Froggess

Froggess is a shamelessly affectionate tribute to the legendary Frogger, the 1981 arcade classic that proved getting home can be considerably more dangerous than invading an alien planet.

Guide our fearless amphibian heroine from the gloomy forest back to her cosy little home.

Unfortunately, somebody has placed several lanes of impatient traffic and a rather inconvenient river between the two.

Evolution has given Froggess powerful legs.

It has given you the arrow keys.

Good luck to both of you.

How to Play

Move Froggess across the road, avoiding cars, trucks and anything else travelling considerably faster than an amphibian.

Once you reach the river, the problem changes.

Froggess cannot simply swim across. Instead, jump onto moving objects and let them carry you safely toward the other side.

Logs are generally cooperative.

Turtles are less reliable.

Other creatures may also be waiting for an opportunity to move Froggess several positions downward on the food chain.

Reach home safely to complete the crossing.

Then do it again.

Naturally, things become less polite as you progress.

Controls

• LEFT — move left
• RIGHT — move right
• UP — move up
• DOWN — move down; surprising, I know
• F4 — pause / resume

The Road

Traffic moves along several independent lanes, each with its own direction, speed and rhythm.

Success is mostly about timing.

Watch the traffic, identify a gap and move decisively.

Standing still in the middle of the road while reconsidering your life choices is technically permitted but strategically questionable.

The River

Reaching the river merely changes the preferred method of dying.

Froggess must use moving platforms to cross the water.

Jump onto logs and turtles, ride them across the river and move again before they carry you somewhere less useful.

And keep an eye on the turtles.

The safest-looking platform may occasionally decide that remaining above water is optional.

Features

• Classic Frogger-inspired arcade gameplay.
• Road traffic with multiple moving lanes.
• Moving river platforms that physically carry the player.
• Logs, turtles and assorted unfriendly wildlife.
• Increasing arcade-style challenge.
• Simple controls built around precise timing.
• Fast rounds and immediate restarts.
• Completely free browser gameplay.
• No installation required.
• No repetitive arcade music. You're welcome.

A Little History

Froggess is heavily inspired by Frogger, originally released by Sega in 1981.

The Commodore 64 later received several versions and clones, including releases from Sierra and Parker Brothers, and those old home-computer interpretations are part of the inspiration as well.

Frogger always stood apart from many arcade games of its era.

While other heroes were busy vaporizing aliens, bombing cities and enthusiastically reducing the pixel population of the universe, Frogger had a much more modest objective:

Cross the road. Cross the river. Get home.

Admittedly, "peaceful" becomes a fairly flexible term when trucks, crocodiles, snakes and drowning are involved.

Why Froggess?

After developing Haunting the Hauntessa and DownHeel, both fairly ambitious 3D projects, building something as apparently simple as Frogger might seem like a peculiar change of direction.

That was precisely the point.

Simple arcade games expose mechanics very clearly. There is nowhere for bad timing, collision detection or movement behavior to hide behind elaborate graphics.

Froggess introduced several things my engine had not previously needed:

• moving platforms that carry the player,
• lane-based traffic,
• precise grid movement,
• classic arcade timing,
• and gameplay where a few pixels can separate success from becoming road decoration.

It was a useful reminder that a game whose entire design document could fit comfortably on a beer coaster can still provide plenty of programming problems.

Under the Hood

Froggess was written in JavaScript and GLSL and runs entirely in the browser using my custom LaughingSkull ENGINE.

The game combines grid-based 2D gameplay with WebGL rendering and the reusable movement, collision, sprite, spatial-indexing and game-object systems developed across previous LaughingSkull projects.

One of the main additions was proper support for moving carriers: objects such as logs and turtles that transport the player while continuing to move independently.

Which sounds simple.

A disturbing amount of game-engine programming begins with that sentence.

Play Froggess

▶ Help Froggess Get Home on LaughingSkull.org

Free to play. No account. No installation.

Look left. Look right. Look left again.

Then get flattened by the truck coming from the direction you forgot existed.