Frogger - Post Mortem

Published November 20, 2018
Advertisement

Finally made a first release of my frogger game for the gamedev challenge yesterday:

What went right

  • Using Godot Engine. Godot and GDScript was very quick to learn and get started with, and is very good for these types of small scale games. Overall I preferred it to Unity which I used last challenge.
  • Using skin modifier for modelling in blender. This enabled me to make game creature models fast, around a day for modelling, rigging, animating and texturing a model.
  • Using 3d paint for texturing creatures. Having spent many months developing 3d paint, it is really starting to pay off in quick texturing of assets. Blender can do this texturing too, but the workflow is much faster in 3d paint.

What went wrong

  • 3d sound broken in Godot. I had to do some bodging to get any kind of positional sound working, and it is flakey at best. I hope they will fix this soon.
  • Android support not yet working. My android hardware / emulator only seem to support OpenGL ES 2, and Godot only supports ES 3, up until the 3.1 release. I tried the 3.1 alpha but no joy as yet.
  • Creating art assets took most of my time, approx 2/3 of the development time (I am not an artist!).
  • Moving house - I only realistically had the first 3 weeks to work a lot on the game, so tried to finish as much as possible early up. I do not even have access to computer / internet at new house yet.
  • Dealing with different aspect ratios. I don't really deal with this as yet, I may have to address this.
  • Normal mapping the assets. I tried this on the cars but it is very finicky to get working right and I don't have much experience. Took a lot of time and the difference was negligable so I dropped it.
  • Procedural terrain texturing. Implemented but was too slow in GDScript, so I precreated 5 terrain textures and just used them in the levels. Same algorithm was fast enough in Unity in C# so I think GDScript is several times slower currently. (However I do prefer the GDScript language to C#)
  • No wheels on cars. This is just funny, I always intended to put them in but never got round to it!!
  • Dropping lots of features due to lack of time. This is typical of gamedev in general, but luckily I had enough features to make it playable. There is already support for other pickups like score and poison etc, I just didn't have time to make the models.

 

 

Previous Entry Frogger - birds
7 likes 0 comments

Comments

Rutin

I liked what you did with this. :)  The art confidently is a time drainer, but on the plus side you shared all your assets for people to use which I believe you're the first one to ever do this. ;)

On that note, your article on skinning is extremely helpful for people looking to model creatures.

For the amount of time you put forth this turned out to be a great entry. I love the camera toggle as well! Good touch!

November 20, 2018 10:05 AM
lawnjelly
14 minutes ago, Rutin said:

I love the camera toggle as well! Good touch!

I am toying with the idea of forcing you into certain camera view for some levels, to make it easier / harder to complete. The closeup is actually easier for eating the flies, as you can only eat them when they are low in the sky, and you can't see this in top down view.

Most difficult level at the moment is around 6, there is one where you have to eat 2 flies, and they are very (too?) rare on that screen. So you have to hang around after getting the lily pads and be patient in a safe spot and wait for them.

Also the last level (14) there is a trick to it, you really have to go for the lily pads first before the flies, as there are 3 snakes that come for you, and it is difficult to get the lily pads once the snakes get near.

Not all the final assets are in the pack yet, I will need to update it. I'm not sure anyone has used but it was worth trying as an idea! :) 

November 20, 2018 10:25 AM
Rutin
1 minute ago, lawnjelly said:

I am toying with the idea of forcing you into certain camera view for some levels

Just make sure you put in an Easy Mode for me so I can toggle! :D 

November 20, 2018 10:26 AM
DexterZ101

Coo! I like the Camera and the Shadow and oh... BLOOODDD!!!!

"Creating art assets took most of my time, approx 2/3 of the development time (I am not an artist!). "

...but O.O  look at that Crocks and Turtles it awesome, definitely not an amatuer! you are an artist! ^_^y

Downloading.....

 

November 20, 2018 10:53 AM
Rutin
7 hours ago, DexterZ101 said:

Coo! I like the Camera and the Shadow and oh... BLOOODDD!!!!

"Creating art assets took most of my time, approx 2/3 of the development time (I am not an artist!). "

...but O.O  look at that Crocks and Turtles it awesome, definitely not an amatuer! you are an artist! ^_^y

Downloading.....

 

Indeed, I really like the quality of the assets used. :) I keep saying that this is art! @lawnjelly is far too humble. :D 

November 20, 2018 06:15 PM
supermikhail

Yeah, really nice animal models and textures.

So, I can only thank you for posting a build already. I actually wasn't sure what a Frogger level should look like (or the level progression), although I haven't been able to get past level 4 yet... I'm assuming it only gets harder. :D

Also, is dying on trying to get into an occupied lily pad by design? In any case, I think I'll use it, going to save me some headache.

November 20, 2018 06:23 PM
lawnjelly
On 11/20/2018 at 6:23 PM, supermikhail said:

I actually wasn't sure what a Frogger level should look like (or the level progression), although I haven't been able to get past level 4 yet... I'm assuming it only gets harder. :D

Also, is dying on trying to get into an occupied lily pad by design? In any case, I think I'll use it, going to save me some headache.

Haha well there are lots of examples of the original frogger out there, I'm not sure mine is a good model for the original game because it deviates a fair bit. Yup the dying when trying to use an occupied lilypad is by design, I think the original did this, although in mine you survive if you don't hit the lilypad straight on which I think you in the original I believe.

The progression I made up totally based on what variations I had available, and I will probably try and improve it. They are meant to get harder but I would say there's only about 4 so far that are 'difficult'.

The one in darkness with the spotlight might be challenging, the secret is, like in hitchhikers' guide, don't panic! In mine due to lack of foresight, all the vehicles come as groups of 2, so you can use this to your advantage. Wait for 2 cars to pass on a row, then move into that row, then wait for the spotlight to catch up so you can work out where the cars are on the next row. If you try and do it too fast in the dark you will almost certainly get run over. :D 

November 21, 2018 06:45 PM
You must log in to join the conversation.
Don't have a GameDev.net account? Sign up!
Advertisement