Frogsong Retrospective

I've been meaning to write a retrospective on Frogsong for a while now, but every time I tried, I got stuck. It's difficult to unpack my feelings about this game because they're very messy and weird and complicated. They shift a lot from moment to moment. I wanted to get this written before 2023 ended. Then I wanted to get it written for the 1 year anniversary back in June. Any time I've tried writing this, part of why I got stuck was the fact that I was writing with the intention of posting it somewhere more publicly directly connected to the game. I don't know if I can be 100% honest about how I feel in channels that are intended to market and build a community of Frogsong fans. Now that I have this blog, I'm finally sitting down and committing myself to actually reflecting on this game before the year ends, and I'm going to be honest.

I'm going to reflect a little bit on the development of the game. I'm going to reflect on how it's done in the one and a half years since launch. I'm going to reflect a bit on how I've been feeling about it all. 

Before I go much further, I want to clarify a few things about this post: I will be casually bringing up spoilers for Frogsong. I will talk about feelings that are sometimes very negative or sad. Ideally this will end up being more bittersweet than a downer, but I'm going to bring up some not so happy things. It's going to be long and a little bit disorganized, too. There's a lot in my head I need to get out, and I'm going to be mostly writing this pretty improvisationally.

We've got that all cleared up? Okay, cool. Let's get started then.

For those who are somehow here but don't know, Frogsong is a game about a little frog trying to prove they can be a hero, while a tyrannical empire is attempting to expand their empire. It was my first "real" game, and by that I mean it's my first game that isn't either a crappy 10 minute long RPG Maker project or a shitpost I made in like 5 hours in Clickteam Fusion. It certainly wasn't my first idea for a proper game, but it's the one that grabbed my attention long enough for me to decide to actually make it. 

The idea first began formulating towards the end of high school. It's really difficult to wrap my head around that fact. I feel like I've been half a dozen different people since that very first iteration. I'm 25 now. Even the game is wildly different from the initial giant sprawling BOTW-inspired open world 3D adventure I pictured (a change that is honestly for the better, in a million ways). I experimented a bit in Unreal Engine early on before deciding 2D would be way easier and better suited to my skills.

Frogsong was largely a vehicle for storytelling, funny character interactions, and worldbuilding. It was a hobby project. I just wanted to make a game for fun. I had this really cool idea in my head that I just had to get out there. There were features I cut really early on due to a lack of programming knowledge - for example, the bug enemies you fight were going to drop bug meat that you would cook with plants and berries and spices and stuff to make healing items. Every time I think about this I feel a pinch of regret. It would make so much sense for you to eat bug meat, and cooking food would have been so cute! It was also going to have gameplay a bit closer to the Mario & Luigi series, where you can jump and there'd be a bit of platforming while navigating the world. I can easily wrap my head around how to do something like that now, but I couldn't figure it out, so I cut it very early on. This is part of why I think the main gameplay isn't very engaging. I never thought of any new mechanics to fill in the gap that left. I wasn't too pressed to make anything amazing, though. It was a hobby project and I had maybe a hundred followers on Tumblr at the time. I figured maybe like 12 people would play the game and I'd move on to my next project, and eventually get a job in the animation industry (thank fucking god I didn't go down that path though).

Then, one day, while in a Discord server for a horror game jam I was joining, somebody invited me to a Discord server for "Wholesome Games," saying the cute froggy game I posted about occasionally looked like a good fit for that community. It was one of those moments that just seems like a random little thing at the time, but in retrospect I can't even imagine where I would be right now if that hadn't happened.

Plenty of people have already expressed their qualms with Wholesome Games. I'm not going to get into all that here. At the time, this was a small little community of people who liked cute, heartfelt games. Frogsong immediately fit in.

I tried doing a Kickstarter really early on and failed miserably. Horribly. Like, 3% of the funding goal horribly. This is largely due to the fact that I showed the game off way too early and the trailer was kind of garbage and I'm frankly impressed anyone tried giving me money for this thing. I dug my heels in and kept working.

During the game's development, in the summer of 2019, I started feeling... weird. I started thinking about stuff. In the earliest version of Frogsong, Chorus, the player character, used they/them pronouns in a neutral way, similar to Frisk in Undertale. But as they grew into a proper character, I decided to make them non-binary. Having them be whatever the player felt like didn't feel right anymore. While writing this non-binary character struggling with self doubt and failing to earn the respect of others, I started feeling... a connection. Thoughts I had been repressing or brushing aside started bubbling up more. I did research. I talked to trans friends. I read through posts on Tumblr (note: I do not recommend this last method). After a few months of questioning and reflecting on my feelings, I told somebody "I think I'm non-binary" in September 2019. The game started to take on a bit of a trans lens and became a bit more personal at that point.

