Our next game is Croakwood, a relaxed game about building and managing a nice town that makes your frog citizens happy!
It's available to wishlist on Steam.

Design and create structures, plan and decorate towns, and explore an ancient forest to guide the growth of a charming community of tiny amphibians as they settle into their new life in the lush and wild woods.

• Piece-based building design system with an abundance of customization options and styles
• Entertaining, independent frog townsfolk to observe and care for while they live their day-to-day lives and express themselves in unique ways
• Guide and manage the economy as the townsfolk gain or craft each resource by hand
• A lush, expansive forest to explore with secrets to uncover and creatures to meet
• Meet goals to gain access to new areas and buildables

How can I get updates about the games development?

• Wishlisting the game on Steam will notify you once the game releases
• We'll post devlogs here on this blog
• You could sign up to our newsletter for an email notification once the game releases, join our Discord or follow any of the other social media platforms linked at the top of the page

When and how will it release?

We don't know yet.
Our experience with Early Access for Parkitect was really good and we think being able to receive and react to player feedback benefitted the game a lot, so we'll most likely do Early Access for Croakwood as well.

Which platforms will it release on?

We're targeting Windows 10+, macOS Big Sur 11.0+ and Ubuntu 20.04+.
Consoles would certainly be nice, but we'll have to see whether that's possible later.
Mobiles: don't think so.

What will it cost?

We don't know yet, it depends on how much content the game will end up having and what feels fair for that.
Somewhere in the ballpark of the price of Parkitect should be a good assumption probably.

Does this game contain any frogs?

Yes. Lots of frogs.

We're super excited to share a first brief look at our next game with you soon, in the Future Of Play Direct livestream during Summer Game Fest on June 8.
Tune in live on Twitch to the Twitch Gaming, IGN or GameSpot channels, or watch on YouTube!

After the game is announced we'll regularly release devlog posts here again, similar to what we did for Parkitect :)

After the last two prototypes for a town building game we were feeling a bit stuck. We liked the idea of working on that type of game but were missing inspiration for which direction we should go with it.
So, we tried something entirely different!

Garret suggested that maybe you should be able to control a character in the town builder.
We gave it a try and suddenly in a complete change of direction we were working on a 3D platformer :)

3D Platformer

Working on this was so much fun!
We built a huge playground to test all kinds of gameplay mechanics and moves.

The thing with developing management games is that they don't really feel fun to play for years. It's only towards the very end of development when all the systems, content and balancing are in place that the game actually feels good and interesting.
With an action game it's very different - moving the character and jumping around was super fun within the first day. It still takes lots and lots of tweaking and adding interesting moves, interactions and level design to turn it into something good of course, but it's a lot easier to see if something works or not.

This prototype did excite and inspire us immediately and we went much farther with it than with the others.
We came up with an interesting setting and story, ideas for the overall design and layout of the world, gameplay mechanics and had some concept art done.

And yet... we cancelled this idea as well right before moving into proper production!
This was a really tough decision though and hurt, because we did enjoy working on it and spent a lot more time on it (roughly half a year as opposed to a couple of weeks for the town builder prototypes).

What we learned

• the project felt risky because we had never worked on a platformer game before, which made it difficult to judge if we would be able to make something good and if there's a market for it. None of what we learned from Parkitect would apply to this game. In retrospect all of this was true when we started with Parkitect as well though. Also this prototype felt like a pretty good start, so we might have been a bit more scared than we should have been
• it was relatively easy for us to make the movement feel good and to come up with interesting moves and mechanics, but we had a really hard time designing interesting levels. Maybe the moves we came up with weren't that great for level design? But most likely this was due to inexperience with level design, and also because we had no good tools for level building. We tried a few different one but they were all awkward and slow to use and didn't allow us to quickly make changes and test them in-game. So what we probably should have done is spend more time on creating good level editing tools and maybe that would have fixed the other problems over time
• we noticed fairly early on that this type of game would require a lot less time to program and a lot more time for art and level design, which didn't work very well for our team composition. We would have to find more artists and new tasks for Patrick and Sebastian

Hey,
we've got a free content update for Parkitect today!

Late last year tristar from the Parkitect community suggested that we should hire him to update a bunch of old items to be recolorable, which we gladly did!
Over time the project grew a bit larger and now we've got a pretty nice update that also includes a good amount of new deco objects, two new entertainer costumes, and some wall and roof shapes to complete existing building sets.

Additionally:

• a number of objects have been updated to be resizable
• some objects have been updated to fit together more nicely
• the water color on water rides can be changed now
• running ad campaigns appear in the ongoing events list so you don't have to constantly check the ad campaign window
• the attraction overview list can be sorted by average queue time

Have fun :)