Frog Wednesday 2
One late night on the BOBBO-NET Discord, community members were drawing frogs. There was no reason for this - it was simply the will of the people. On that fateful night, Wednesday was declared as Frog Wednesday - a recurring event (on every Wednesday of course!) that encouraged members to “create for the sake of creating” every Wednesday. This later resulted in the creation of Frog Wednesday 6 10 2020 (or Frog Wednesday 1), a joke game made in one day for fun. 6 months later on December 23rd, 2020, I released the sequel: Frog Wednesday 2 - in collaboration with Leo Vader.
Description:
In Frog Wednesday 2, you act as a playtester for Halliburton Gaming. Halliburton has bought the rights to Frog Wednesday from Iseeicy for an outrageous sum of money - and the company is trying to reboot the IP into a more marketable genre. Players platform through and… test (?) a wide variety of genres (ranging from a Battle-Royale mode to an Idle Clicker) while company executive Mark Dividend tags along to hover over the player, comment on their every move, and ramble to fill dead air.
The second level of Frog Wednesday 2.
My Role:
My role in Frog Wednesday 2 was programming, level design, sound design, and a tiny amount of voice acting. Leo Vader took over the writing, voice acting, and overall story design. You can find more details on Frog Wednesday 2’s itch.io page.
Frog Wednesday 2 was primarily a collaboration between Leo Vader and myself.
After working on mass, I wanted to focus on more team based projects in my personal work. I also wanted a chance to play with the new dialog engine I had been writing for You Played Yourself, and also also wanted a chance to work on a project that involved level design. I brought Leo in on the project and right away we were brewing with ideas for a short story that would fit with the first game’s gameplay.
Why it’s important:
Something interesting to note is how we designed Frog Wednesday 2. I essentially came to Leo and said: “Hey - let’s make this thing. I have a dialog system I want to test that can branch in a ton of ways. Let’s make a game where you talk over the whole thing and play with that branching dialog”. After that, Leo came up with a premise, we decided on some genres that would be simple to make basic or comedic clones of, then Leo created a story tree which ultimately determined where the player would go. We didn’t necessarily start with locations or levels in mind - it was very much story oriented from the start, with locations and levels getting filled in as Leo wrote and recorded dialog and as I worked on the game.
The fourth level of Frog Wednesday 2.
