's a few considerations we have to make for these tools. There are some restrictions we need to make simply due to how the game works, but…
It’s been quite a few years for most of the members of our team since we last attended a convention, especially as exhibitors. As mentioned in the previous post, a few weeks ago we had the pleasure of running a booth at a local event (for our two Canadians), Vancouver Game Garden , and we had a fantastic time! The team has been quite eager to put a Croakwood demo into the hands of the public, g…
We're bringing a first demo of Croakwood to Vancouver Game Garden on September 27-28, alongside many other great games from local independent developers. If you happen to be in Vancouver we'd be excited if you come and give it a try! The demo encompasses a slice of roughly the first hour of gameplay with a focus on town building mechanics. The event location is the Roundhouse Community Centre a…
When we started working on Croakwood, programming the villagers seemed to be relatively straightforward - they just have to walk around in whatever environment the player created for them and interact with certain objects. In that sense they are very similar to the guests in Parkitect and so we thought we could easily apply most of what we had learnt there to Croakwood. This was sort of true, b…
This post is about a few different aspects regarding how the game is being rendered. It's mostly technical but I figured it might still be interesting to see behind the scenes a bit. We're using Unity as the engine for this game. A game engine is a piece of software that provides various features for you, such as systems for animations, the UI, or how things get drawn (rendered). This brings a…
A big part of Croakwood is providing cozy little houses that your frog villagers can live and work in, so let's take a look at how the houses work! All of the buildings are created from individual pieces, so every wall, furniture item and decorative object is an individual object that you can place. This is a system that's similar to the one we used in our previous game, Parkitect. We really li…
In a game about frogs you kind of need to have water, which means you need to program a water shader. A shader is basically a short program that calculates what color a pixel should receive. To me as a programmer they can be somewhat intimidating to create - you need to write some code that, somehow, produces something that matches a certain artistic vision. Whenever I'm working on a shader I f…
In this post our art director and concept artist Marve gives some insights into her thoughts on the setting of the game and some of the influences for the art direction. Mood We decided pretty early on we want to keep the overall style semi-realistic and not wander too far into fantasy. From earlier conversations we referenced story-book like elements a lot, and its still one of our guiding ele…
In a game about building frog towns the frogs are unsurprisingly pretty important. Here's a look at how they developed over time and what we had in mind while working on them. First of all, as with everything else, figuring out their look took some time and we went through some revisions. The first try was a more biologically accurate version with the eyes on the side of the head. When viewed f…
Where do you even start developing a game? There's so many things you need to work on at the same time. A good starting point probably is the terrain and general environment, so let's take a look at how that developed. As with any feature, it starts very simple. Over time we get a better idea for what exactly we need and we keep iterating to improve and expand. Since we knew it would be a grid-…
Whew! Feels good to finally have this game announced and be able to talk about it 😊 Seeing all the reactions to the announcement trailer was incredibly thrilling, and we're all very happy that people seem to be quite excited about it and sent so many nice comments. You never know - obviously we think this game is cool, but it's very hard to judge if anyone else thinks so as well before actuall…
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Announcements are the developer’s own posts to the game’s Steam news feed: updates and their patch notes, in-game events, releases and sales. The important ones are marked on the players chart.