Getting lost can be surprisingly difficult these days. In the modern world, there is always a satellite following you or a sign that points you in the right direction. This also happens in video games, perhaps even more so than in real life: they include interactive maps, light paths or flying arrows that mark the exact route to your next goal.
Time on Frog Island does not offer any of these facilities. In this title, you play as a shipwrecked sailor on a mysterious island and you must find spare parts to repair your small ship. You don’t have the help of a map or any type of mission menu. The islanders are friendly, but they’re frogs, so they can’t really communicate with you to help or give you information.
The creators of the game, members of the studio half hour yellow, describe Time on Frog Island as a combination of free roaming, light platforming, and puzzles. More importantly, this title is not just about getting lost on the island, but getting lost in the moment and fully immersing yourself in the gaming experience.
“Our artist Casper always said it was like an adventure Point and click for people with ADHD, strange as it may seem,” explained director Max Wrighton. “You can pick up anything and you can throw anything. You move from place to place, and just doing that is profitable enough.”
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I visited Half Past Yellow in mid December on a snowy day. The building has a small second floor and the space seemed even more cramped as everyone had gone to the office. Even the sound designers, who usually work remotely from North Macedonia, were there. Still, the place is an improvement on their early days, when they worked in apartments and cafes, “trying to figure out how many coffees we had to order so we didn’t get fired,” in the words of the co-founder of the studio and CTO Rémy Stuurwold.
The studio was founded in 2017 and although it is located in Copenhagen, none of its founders are Danish: Max Wrighton is Scottish, Remy Stuurwold is Dutch and Gianfranco Dbeis is Italian. The trio met through the short-lived exchange program EUCROMA, organized by the Danish National Film School, and immediately became friends after discovering that they had a common interest, going to game jams.
Half Past Yellow’s identity is based on their way of quickly prototyping concepts and throwing ideas up in the air to see where they land. This way of working was an essential part of the initial development of the game that eventually became Time of Frog Island.
“On Monday we would start building from an early concept. It was like a longer game jam: we would continue development on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and sometimes even Friday. On Friday we would evaluate usually the outcome. We would sit down and have a beer and decide if the game was fun and if it would be a good deal,” says Wrighton.
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“I think the way we work is very similar to the way we work in game jams, both the structure and the deadlines, which are quite strict and set by ourselves to maximize our efforts and get the best possible result. “, adds Stuurwold. .
After releasing mobile game Tiny Tomb, a collaboration with another indie studio, and abandoning another project known as Komako, Half Past Yellow decided to create a new game from scratch in 2020. The team has proposed the prototype and tested different concepts for six weeks, hoping that from one of the seeds planted would grow a game that would have everything it needed. Abandoned ideas included a multiplayer title and a game about a maze flight, inspired by Indiana Jones. The concept that eventually caught his eye was much simpler.
“The first thing that came to us was the idea of the sailor, remembers Wrighton. It was not really a platform game, it was a stage that you could cross. There was no of frogs. We thought of a system with static characters, like in an adventure.” Point and click. Almost like a very simple memory game. The time spent on Frog Island ended up being exactly all that, but we added a lot of other elements.”
Although having an essential role in the final game, the frogs did not appear in the initial concept. The island could have had all kinds of inhabitants, but the most important thing was that they didn’t speak the same language as the player.
“We wanted there to be a communication barrier between the player and the native inhabitants of the island. What we wanted was the images of the objects needed to advance as the main communication,” says Stuurwold. “The decision to make frog dwellers was a bit random. Maybe it was because of the mood at the time, because we just released the game alongside five other indie games with frogs came out. Maybe it was something floating in the air.”
Wrighton adds that there were also more practical reasons why the team ended up choosing these green amphibians: “At first we thought of doing something similar to Animal Crossing, with dogs, cats, birds etc. It’s just that it’s more expensive when it comes to creating assets.Although all our frogs are different, Casper, our artist, created them from the same model, in l ‘adjusting if necessary.’
Once created, the frogs helped bring the developers’ vision to life. As for the decor, they added the feeling that the island is an unknown place, but familiar at the same time: the frogs wear human clothes and work as artists, plumbers…
In addition, the frogs also reinforced the main dynamic of the game, which is based on constant movement. Since the player has no clues other than an image in a speech bubble, there’s nothing to be gained by standing still in one spot and thinking about how to move on. What you have to do is explore without any guidance, trying to stumble upon the necessary items. In this way, the game emphasizes the fun of exploring, which fascinated the team when they started creating it.
“One of the most important things to keep in mind is that when a frog asks for an item, you know exactly what it is. That way, if you see it, you’ll know what it is. and you’ll have that eureka when you go exploring. You’ll have to explore until you find the next crumb to help you fix the ship,” says Wrighton.
In addition to unleashing a small plague of frogs on this fictional island, Half Past Yellow also tweaked some existing concepts and added many more during development: a day/night cycle, a charming Zelda-like art style, and a more elaborate story.
Merge games is handling the publication of the game, which will be released on PC and all major consoles in the summer of 2022. It has been generally well received, but some players and reviewers have complained about the lack of a map or quest menu to take away the account of the multiple objects and tasks that must be accomplished simultaneously.
When asked about it, Wrighton accepted the criticism, but said it was an intentional choice. “One of the things I love most about video games (and maybe try to force it on my players) is that in more popular titles, like Red Dead Redemption 2, you can disable the map. I like having to learn the layout of the map”. For example, when you see the farm, you know the village is to the north and the fishermen are to the west. That’s the experience we wanted to show the players.”
In summary, most design decisions in Time on Frog Island have been made to provide greater immersion, although sometimes at the cost of helping the player. Therefore, it is totally opposed to most modern titles. These decisions don’t make the game difficult on their own, as there are no enemies or time limits, but it does make it, in Wrighton’s words, “more niche than it looks on screenshots”.
Even so, Time on Frog Island is one of those games where what you see is what you get, since Half Past Yellow didn’t release any type of downloadable content or add any new features after launch. Although that doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t want to keep expanding this universe.
“It would be possible to create a sequel or more content in the same universe, if we wanted to. It’s a door that we left open, in case at some point we wanted to add something like an island to the Bear, Cat Island or Mole Island. All of these things are possible in the world we create, because we don’t completely close it off.”
For now, we’ll focus on their “top secret” new project, a game in which they’re going in “a totally different direction.” Because that’s precisely what this team, accustomed to developing in game jams, wants to do: create games and release them on the market. This way, they can finance their next project and continue their creative process.
“I’m sure you’ve heard Miyamoto or the director of Zelda talking about Ocarina of Time saying something like ‘a released game may be bad, but a late released game will end up being good,'” Wrighton says. “I think that phrase applies to a studio like Nintendo, which is not going to run out of money. For an independent team, it is better to take the game out of the game than to go bankrupt. It’s much better to keep creating, having fun with the team and finding your next title, whether it’s a sequel or something totally different.”
