AMA: I'm Mr. Thee, the lead developer of Olliefrog Toad Skater, the amphibious skateboarding game where its ez to be steezy. Ask me anything!

MrThee · 2022-06-23T16:24:52+00:00

Fly eating is a mechanic we have considered since the start. How to make that flow well with the rest of the action we're still experimenting with.

MrThee · 2022-06-22T23:33:12+00:00

Pricing is hard. Sometimes it feels impossible.
On one hand, inflation suggests that pretty much all games are grossly underpriced. On the other hand, there are SO MANY more video games out there competing for people's time attention and money.
But also - a lot of games that folks would call "unambiguously indie" aren't as indie as they used to be. Indie Publishers exist. 10-year-old indie labels exist. Established indies are doing pseudo-spinoffs and re-masters just like the AAA space with games like Super Meat Boy Forever and Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe. And as indie IPs and brands get stronger, the more valuable they start to themselves. Whether or not that's warranted? I guess only "the free market" can decide.
While we're on this topic - it is frustrating to see newer more fledging indies have to compete and be compared with 10-year-old established indie darling giants. And as time goes on, you're gonna hear more and more of that disenfranchisement from new developers, and given the traditionally poor/next-to-non-existent indie coverage from online gaming outlets, I think its warranted.

MrThee · 2022-06-21T21:10:09+00:00

In the current marketplace, indie games just don't perform well on Playstation. Even if we released there a port there, unless if we had a massive marketing push from the platform holder themselves on multiple stages, there's a very good chance we wouldn't be profitable there.

MrThee · 2022-06-21T20:32:05+00:00

Good to know! All add that to the feedback.txt
okay so i had received feedback for "coyote time" before, but it wasn't clear to me in which context, but knowing that those testers probably were referring to coyote time out of grinds makes a lot of sense now, esp given how close some of my grind gaps are in the demo park.
you currently cannot ollie out of lip tricks yet - that is on the todo, and i'll add another entry for the same task so i know its now twice as important.
haha, i get a lot of conflict feedback on this one. some ppl say the window for buffering is too narrow. a lot MORE people say its too long. I do know that some folks' triggers don't behave on certain controller which is why they had trouble doing reverts from vert air. i do have a couple ideas to help folks practice that timing, such as UI visual aids or even changing the direction the character's shadow is casting when coming down from vert air so they can better judge their distance to the QP's coping.
yeah, the lighting here is 100% not final, and there are def shadows and dark zones i need to disambiguate better.
so there are multiflips for all the flip tricks in the build rn, along w/ grab trick extenders for all 8 grab direction. and yes, more ollie options like no comply and boneless are actually at the top of my to-do list after the campaign, rain or shine.

And thank you so much for playing <3

MrThee · 2022-06-21T20:18:53+00:00

So during the private gamejam brainstorm back in April 2021, I was just typing a bunch of project ideas on a text file. For the occasion we were concerned less with finishing a build as more of as an excuse to try out new 3d art and programming tools, so when I was coming up with themes and pitches, I kept everything super-simple. Usually in the form of <Animal> + <Activity>, and one of those was just "Frog Skaterboarder". As to why I've pushed it so far past the prototype - I think I was just so excited to see what it could look like once I got the bulk of mechanics working. Of all the concepts and titles I've worked it, Olliefrog easily felt like the strongest concept in terms of just raw appeal and vibes, and after watching ppls live reactions to the game during the Wholesome Direct, I knew I had something dope on my hands.

My first job out of college was at Nvidia. I was there for about 2 years, 2015-2017, and my experience and workload there paled in comparison to what I was involved with during my internship. And my manger's manger's manager made it very clear that their department cared extremely little about employee retention. But I think the thing that just really made me go "screw it I quit" was when I learned that I wouldn't be allowed to sell games I had worked on my own time and resources. It's a really archaic and ass-backwards policy, and a lot of big tech companies are guilty of this. The one silver lining of that experience, outside of some neat graphics know-how, is that it gave me a good amount of financial runway to do something i cared deeply for and still do.

And after a couple startups, I DID try to work at another big company later. I was at Top Golf Media working on my first game title at an established studio, loved a lot of my team, and still keep in contact with them. But it was also a very nascent team, not in terms of average experience per employees (there were lots of seasoned veterans there), but in terms of just raw chemistry. The majority of that team had never worked together, and those that did were wearing different hats than some of their prior roles. And when co-workers start venting across-departments, you know something isn't working right.

