In Trail of Toads (formerly Last Frog Standing) you play as a frog who attempts to master the sacred Trial Grounds and inscribe his name into stone. This 3rd person 3D platformer features many traps, enemies, ancient statue guardians, and a dense magical atmosphere.
My work: Story Tech Programming, Narrative Design, Writing.
Duration: 24.6.2022 – 3.7.2022, ca. 5-10h/day
GameJam together with Sleeprunner Studios, Empyre Audio and members of the Ocularis team.
With this project, we won the ChampionJam! Our prizes were $3,000, a Twitch frontpage feature, and a pitch in front of several well-known publishers.
Story Tech Programming
Here follow some videos showing my progression on programming jumping, talking frog statues from the first to the last iteration.
1) First, I implemented some simple communication, featuring:
- a communication/skip indicator attached to the actor
- cinematic borders akin to and inspired by those used in Nier: Replicant, fading in and out
- debug voiceover
2) Upon thinking about this prototype, I found that the statues — which were intended to speak, after all — needed a bit more life. And since I had the time and energy to add a feature, I went for some animation upgrades.
- added statue jumping based on the player’s relative position in a 3×3 grid around the statue
- adjusted cinematic border heights after feedback
3) In parallel, I had been talking with one of our 3D artists about a proper mesh. When it arrived, we felt that there were some good decisions in this design. A great deal of improvement was added by the smaller visual and sound effects.
- inserted new, proper mesh
- fixed wrong pivot for rotation
- added VFX and SFX for more game feel:
- wind lines up/down
- dust clouds upon impact
- (placeholder) sound upon impact
4) Being almost at the end of the jam, I implemented feedback from my team: we judged that attaching the line display directly to the statue would be more fitting to the atmosphere we wanted to create.
- replaced cinematic border UI with world-space speech bubbles attached directly to the mesh
- wrote monologues for the seven statues
- added tutorial messages
- added proper sound effects; revised impact dust clouds
5) On the last day, I took care of the statue’s surroundings in our main level. Our level designers and artists had planned out dedicated spaces for them in the map, which I then decorated to give each statue a fitting environment.
- decorated five statues’ surroundings (the start and end surroundings were handled by others)
- created special materials derived from the base ones provided by the mesh artist
- created special fire VFX derived from base ones provided by our VFX artist
Key Learnings
- a skilled team (both in craft and teamwork) makes all the difference
-> never before have I experienced such a productive and fun development, mostly due to smooth communication and the great work everyone delivered - focusing on a specific area (in my case, the statues) helps learn and achieve great polishing
Gregor Sönnichsen 