And then COVID happened.

I had made a lot of progress on the game by early 2020. The organizers of Wholesome Games wanted to put together a little community showcase to bring a bit of joy to people during the rough early pandemic days. I applied to be a part of this showcase, and wasn't surprised when I was accepted. After all, it was just a little video being put together by some friends. I eagerly waited for the showcase, and as it approached, publications started writing about it. People were talking. It dawned on everyone this was going to be much larger than anyone originally anticipated - though nobody could have predicted what it's turned into. Frogsong was only in the first Wholesome Direct for 12 seconds, but it was a moment that stands out in my mind so clearly. From that point on, my little hobby projected started gathering more and more attention. The little community around it grew to be just big enough for me to pull off another Kickstarter, launched alongside the next Wholesome Direct in 2021. I actually had funding now! 

I hired a couple amazing people to help out with the game. Scruffy, who makes incredible videos on YouTube about sound design and music in games, joined to help with the music. Joanna Blackhart, who's work I noticed in Ikenfell, joined to help make the game more accessible. Towards the end of development, they even helped edit the game's dialogue with me in big group meetings. Did you know the Snnikt has like 20 lines of cut dialogue??? A lot of changes were made for the better.

I went through a lot during the game's development. A lot. I initially worked on the game from chapter to chapter, but had to momentarily put Chapter 4 on hold because my grandmother passed and the content of the chapter was far too painful to work on at the time. I started developing wrist pain that's gotten better but likely will never go away. A million other things happened. I grew and changed so much, and Frogsong did too. 

I went to PAX West in 2022 shortly after I quit my part time job to focus on Frogsong full time, with the intention that once the game was out I'd have money to go to animation school. It was a very last minute decision - I bought the tickets 3 days before the event. I don't know why or what it was, but I just felt this pull like I had to go. While there, I met and socialized with several indie game developers, some of which were huge inspirations to me and some whose work I had honestly never heard of before then but they were great people and a blast to hang out with. I met some people I vaguely knew online who I ended up growing to be friends with. I wore my Frogsong shirt... and like a dozen different people ended up recognizing it. That's when it hit me this was all really happening. People knew my game. It's one thing to see numbers on a website, but it's whole different story when complete strangers walk up to you and ask where you got that cool Frogsong shirt. 

People were shocked I was only 22. Most of these developers were in their early 30s. I told some developers that Frogsong had 30,000 wishlists on Steam, and they were shocked and impressed. I was told the game was going to be a huge success, especially with numbers like that. 

I went to PAX with the intention of seeing cool games and meeting developers who had inspired me. I left with a whirlwind of emotions, realizing that I was making a video game that was going to sell well enough to live off of for a bit. I'd have a budget to work on a new game and keep doing this. Fuck the animation industry, I didn't need to work for a random company when I could make a career off my own work! 

As we entered 2023, we planned on a surprise release during the Wholesome Direct 2023, hoping the marketing boost would help push the game even further. As June 10th, release day, drew closer, I was busy putting finishing touches on my wonderful little game. What started as a simple hobby project I expected a dozen people to play had grown into the start of my dream career. I don't know how I managed to sleep the night before, but that morning, the Direct began, and I finally clicked the launch button on Steam.

The game was out. I had finally finished a major, multi-year project for the first time in my life, and it was going to be the start of a career where I got to keep making cool things.

Based on what other developers had told me, I anticipated somewhere between 1 to 2 thousand copies to sell on day one. I went out and ate a bunch of dumplings in celebration of launch, and came home that evening to check the numbers.

If it wasn't clear by my disclaimer at the start of this post, it's time for the other shoe to drop.

It sold 400. Not 4000. Not 400,000. 400. For those who don't know, the best sales day of a game by far is day one, outside of weird freak scenarios like Among Us. More copies sell within the first month than any other month, and the majority of that is on day one. 400 wasn't enough. I sat there at the end of day one, the day I was supposed to be celebrating, trying to not panic. Surely it wouldn't drop off as quickly as anticipated. The surprise launch must mean people weren't ready for it and are going to get it soon! It was going to be fine!

