It's been one year already since we started working on Frog Collective. So it's time to make a quick recap of what we did last year.

As described in the last posts, we started our adventures last year in April. We worked on our first game Coldridge and published it seven months later.

After the release, we continued working on balancing things and adding some content to offer to the community. And finally, took some rest and enjoyed the holiday season.

Going back to work, we wanted to test new things, leaving board games to test the first person exploration genre. We did know that the topic was ambitious, especially knowing that we were only two people on the team. So we put ourselves on a deadline of three months to see what was achievable in a reasonable time span.

We worked on different ideas; some were very convincing, others needed a lot more work to be playable. To illustrate a bit, here is a sneak peek of what the prototype looks like:

At the end of this research phase, we were quite happy with what we did, but starting to list everything we needed to do, we planned that we would not finish anything in years. So we made the hard choice to stop the project (maybe we will continue later?) and moved to another game idea we had (a more reasonable one). We'll start working on it next week, so stay tuned; the next blog post will tell you more about it 😉. Just for teasing, we can say that we are coming back to some roguelite stuff!

While working on this prototype, we also did a thing that we wanted to do since the Steam release of Coldridge. We published Coldridge on Itch.io!

Itch.io is one of the most creative video game places you can find; we are so happy to have our game on it!

PS: If you want to know more about what we did, Aurel talked about it in a conference (in French).

Hi everyone! Big announcement today!

At the time of writing the last post, we wanted to share our adventure with this blog a lot more often, but I think we were quite busy making our first game 😄. It's never too late though, so here is a recap of what we did.

As described in the last post, we started to work on Frog Collective in April. We did the pre-production of our first project during this first month while dealing with administrative stuff (we are in France; it's a known fact that administrative paperwork is quite intense here). The company was officially created in May.

At that time, we started to know where we wanted to go with our first game, so we started to work on its title, the Steam page and trailer to start to communicate as soon as possible. The game: "Coldridge", is a blend between board game and roguelite mechanisms. You need to explore a procedurally generated map to discover resources requested by the all powerful guild of the city of Coldridge.

Our initial plan was to develop the game in five months; making a small game was quite liberating for us! We published Coldridge Trailer on June 24 and the demo one month later, on July 23. The reception was amazing, so we decided to put two more months on the project to add a lot more content and a narrative storyline.

In October, we attended GodotCon, where we gave a talk about how we approach the Godot engine to make Coldridge. Watch it if you want to know a bit more about how we did it. Don't hesitate to come ask us questions about details on our social networks; the presentation is quite dense, so we don't delve into details.

The game is out today! We hope you'll enjoy it as much as we liked working on it.

Hi everyone and welcome! We are Adrien and Aurel, two friends passionate about video games. We've been working in the game industry for the past 12 years. We met at Amplitude Studios about 10 years ago (maybe more). We've worked on all strategy games made by Amplitude! These are huge and complex projects, so we started doing some game jams to have a fresh approach and try some crazy ideas. It's been a long time since we spoke around a beer about "Someday we'll try to go indie and make our games".

This time has come! Last year we started to plan this project seriously (mostly by doing administrative stuff and planning for our future company). We plan to make games on a whole smaller scope than what we did before, to be able to test new ideas and to change the context more regularly. We started to work on our project in April, at first it was a wild mix of crazy game design ideas, administrative papers and technical setups.

Talking about technical setup, the first step was to define the whole tech stack (the software we'll use to make our games). The open source software is not as strong in the video game industry as in other domains like web development. As a side goal, we aim to help this community and projects grow, so we choose to use as much open-source software as we can and hope to contribute in the future.

We also want to thank Corentin (a close friend). He set up all the toolchain we use to develop our games, and he did that with some panache. We use only self-hosted open-source tools.

But enough ramble, after this luxurious technical setup, we started to work on a prototype and things aligned themself from week to week. At the end of the first month, we asked our friends to test our prototype. Guided by their priceless feedback, we continued the development of our first game. We are almost ready to announce it, but I'll keep that for a later post :).

Nevertheless, we are proud to present our game studio: Frog Collective.

We hope you'll like what we will do together.

Thanks for the reading!