To be honest, it doesn't even feel like we are about to go into our 8th sprint. It still feels like we are going into our second week of being together as a team. I truthfully don't think I have had this much fun working with such amazing people, working with all of them just gets me excited for when I go and work in the industry.
A lot has happened since my last blog post, We switched gears and aimed to make a smaller level, we iterated on the original level from last semester, we started development on a second character, we now have a beautiful Main Menu and we even had the amazing opportunity to bring Frog Bath to PAX East! Towards the end of the last blog post I made, we were in sprint 5 I believe, we realized that the main level that we were building was way too big and that it needed to be down scaled a lot. So we down scaled, we went back to our original level size, which was at a scale of 1, and brought it up to a 1.2 scale instead. With this change we believe that there will be more player interaction, we are even thinking we could scale down even more but we will have to see what happens. However, we took some parts of the big level and transferred some of the work to the new smaller level so that no progress was lost and not a lot of time was wasted.
As I also mentioned in the end of my last blog post, we are voted on new characters to add to Frog Bath and this past sprint we finally started to work on that character! his name is Dopey and he is fantastic, hopefully in my next blog post I can share a picture! We also have a lot of new player VFX which includes an animation for the Perfect Frog Hop (PFH), an animation for the tall jump and a charge jump for the tall jump animation. We were also able to get new environment assets for our courtyards where the Frog King jumps between during the game.
We also now have a beautiful Main Menu! players can now view the tutorials, chose between local play or networked play (which is a feature coming soon to a theater near you haha) as well as switch between settings by switching between drawers. Currently there is a placeholder for how to play instead of the player being able to switch settings, but that will also be updated soon.
Finally some networking updates!! We have started the transition into networking, my co-producer, Rachel, is setting up our Steamworks account so that we can get a Steam ID which will allow us to have networking with more than 2 people. Within the last 2 night we have implemented VFX that other players can now view in a scene as well as the tongue shot! now there is still a long way to go but it is awesome progress!
Last but not least! we took Frog Bath to PAX East!!! It was such an amazing experience going to the booth and seeing so many people having fun playing Frog Bath, it was such an unreal experience. We were only suppose to have our game being shown for Friday and I was only there for Friday attending privately and not with the team. Supposedly on Saturday people wanted to play more Frog Bath so we showed off the game for Saturday as well which is awesome! Before we went to PAX we decided to start a Twitter account (@PlayFrogBath go follow it!) so that people can keep up to date with the game and when we intend to release the game. We intend of releasing for free on both Itch .io and Steam but we want our fans to know when they can get it themselves and by following the twitter they can do that! Seeing so many people enjoy our game and coming back to play more and more is such a great feeling and going to PAX really shows how much people really enjoys our game.
Thank you for taking the time to read this! there has been a lot of progress since my first blog post and I cant wait to continue sharing our progress!