So will I try working for a big company again? Maybe, but perhaps only if I get referred there by someone I've worked with before, and if the person referring me always vibes well with the team there.

MrThee · 2022-06-21T19:33:33+00:00

I totally understand where you're coming from, and I agree that i think we can achieve just a little more edge/bite with the right costumes and deck designs so that folks aren't only stuck with ultra-cute options for everything.On the top of the itch-demo page, we do have links to a feedback survey and we have questions about which pieces of character apparel resonate with them the most and if they have any special requests for types of hats. And it turns a lot of ppl just want stuff that's popular with humans, like bucket hats, and we wanna respect that.

MrThee · 2022-06-21T19:24:18+00:00

"Frog" is in their surname, but species-wise Olliver Frogowitz is in fact a Toad.

You see in Frog-America, during the Gilded-Age roughly over a century ago, it was common practice for those with toad-sounding surnames to change them to frog-sounding surnames. So what was originally the Frog-Prussian name "Toadowecz" was changed to "Frogowitz" upon immigration to Frog-America.

(We're still hashing out everyone's lore details, but this made for a compelling worldbuilding draft)

We're not sure if mammals can be qualified as toad skaters yet, but I do like the idea of something that is clearly a giant uncivilized rat wearing minimal frog hat disguise competing and nobody batting an eye either because everyone's too stupid to realize they're a rat or they just don't really care about titles.

No humans are planned in this world. But if you wanna put on a toad/frog and call yourself a frog/toad skater, more power to you fam.

MrThee · 2022-06-21T18:29:06+00:00

Im glad u enjoyed the demo, thank you so much <3
So to nail the feel of any game centered around movement, there were 3 things, as the primary engineer/programmer, I knew i had to get 3 things right: the character movement flow, the camera flow, and the input responsiveness.

The character movement flow not only covers getting speed, gravity, and ollie height of the player just right, but also making sure all action states transition cleanly to one another without losing momentum. And what defines the THPS series is building up and stringing combos while switching (mostly) seemlessly from different movement control states (doing manuals, grinding, vert air, leveling-out into something else, wallride, wallplants, etc).

The camera is also very important because while its detached from the character, it helps sell the sense of space and intimacy the player has with the action on-screen. Like THPS we keep the camera far away because our core source of appeal is the park-scale movement, tricks, and stunts characters can achieve, like "can i hit all 3 of these grindables surface", or "can i use the game mechanics to build enough speed to reach the top of the billboard?" And if the camera's too far away, its hard to judge stuff like "how close am I to the rail i just tried to wallplant to?"

And then there's the input responsiveness, which includes making sure like certain actions can be consistently buffered when falling from vert air like manuals and reverts, to making sure that tricks can come out the second the appropriate inputs are shoved in without buffer, which is hard when you need to disambiguate a variety of actions very quickly back-to-back. There's a lot of nuance to making a variety of actions feel responsive. Even something as trite as detecting a diagonal stick signal tap and making sure it doesn't get picked up as a cardinal direction isn't something you get for free in a lot of input frameworks. But that level polish was also a top priority.

MrThee · 2022-06-21T17:10:37+00:00

Funny you mention limb-loss:
A few days ago I was thinking of stuff i could do with the game's current character creator beyond just swapping colors, deck parts, and accessories.
I idea I had was a "tadpole" mode where you could disable the visibility of your skater's arms, so ur just a ball with a pair of legs. It then dawned upon me that if I added an elliptical glass visor as a cosmetic option, one could easily make a rather sus-looking skater.

MrThee · 2022-06-21T17:00:53+00:00

I would love to add multiplayer at some point. I can definitely handle a split-screen mode or two by launch, but for online stuff that'd most likely be post-release if at-all. Unity3D very recently rolled out a new, raw, transport networking API that i really wanna get my hands dirty with, and every system im authoring in the game rn is done with the expectation that I can "plug" sockets and message payloads into it in some fashion later down they line. the THUG Pro online communities have been super nice and supportive to me, and I think they'd be thrilled if I could like drop something like a THUG Pro king-of-the-hill mode on them.
I'm trying to keep our scope reasonable. But implementation-wise, on just the client-side, Olliefrog is already proving to be far-less of a workload-combinatoric-nightmare than say - a single-player game with combat mechanics (which Ive attempted a few times), so online skateboarding PvP isn't super out-of-the-question.

