LOL, didn't you guys read the TA preview article? http://toucharcade.com/2010/07/12/exclusive-pocket-frogs-sneak-preview-breed-an-army-of-frogs-in-nimblebits-next-game/
Never saw that mate, cheers for the link. You must really love frogs huh? Or has it got to the stage where you are sick of them?
I don't remember reading all of it I think I had read the first paragraphs than got distracted by the screenshots Quite a bad habit of mine.
Easy to see why, right? Cute slimy things that hop. What's not to love. ;P Are you in charge of designing the frogs? If so, you do it very, very well!
*Kneels* We are not worthy! Let's just say that between the two of you, you have created a Froggy Nirvana!
Suggestions for Pocket Frogs This game is shaping up to be one of my most coveted games of 2010. It seems to me that you’ve created a nice blend of cute visual aesthetics and a deeper breeding system (based on said visuals), while integrated a pokemon-style trading feature that will extend the length of the game for players. You’ve pledged to maintaining the game with weekly contests and prizes and such, and plan to make the game free to play, supporting it through In App Purchases. You’ve answered many questions about the game so far, but there’s one area I still feel a little confused about, an area I feel that is the most important part of the game: The Catalog. How does it work? Are there any screenshots available? I ask this because I am a collector fanatic. I’m the guy who spent hours in Oblivion trying to collect all of the coolest weapons (displaying all of those weapons in my house on the other hand, as any Oblivion player knows, was a HUGE pain in the ass!); I’m the guy who spend hours farming enemies in Kingdom Hearts 2 in order to synthesize the Ultima weapon, the only keychain I hadn’t already collected; I’m the guy who needs the Catalog to be AWESOME. Right now, I’m imagining it as sort of an index card system, with “froggy cards” in that they display a picture of the frog and its traits. What I’d like to see as well would be the flip side of the card. I’m thinking social stats, in that the user could see Who originally bred the frog and When they bred it, kind of like the OT stat in Pokemon. Another thing that might be nice is a description or special symbol to denote where the frog came from. I know contests were mentioned in the Touch Arcade preview; I don’t know what the rewards for contests will be, but why not frogs? If a frog was won in a challenge, it could have a special golden star on its “card”, along with a description mentioning how it was won. I think it would be overkill or impractical to implement a system in which each user could create and mark the frogs they’ve bred personally with a unique symbol, I’m sure that you developers at NimbleBit could come up with a similar, much better idea. The idea of having all this extra- metadata, if you will, is extremely attractive to collectors, such as myself, and would really add something extra to the game. Another question/suggestion for the Catalog deals with the storing of frogs. You’ve mentioned before that “there will probably be a high frog turn over rate.” This means that we won’t be keeping our frogs around for very long. The whole point of collecting something is to have it, to know that you can view it and access it anytime you want, because it’s Yours. This is where I would turn to the Catalog for help. Say you are a successful frog breeder; you’ve developed several different “strains” of frog styles, and work on each for a while before flushing your Pond Nursery and starting on a new type of frog. Now that you’ve worked for a while, you feel that the frogs you bred when you were just starting out had potential, but you got rid of them before you could experiment further. This is where a feature I’m going to call “Frog Recall” comes in. What if the user could enter the Catalog, select a frog that had been owned by the user at some point in time, and “recall” it by paying a certain amount of in-game currency? The frog would then be deposited (in its tadpole stage) in the user’s Pond Nursery. This would solve what I consider to be a pretty big problem in the fact that a high frog turnover rate results in jettisoning promising frog candidates merely because your Pond wasn’t big enough. These features would add an immense value to the game for me, and collectors everywhere, and create an experience for my fellow collecting gamers that no other game really can match. Being able to tinker and experiment with your frogs is great, but I feel that sometimes I’ll say, “Whatever happened to that one frog?” With these features I could enter the Catalog, find the frog in question (with a well indexed, simplistic viewing format that supports several search and organizational options), learn where I got it from, and obtain another one to work with and mold into an entirely new type of frog. Again, I love the way the game is turning out and I’m sure everyone else following this game is just as excited as I am about your pending release of Pocket Frogs. Thank you for your time and I hope you find my suggestions thoughtful. Drkmaster P.S. Sorry for the huge wall of text. Too many things to say!
Wow! Thanks for taking the time to write all that out! Unfortunately the breeding / trading / collecting will not be quite as in-depth as you describe above. We have limited development resources (me), and are also trying to appeal to the casual player. The catalog will be a simple snapshot of a breed in general (not individual frogs). I am looking into ways you might be able to share your favorite created breeds with others but I can't promise anything right now.
