My name is Bryce, I am the founder and director of Arkanpixel. I am the lead artist, animator and a few other things on Frogreign. I essentially have my hands in everything except sound and programming!
Frogreign is set in a world filled with vibrant frog characters, the Kingdom of Callidrya. You play as Rill, a frog prince on a quest to find his lost sister in the midst of a royal conspiracy. Use your tongue to swing, slap and grapple your way through combat, puzzles and platforming. Leap, climb, and swim with the agility only a frog can master.
I got the idea for the world when I was on a hike and saw a sign that had illustrations of all the local frog species in the area. I thought to myself that frogs would be a great subject, as there is so much room for creativity as both an artist and designer. As a bonus, frogs are very cute!
The concept for the gameplay came from a mix of platforming mechanics I enjoyed as a kid and a major complaint I had. The most common implementation of grappling hooks in games is to have a singular point you can grapple from. This is fine for games where grappling hooks are far from the main focus, but for us this implementation would simply not suffice. We wanted to make a game where you can grapple off of practically anything, and the game design would accommodate that. In Frogreign, any surface, object or enemy is intractable in some way with the various tongue mechanics. So your tongue grappling hook can be used in traversal, puzzles, combat and general interactions. We think it is pretty fun!
The development journey has been pretty typical of any indie I think. It was just a couple of recent graduates, a guy I met on Reddit and a musician that I met during an online game jam.
We started in March 2023 and have been working on it part-time since then. Development started quite slow - we were a bunch of juniors with no real experience outside of freelancing. But we have grown into a real indie studio now - even if we are still very small!
We are making Frogreign in Unity. Unreal was not really good for pixel art out of the box, and godot wasn’t really viable for our needs at the time. Everyone in the team had already made small games in Unity before, so it won by default more-or-less. I think these days any of the engines would be a viable choice, Godot in particular has come really far since 2023!
Unfortunately one of the biggest hurdles is entirely self-afflicted. We spent a lot of our early development time (over a year) doing and redoing the first few areas of the game. This was due to our evolving sense of design and improvements in our art and directing abilities. Some level of this is probably unavoidable, but I think it would have been much better for us to have at least made some more concrete plans and limits for our process of redoing assets, mechanics or levels that are already functionally complete.
We are really proud of where the game is at now, and a lot of that is a direct result of iterating and re-iterating until we get it the way we want. I suppose I would just caution against unplanned, unbridled reworks!
Pre-Production is so SO important! It should never be rushed or ignored. Most development hurdles we have encountered or things that could have gone better for us during development or marketing would have been improved or avoided altogether if we were more organised in the beginning.
Also, I know it is very common advice at this point. But you really should make small games first before creating a large one! There are so many things you learn throughout the process that will make the process much more efficient and even fun. In my experience, you will definitely be glad you did a few small projects before making your dream game!
I would also recommend you to reach out to other members of the community. In my experience, most people are friendly and happy to help or give advice. Even if you are a solo developer you don’t have to be in this all by yourself!
At the end of the day, we all got into this space because we love videogames! Make games you are passionate about, have fun, and make something cool!
Bryce
