Whew! Feels good to finally have this game announced and be able to talk about it 😊
Seeing all the reactions to the announcement trailer was incredibly thrilling, and we're all very happy that people seem to be quite excited about it and sent so many nice comments. You never know - obviously we think this game is cool, but it's very hard to judge if anyone else thinks so as well before actually showing the game. So this is very reassuring!

With that, let's continue where the previous blog series left off and properly start the Croakwood devlog.
We have been working on this game since late 2020 roughly and still have a lot of work ahead of us before release. So, there's lots of stuff to talk about that's already been done, and then over time we'll catch up with what's going on recently.

Obviously we did end up deciding to make a town building game, despite the prototyping attempts chronicled in the previous blog series only having mediocre success. How did this happen?

The conclusion from our previous attempts was that if we want to make a town builder, it should be somewhat unique gameplay-wise, with some mechanics that are more interesting than just plopping down buildings and waiting. Additionally, it should have a somewhat unique setting - everyone has already seen a dozen medieval or futuristic town building games, so doing something else seemed more interesting with a bigger chance to stand out from the crowd.

The answer to the gameplay question should have been obvious after making Parkitect, but it really took creating all these other prototypes to find it: what if you could design the houses in the town yourself? What if decorating the town nicely had some impact on gameplay, like in Parkitect?
Surely there must be some other town builders out there that are a mix between management and creativity/decorating but it's certainly not the norm, so that immediately seemed like it could be a good idea. Plus we'd get to apply a bunch of stuff we learned from Parkitect to it!

And so we created one more town builder prototype, and since it would share a lot of gameplay mechanics with Parkitect... we simply took Parkitect and turned that into the prototype! Here's how that looked:

It's not much but it had all of the core elements that are part of Croakwood: houses you can design yourself; villagers doing various jobs; resources getting created and transported around. This seemed promising and convinced us to keep going!

All that was left to figure out was a setting then. We thought a "miniature scale" world would be fun and interesting, so we started looking around for a fitting concept artist... and found Marve, who had lots of concepts of cozy house interiors and miniature scale towns in her portfolio, and was interested in doing some concept art for us!

She came up with a first concept to determine the rough setting, style and mood of the game:

And she also tried a few ideas for the villagers, of which we all liked the frogs the most.

... and she's been working on an endless stream of concept art ever since 😅. As it turns out there's lots of objects to design if you want to fill an entire frog village.

Which also means there's lots of objects to model! It was more than Garret could possibly handle alone, and we were lucky once again to find Kindra, who has not only been tirelessly trying to keep up with the concept art but also designed plenty of additional objects.

Abby originally joined us for animating all of the activities the frogs get up to, but she has also done a lot of work on shading and lighting and is currently working on concept art for additional characters.

And to make the team introduction complete, we have the same team members you might remember from Parkitect: Garret is mainly doing 3D art once again, Sebastian and Patrick are handling the programming, and Jada is taking care of production and game design tasks.
Of course while there's more people around now we're still a pretty small team, so it's not unusual for anyone to do some other tasks outside their main expertise.

Finally, anything regarding sound and music is handled by the great team at A Shell in the Pit again and the Croakwood logo was designed by Colby Nichols, who also created the Texel Raptor logo.

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