This week, I had the realization that Frog Snatchers was missing an essential component that we’d sort of put on a back burner: frogs. It was sort of a stark wake up call in the series of wake up calls we’ve been having lately. It’s fairly reasonable for us to have not really touched them right now, as we’ve been tossing around a lot of ideas as to what they were going to be, without much thought for how much time we would actually have to implement them. There were also a lot of different ideas floating as far as what frogs should actually do. As of this time, they were pretty much all just going to change the color of your cloak, which is something I realized we definitely don’t want to be doing all the time anyway.
I set some time aside to draft an overview of a system that could fit all of the needs that we wanted for frogs. I drafted up a pitch and presented it to the team at our weekly meeting, and they seemed to like it.
This system is very modular, and will hopefully also allow us to create interesting personalities as well as a wide variety of gameplay styles for whatever players want to experiment with. We’ll be implementing this system in the next week, and I think it’ll work pretty well.
This week I’m also going back and revising the golden path that I built for Florida last week. The three level designers all sat down and reviewed each other’s content, and we all had some very good critiques for the different areas and how to improve them. I’ve got to extend the pacing of Florida a bit, as it’s a little bit cramped with one challenge after another. This will help make it a bit longer too, as right now it only takes about ten minutes to play through.
I’m also hooking up the game start to finish. The individual areas are for the most part connected correctly to the other rooms within them, but since alpha is the day we get back from break, we need to make sure that the entire game is playable from start to finish, each area flowing correctly into the next.