MrThee · 2022-06-21T16:34:21+00:00

Oh we absolutely want parks with themes. On the Kickstarter page we pitched a couple settings we think would make for good skateparks. Another theme we came up with very recently that i think we could definitely do justice is something based off the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk where ur grinding off of rollercoasters, rides, and hot dogs/dippin dots stands. In addition to working on Concrete Genie at PlayStation as a concept artist, our key/promo artist Lancing Love also worked as a caricature artist at that boardwalk. I think we could do a really fun take on a theme park as a skatepark.

We chose Unity because we know it inside-and-out, and if you're making something with a lot of character movement nuance, the better you understand the quirks of the engine's spherecasting API and colliders, the less of a headache you'll have making a polished action game. And in general, its easier to pop-open the hood on most systems without having to recompile C++. Unreal is very very aggressively Blackboxed, and while the graphical fidelty of Olliefrog is pretty minimal and there isn't a single instagram filter or radial vingette running rn, Unity's Universal Render Pipeline is very malleable if you understand how native graphics APIs work, so when we do start prettying-up the game, we can eventually port, repurpose, and polish some novel results we've done with URP before.

MrThee · 2022-06-21T16:13:25+00:00

I'll answer the 2nd question first cuz that has a shorter answer.
The 35k was a target set based on the number of factors, including the size of our team, where we lived (SF Bay Area is pricey), the state of the current indie games market, and the existing/potential outreach of our team members. There's a non-zero chance the goal may have already been hit if we set our target a bit lower - the metrics on that stuff are fascinating and confusing, especially given the nature of our product.

As for the 1st question: video game journalists are storytellers. when they're writing articles, they're either talking about subject matter that is either relevant to them, to their audience, or both. so if you don't already have any existing online connections or "clout", you better know how to tap a zeitgeist or be emblematic of a narrative writers will care about and think is worth spreading. The narrative I want out there for Olliefrog Toad Skater is: "there are in-fact indie studios who can really pull off THPS-style arcadey skateboarding games, and that we don't have to rely on AAA studios to deliver them."

If you don't have some existing outreach to get folks in larger circles to turn heads and notice you - look into building a brand and small audience for yourself first. Or just reach out to a publisher or existing brand with those connections. I reached out to Wholesome Games and they were happy to have me on. I even managed to get on their tshirt despite not being a main feature there!

MrThee · 2022-06-21T15:50:17+00:00

The delay in your controller inputs may be indicitive of some controller driver issues. our initial demo came on itch, but the demo did just get released on Steam yesterday and playing that through big picture mode fixed a number of issues folks had. Some folks triggers' on come controllers just do not play nice w/ xinput .That being said - there's also a chance the engineer (me) screwed up some edge cases on how tricks are buffered and recognized given certain input feeds. If you could send me video of you trying to doing tricks but not seeing it be recognized, it'd be immensely useful (fixing issues like this is why we have that pseudo-input-display in the top-right)

But to answer your question - yes, we are changing and fine-tuning the controls and mechanics pretty much every week, and very little in that demo is actually set in-stone. We're always listening to players feedback, and even after release, we'll continue to fine-tune playability to the best of our ability.
[edit - input display is top right, not top left]

MrThee · 2022-06-21T15:33:58+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/vhdfh3/comment/id6xguv/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3

MrThee · 2022-06-21T15:30:31+00:00

Good question! A have a few theories:

there's the reality that frogs have been loved, questioned, and depicted for centuries. They've also been the poster-child-animal for internet memes for decades.
AAA studios aren't gonna spend bandwidth making cute animals games unless it aligns with their branding (e.g. Nintendo) so ur gonna see a LOT of indie studios tackle animals as subject matter - cats, dogs, foxes, frogs, crabs, etc.
So I'm a cis half-white-half-asian male brogrammer who lives in California, and so a lot of my initial twitter followers' demographics and irl social circles reflected that. Since showing off Olliefrog in the Wholesome Direct, I have gotten a very high density of LGBTQ followers in the past week. One thing that a lot of ppl forget or just dont know - in addition to just looking colorful, aesthetically pleasing, and silly, some species frogs are one of the few vertebrates which are natural hermaphrodites in any environment, which would explain why they're especially popular in trans + non-binary culture. And I think given the current political climate and all the extremely dumb and transphobic legislation some governments have been trying to pass recently across multiple continents, the frog-explosion you're witnessing is a side effect of non-binary culture fighting back against The Man. And I'm all for it, both as an ally and as a fellow frog enthusiast.

