Voxel Engine

As you can see, the thing that gets more attention is the CUBE. And you may ask, how have we done it? How does it work? (or maybe not, you just like to watch it and just that. I’m not in your heads, I don’t know what you think).

Well, it has been a mix of different sources: a bit of research, some things learned in class... For example, the roads are based on a 2D path-finding algorithm which has been expanded to 3D. But we’ve had to learn about how to make a voxel game since we hadn’t done anything similar before.

As you may have noticed (or watched in any of our posts on Twitter), the world is built procedurally. The roads, the rocks, the bushes... They will all be different every time you play! This will allow us to build a great number of levels with increasing difficulty, as there will be less space to build defences, more paths, and more enemies. But making everything random is dangerous, so don’t be surprised when there are little to no places to build your turrets (and factories, but we’ll talk about them in the future).

Also, we must talk about something you may also have already seen, and that is the pixel art filter. We do not know what to do with it. We like it and dislike it at the same time, it has some cons, but you love it, so it is a tough decision to make. We will see what we end up doing.

Turrets and Enemies

4 enemies, 4 turrets. Straight to the point.

We are going to give you a little bit of information about them, starting with the enemies (we do not have any name for them, sorry v_v):

• Common enemy: the dirty frog you are going to see almost constantly during the rushes. It moves by land, as the amphibian it is, and it doesn’t move quite fast nor quite slow. Although do not underestimate it.
• Heavy enemy: this little frog is bigger, stronger, tougher, slower and also amphibian. Be careful with this big boy because it can ruin your playthrough.
• Horde enemy: a lot of tiny little frogs moving fast towards your pond. Sounds intimidating, isn’t it? Well, when you see how fast they can be beaten they won’t intimidate you at all. If you can defeat them on time, of course.
• Flying enemy: this one is quite funny because we don’t know yet how they will look in-game, but you can imagine something along with the words “Mentos” and “Soda”. And also that it can fly.

Now with the turrets (we also don’t have their names yet):

• Basic turret: as the name says, the most basic turret. Medium damage, medium-range, medium rate of fire, everything medium. But it can shoot into the air, so you can knock down dirty frogs flying through the air.
• Heavy turret: the big brother. More damage, more range but slower and only hits frogs that move on the ground (and the ones that are near its objective).
• Psychic turret: we are not going to give you a psychic frog, it’s too overpowered. It’s just a placeholder. What it will be is a frog that doesn’t have enough range and that is weak, but any dirty frog hit by it will get sleepy and move slower.
• Rocky turret: this one is interesting. We have thought that it will only be deployable over rocks or bushes and that it will shoot to the air and the ground like a Gatling, making the flying frogs a vulnerable target.

Levels and Biomes

By now we are going low with the number of levels and biomes (we don’t need to get on top now). 4 levels, for now, seems an adequate number, besides having a cube generator system helps us a lot (thanks, procedural generation).

In terms of how they look we can’t give you an advance BUT we can tell you about the biomes (consider it as a gift from us):

• Swamp: the natural habitat of the little frogs, the best way to start.
• City: the metropolis, a hard setting for the existence of the little frogs and their ponds.
• Mountain: snowy woods keeping warm puddles where you can swim and live.

Story

One thing that id Software has taught us with DOOM (2016) is that the importance of a videogame’s story is established by the ones who write it. In our case, it seemed more important to us to make the cutest little frogs in the world.

The story is about the defence of Clean Frogs’ pond against the invasion of Dirty Frogs. And you may ask, why are they attacking? Well, they are because they intoxicated their pond and they are looking for a new home, at any cost.

And it’s your objective to avoid losing your home. Simple, isn’t it?