This is a devlog to mark the release of Armored Frog for the Toronto Game Jam 2025 (TOJAM). It's a an arena shooter featuring cyberfrogs and too many guns completed over a 3 day weekend operating within the theme of "The More You Have, The Worse It Gets".

Wanted to use this space to talk a bit about the process of getting here!

Before the Jam

Dave, the audio designer, contacted me about wanting to collaborate again for TOJAM; he contributed the audio to Let's Relax Aggressively. Mauricio, the artist, joined a little later; I had just resigned from my job at Budge and he wanted to continue to do side projects with me, so TOJAM presented itself as a fun opportunity to do so! The team of three was assembled.

The decision to make the game in Unity was born out of familiarity with the engine as Mauricio and I had previously used it in work together. I also had an interest in doing a multiplayer networked game, having recently completed a tutorial on Photon and having some interest in doing something beyond a couch co-op title. We didn't end up going down the networked multiplayer route for the Jam though! 

Brainstorming together, we had ideas about a player entity that gradually collects parts to be able to interact more with the environment. There were ideas about it being a bit of an experience like gathering missing limbs and senses; movement, vision and hearing. This was toned down to just being a pile of augments that continually stacked on the user. The notion of frogs came later, with the tongue used in game to steal parts from opponents becoming a driving factor.

Development

Work commenced at the jam with a Unity Third Person tutorial as a base, which provided a baseline Input System and controls. These were tweaked to have more of a 'tank controls' feel and allow for a split screen experience. There was some initial issues getting the Cinemachine camera setup with the split screen system (as the two are officially considered incompatible) which was later resolved by making the camera focus only on elements in player-defined layers. Many generic scripts utilizing Unity Events were produced which allowed me to quickly produce routine effects like timers and On Enable actions without having to manually create a new script to do so.

The first system implemented was a means of collecting parts and 'storing' them in a transform hierarchy on the player in an organized fashion. The first set of parts were manually arranged since we needed to set them around the player's base model, but afterwards they were dynamically attached in a balanced fashion, infinitely, using some basic modulo math.

Afterwards, part functionality was implemented. Each part was given health, which when expired would cause the part to drop and be free for the taking. The first batch of parts were all very active-interaction pieces like gatling guns, sawblades and missiles. Some care was taken to ensure that the elements didn't end up blowing up the player or their other weaponry, though the bulk of the weaponry ended up making for some fun surprises when, for example, the player shot exploding missiles near doorways and detonated on their own stack. The parts ended up both acting as a bit of armor from light pellets as well as making the player become a larger, more visible target; ninja approaches to ambushing other players were very popular during playtesting, with players taking advantage of tall heights to drop down on unsuspecting opponents.

The licking effect really made things unique and turned out to be a very fun and mischievous mechanic. You could start with a serious arsenal only to have all the weapons in your lower racks stolen by an opponent. This would make it very difficult to combat them and give them an immediate edge. It also made for a fun taunt effect.

What Comes Next

Armored Frog was very well received and engaging based on the showcase playtest at TOJAM. We had several players sticking around for prolonged periods to enjoy 4 player split screen combat sessions. Several bugs and gameplay quirks became quite apparent, such as the tongue having a fairly small collider and the parts often getting lost forever in the lava. Today, I will be releasing a new patch to address most of these bugs and frictions in the initial TOJAM build and release to more platforms.

In the short term, we plan on expanding the available parts and deepening the system by implementing a part weight mechanic that impacts player mobility and passive parts that provide buffs to the player; not everything will be a gun! A prototype of these features are fairly far into development already and the bottleneck is expected to be the opportunity to playtest and confirm they work to expectations.

After that, the hope is that Armored Frog is in a position where we can incrementally apply improvements over time. There's no plan for major release or anything particular ambitious yet, but if we complete a build that we're happy to bring over and play with friends it will become a project that we can nurture based on our dynamic interest. Who knows, maybe I will try to get it network compatible! But I don't want to make promises for anything that isn't about to be completed. :)