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 actually showing the game. So this is very reassuring!
With that, let's continue where the previous blog series left off and properly start the Croakwood devlog.
We have been working on this game since late 2020 roughly and still have a lot of work ahead of us before release. So, there's lots of stuff to talk about that's already been done, and then over time we'll catch up with what's going on recently.
Obviously we did end up deciding to make a town building game, despite the prototyping attempts chronicled in the previous blog series only having mediocre success. How did this happen?
The conclusion from our previous attempts was that if we want to make a town builder, it should be somewhat unique gameplay-wise, with some mechanics that are more interesting than just plopping down buildings and waiting. Additionally, it should have a somewhat unique setting - everyone has already seen a dozen medieval or futuristic town building games, so doing something else seemed more interesting with a bigger chance to stand out from the crowd.
The answer to the gameplay question should have been obvious after making Parkitect, but it really took creating all these other prototypes to find it: what if you could design the houses in the town yourself? What if decorating the town nicely had some impact on gameplay, like in Parkitect?
Surely there must be some other town builders out there that are a mix between management and creativity/decorating but it's certainly not the norm, so that immediately seemed like it could be a good idea. Plus we'd get to apply a bunch of stuff we learned from Parkitect to it!
And so we created one more town builder prototype, and since it would share a lot of gameplay mechanics with Parkitect... we simply took Parkitect and turned that into the prototype! Here's how that looked:
It's not much but it had all of the core elements that are part of Croakwood: houses you can design yourself; villagers doing various jobs; resources getting created and transported around. This seemed promising and convinced us to keep going!
All that was left to figure out was a setting then. We thought a "miniature scale" world would be fun and interesting, so we started looking around for a fitting concept artist... and found Marve, who had lots of concepts of cozy house interiors and miniature scale towns in her portfolio, and was interested in doing some concept art for us!
(Not Croakwood concept art. This is something Marve had made before and is one of the pieces that caught our attention)
She came up with a first concept to determine the rough setting, style and mood of the game:
And she also tried a few ideas for the villagers, of which we all liked the frogs the most.
... and she's been working on an endless stream of concept art ever since 😅. As it turns out there's lots of objects to design if you want to fill an entire frog village.
Which also means there's lots of objects to model! It was more than Garret could possibly handle alone, and we were lucky once again to find Kindra, who has not only been tirelessly trying to keep up with the concept art but also designed plenty of additional objects.
Abby originally joined us for animating all of the activities the frogs get up to, but she has also done a lot of work on shading and lighting and is currently working on concept art for additional characters.
And to make the team introduction complete, we have the same team members you might remember from Parkitect: Garret is mainly doing 3D art once again, Sebastian and Patrick are handling the programming, and Jada is taking care of production and game design tasks.
Of course while there's more people around now we're still a pretty small team, so it's not unusual for anyone to do some other tasks outside their main expertise.
Finally, anything regarding sound and music is handled by the great team at A Shell in the Pit again and the Croakwood logo was designed by Colby Nichols, who also created the Texel Raptor logo.