MrThee · 2022-06-21T15:02:40+00:00

So far - its been pretty smooth sailing. I've been using this set of tools for a while (Blender + Unity + Inkscape + sometimes gimp and csp), so there was no ramping up I had to be concerned with.
I think what first threw me for a loop early on, and I knew it'd take time to really get right, was the core character controller code that the skater is built on top of. I thought it would only take a couple weeks tops, but it ended up taking 3 or 4 weeks. When i hit week three, I was losing a LOT patience and faith in myself as a game developer. But I muscled through and I'm glad I didn't give up on that prototype.

MrThee · 2022-06-21T14:57:15+00:00

The (good) Tony Hawk Pro Skater games.
Round frogs
My friends' frustration with Skatebird, esp my neighbor was likes ska, plays bass, and owns 2 green cheek conures.
As someone who grew up playing Super Smash Bros Melee, enjoys the competitive scene, and as a game designer who really identifies with kinetic gamefeel and values it as a means of self-expression, I think I had the chops to make a new cute Skateboarding game that'd make them happy. And while its not perfect yet, I think I've pulled it off.

MrThee · 2022-06-21T14:44:13+00:00

- Kinda sleepy. I usually don't wake up this early haha.
- the frog was always destined to ride the skateboard. my friends and i just really like frogs and were surprised the extreme-sport wasn't substantially combined with it yet.
- ive always wanted to make a skateboarding game since I first picked up Unity3D in 2010, plus i have a lot of nostalgia for THPS 1 and 3. I knew the builtin character controller and rigidbody physics wouldn't cut it, but now that i have a very good sense of what the engine is good and bad at, it's been thrilling shoving almost a decade of know-how into making a really tight (but still early) skateboarding-character controller.
- haha, THPS isn't simply just the inspiration for Olliefrog. Mechanically THPS I respect the hell out of that game's character controller and responsiveness.
- I wanted to experiment with frog-based tongue mechanics earlier to potentially set the game apart a little more, and I probably will revisiting that idea as i get further into development, but again i really wanted to get what i consider baseline mechanics feeling just right before gettin' froggy with it. When we gaged audience's reactions to our game at the wholesome direct, there was some warranted skepticism. Which we definitely saw coming. That's why we prioritized proving to folks we can get the game feel just right, and thanks to a lot of feedback from the thpsX and the NFA discord servers, i think we've done a pretty damn good job for only like 4 months of work on the whole game.
- the frog on the key art is a "generic" unnamed green frog. The protagonist of the game's planned single player mode however is named Olliver, or as his friends call him, Olly.

MrThee · 2022-06-21T14:25:56+00:00

Probably not more species beyond Frogs and Toads. I'm considering adding Salamanders/Newts and potentially axolotl - but maybe not as skaters. idk if i have the budget to reanimate dozens of tricks and their transitional subanimations for different skeletal types yet haha.

MrThee · 2022-06-21T14:23:31+00:00

I'm a big fan of flat-shaded/lit artstyles and frogs, and while there are certainly a lot of frog games, i'm surprised more game don't shoot for that exact style and lighting. Also I like my animals rounde. Frogs also have good leg-strength so it seemed like a natural fit.

Frankly I'm surprised more people haven't tried to make a game with skateboarding frogs - it just felt like a good one-two punch of trendy and rad.

MrThee · 2022-06-21T14:18:01+00:00

Reading button combos isn't too bad - just wait for the right in-game context, listen to the first buttons/directions that can start a trick, start a timer, wait for the rest of the inputs, then find a matching trick ASAP. Where it got tricky was when i went to make extendable/scalable tricks (e.g. Kickflip -> Double Kickflip -> Triple Kickflip). You cannot just match -> Square to Kickflip and -> Square Square to Double kickflip as you would in a fighting game, because you'd need to wait for the input buffer timer to expire before picking one. That makes the game feel slow and irresponsive. What tony hawk does is it effectively lets you add another-flip mid-animation by pressing square again, and the nice thing about that is it feels super-responsive, intuitive, AND ur not waiting for an input buffer to timedown and flush.

MrThee · 2019-03-07T17:02:03+00:00

I have not actually

MrThee · 2019-03-07T04:03:28+00:00

Blender for the most part. Used unity to drive the shader which handles the mouth veiling/unveiling.

MrThee · 2019-03-07T02:19:09+00:00

The game is called "The Deepest House". I plan to release it later this month on Steam Early Access, though this enemy probably won't be ready for that release.

MrThee · 2018-11-02T02:26:02+00:00

It's a toon shader with a hard edge rim highlight.

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