Froggy's Farm & Friends
Froggy's Farm & Friends started by budding off of Chamomile Grove. We felt that the game was over scoped so we cut puzzles from the game and adjusted development for a smaller team to work on. We decided to make it a single large area instead of multiple areas. Reworking the idea of customers and having the character potentially licking the plants to water them, from that sprouted the animal main character.
At the start, it was three designers so we ended up having to make our own assets for placeholders. We were working hard on reshaping the level and removing the things we could without creating further bugs. Most of the game was coded in C++ and we were facing the challenge of how to carefully disassemble the scripts and replace them with our own blueprints.
After we started reworking this project we gained new members. We gained a User Researcher, two Engineers, and an Artist, so our team of three rapidly grew to seven. Which meant we were able to delegate and get people working on parts of the game they excelled in. We did have a bump with onboarding as it was unexpected we weren't prepared for doubling our team, though we were able to figure out how to communicate with each other and work to make this game finished.
The Frog's beginning
I was Creative Director and the primary UX designer for this game. Due to the roles I played in the team, I was responsible for many of the decisions on how the game was shaped. However, I never made big decisions without consulting and talking with my team, we would brainstorm together when it came to needing to change direction, and we would give feedback to each other on proposed ideas. This process helped me understand our time constraints and resources better so I could figure out the best course of action for how we should proceed with production.
We had the fortune of having a User Researcher on our team, which allowed me to ask for testing with menus. I would prepare A/B screens to have them test while I was continuing on other tasks. I was able to learn a lot and make a lot of decisions quickly thanks to the findings from those tests which also aided in shaping the development of the game and it's UI greatly.
Our game did change a lot, we didn't proceed with the customer idea as that would have been a lot of extra work, and we eventually phased out the shop because it was very confusing for players and we wanted a different feel for our game that the shop didn't fit. We opted to change the shop into a compost bin at first but that got confusing for players because they would think of it as fertilizer rather than currency. After that, we turned the compost bin into a mortar and pestle and turned compost into 'essence' which allowed us to keep a more naturalistic feel and reduce player confusion.
The whole team decided that once we finished our initial deadline, we would voluntarily work on it to make it better for Steam and public publishing. During that time we took and made the game more refined and cohesive. There isn't too much to talk about during those months as it was polishing and bug clean-up.
Development
Now available on Steam!
Brianna Cherise
UI & UX Designer
