Wow guys. I'm one of the two artists who worked on Frogatto, so hearing this sort of response really gets me pumped! Thanks a lot.
I've now spent a bit of time with the Mac version, and I'm pretty much blown away: this thing is massive. Just to give people a sense of the scale, here's a screenshot of the section of the map I've already unlocked. There are lush platforming challenges, multi-level houses (that you can enter), upgrade stores, NPCs with dialogues and side missions, boss fights, and a widening story that holds the whole thing together. Kudos to Jetrel -- the game is a pixel-art feast. If the controls hold up on the iPhone, we're in for real treat.
Don't be fooled - NOT counting interiors, we have only 4 major environments in the game - right now. We of course want to add more. That said, a mere one of those environments has more levels than the entirety of ghouls and ghosts (any one of the sequels). Over the course of updates, we'll probably add a few more key environments, but more importantly, we're going to work on more monsters and puzzles - especially, we're going to try making some monsters and puzzles that offer very different gameplay. I feel that's one of the weaknesses of the current version of the game. The other key thing is that we don't consider current content "set in stone"; if we make additional monsters/props/etc in future updates, expect us to populate earlier areas of the game with them as appropriate. Expect us also to tweak away any problems in the early parts of the game. We're not some shovelware crew in the stable of a major publisher, who's forced to abandon a game they've made and move on to the next title. We're indie, we want to get this game right.
Best post ever by a dev . You've just earned my launch-day money. Just like sammysin, I've probably tried every last plarformer on the App store without ever being 100% satisfied. This one looks like it could well change that fact. Great job guys.
That's great to hear. I'm finding plenty of variety right now (the two boss fights so far have been remarkably different), though I'd imagine you can always have more. Crevice Village is gorgeous, by the way, and each character has been rendered both distinctively and with tons of personality. I appreciate your modesty, but clearly there's plenty to be excited about here.
Been playing the iphone version a bit (just beat the first boss battle) and I'm just blown away by how fantastic it looks. I'm still not used to the controls yet (especially swimming) but that may be that I don't really play iphone games that require the precise movements a platformer calls for. Overall the game has quality written all over it and is a must have title, no doubt about it
Put it there pal. Here's to us enjoying it as much as squarezero and Vegan! I need to stop reading this thread before the excitement kills me.
I just played the windows version for half an hour and it's really great. I'm now only worried that the controls may not work well on iphone, otherwise this is a must buy and I dare say one of the most enjoyable platformer the appstore can offer.
I have to admit, I'm a bit disappointed that "the creators of Battle for Wesnoth" didn't even ask "the iPhone porter of Battle for Wesnoth" to even try out the game on iPhone. This is the first I've heard of it, and I probably could have offered a lot of valuable input
Well, sorry about that; I thought of it a few times, but didn't really know how to contact you. Anyway, I'll give you a copy if you give me your UDID.
The website says the iPhone version is "coming soon". Hope that means soon as in already submitted to the AppStore. Looks freakin awesome. D/l mac version Crimson penguin: any hints on when the appstore release is planned? Any idea on what the price may be?
Awww don't be like that The game doesn't have a way to rotate the screen so my hand ended up cramping pretty bad after a long session with my headphones plugged in. I suffer for you damn it!
Besides dave, none of us actually had any clue how to get a hold of you. We'd love to have you test - in fact I'd actually like to get to know you, since you might be great to work with on future stuff. (If anyone's wondering, Wesnoth is a sprawling project, so quite a few people involved don't know others. I for example don't really know any of our large numbers of translators. We guys who wrote frogatto are kind of a small tight-knit "dream team" group of friends from inside wesnoth. We feel it's safe to call ourselves "the creators of" when one of us is the lead programmer and founder, and another the lead artist, even though Frogatto didn't involve the whole, enormous 500-man-strong revolving door of people who've helped make wesnoth over the years. ) Rotating the screen 180° is something we should add support for down the road. That would be helpful to have, for precisely the reason you state. Rotating it 90°, to profile mode, is something we won't ever do for artistic and level-design reasons. Most of our levels are designed around the current aspect ration, and would show undefined areas outside the level, if we radically changed the screen. We actually had a fairly large amount of work done just to remove issues from the simple change from the original 400x300 aspect on computers, to add the tiny margin of 80x20 to make it use the whole iPhone screen (which is 480x320). We were originally just a pure computer game, but because the game was almost a glove-fit for the supported tech stack on the iPhone (OpenGL, C++), and because 3/5 of us were fairly big apple fans, we pushed to make a iPhone version. There are actually a great number of devs out there making iOS games for the exact same reason - unlike every other console, which has some unusual proprietary API, the iPhone is extremely friendly to being programmed through the usual *nix style cross-platform libraries. Most consoles, if you're gonna put your game on them, are getting a full and proper "port", involving massive rewrites of the codebase - sometimes in the old days, involving downsizing and butchering the art to fit (c.f. console versions of SimCity et al. Ick.). When you run Frogatto on your iPhone, besides the sound code, you're running pretty much the exact same code as the computer version.