Sales didn't improve. The game is sitting below a third of the average Steam wishlist conversion rate. It currently has over 50,000 wishlists and less than 5000 copies have sold. I spent the next couple months patching bugs that slipped past me and trying to stop being too burnt out to touch the Switch port. When I finally got started on it, I had a miserable time. It took me 4 months of some of the most miserable technical work I've done, fixing bizarre bugs and dealing with weird optimizations, the whole time feeling not very hopeful about the next launch. During the miserable period between the Steam launch and the Switch launch, I grew frustrated with Frogsong. I stopped watching people stream it. I stopped wanting to think about it, but I had to. I just wanted it to be over. I struggled to market it during this period due to a mix of these feelings and likely some burn out. Making a game is exhausting. Making a game you've put your whole fucking heart and soul into and been primed to expect to sell well enough to live comfortably for a couple years only for it to not is both exhausting and demoralizing.

The Switch launch was slightly worse than Steam, but I had always expected that. It was still a nice boost, and was the only reason I was able to keep going full time for a while. At this point, I just wanted to get the art book finished so I could never touch anything to do with the game again. Drawing this art to celebrate the Switch launch was... hard. It's depressing to say, but I didn't want to draw these characters.

What went wrong? Well... probably a lot.

Read any indie dev's post-mortem about their game that failed and almost every time they'll blame marketing, and, yes, god, marketing is hard. Marketing feels bad. I just want to make video games and weird little characters. I don't want to advertise. Nobody likes ads. I feel gross trying too hard to market. So I definitely could have done better there. I didn't send out press copies of the game before launch because I was for some reason scared that press would leak the surprise release of this game nobody really cared about. I could have posted more. I could have sent more Steam keys to streamers. There's a lot I could have done better.

But I'm not going to pretend marketing was the only problem here, or even the biggest problem here. I think the biggest issue is something I might not have been able to avoid due to circumstances - the gameplay isn't particularly fun??? Remember how I said it was primarily a vehicle for storytelling, funny character interactions, and worldbuilding? Yeah, it doesn't matter how good your story is if your gameplay is mediocre. Strip away Undertale's amazing character writing, and the battle system is still decently fun. There's neat puzzles if you're into that sort of thing. Frogsong's gameplay is walk to where the characters are and sometimes fight enemies that don't really pose much of a threat. I already outlined the reasons for this: it started as a hobby project I expected nobody to care about, and I was intimidated by my lack of programming knowledge. Really, when the game started getting attention, I probably should have redone the gameplay from the ground up, but I'm somebody who hates redoing things. I should have at the very least made the player character feel good to move around. I didn't iterate on the base systems. I barely twisted the gameplay. Being my first game, I also barely knew what good game design was other than basic intuition and gut feelings from having played games myself. I felt this later in development. I worried about the gameplay, but I was so far in by the time I realized something was wrong that actually making some major fixes to it would have delayed the game by another year or two. Game development is a medium that's progressively harder and/or more time consuming to make big changes to the further you get into a project. 

Frogsong simply wasn't a game that was very fun if you stripped away the characters. I didn't make a game people would be excited to tell their friends about. I guess that ties back into marketing a bit - word of mouth is the best form of advertising by far, and it's something you have no control of. If you aren't making something people want to recommend to their friends, you aren't going to get any word of mouth. 

Was the price too high? Maybe? If the price was a third of what it is, would four times as many people play it? Is that why wishlist conversion rates have been abysmal? I have no way of knowing, but I don't want to contribute to the devaluing of indie games that's occurred over the years. You'd have to sell a lot of copies of a $5 game to make a living for 3 or 4 years. Hell, even $15 you need to sell a shit load. $15 is still cheap as hell for a game, and I've heard if nobody's complaining about your price you're charging too low. I've chosen to take those words to heart. I'll probably be charging $20 for my next game.

Lastly, the most common game marketing advice these days it to send your game to streamers. That doesn't really work when your game is a fairly linear story-based game. Why play the game when you just saw your favourite internet personality do it? You'll probably just see the same stuff again. If anything, having people stream the game very well may have actually hurt sales. I was more than one person say something to the effect of "this game is awesome, I'd buy it but I watched JoCat stream it."

I finally got the Frogsong art book out last month. I've sold 13 copies. If people hadn't already preordered it on Kickstarter it would have been a complete waste of time, financially speaking.

But...

Well, for starters, these numbers are great for a first time commercial dev, if we're being honest. Even though they were far below what I was expecting and they aren't nearly enough to keep going, most first time devs don't even recoup the $100 Steam fee.

And let's ignore finances and good game design for a second. I made a fucking video game. That's something I've wanted to do since I was a little kid. This was literally a childhood dream come true. I won't lie, I told a pretty fire story too if I say so myself.

I made a story and a world I'm proud of. The characters grew to be so much better than my initial vision. And again, I finished a giant project for the first time ever. I've dropped so many big projects over my life. Of course the gameplay is lacking, it was my first time making anything in Unity. When a game dev I respected tried the game and pointed out the flaws in the gameplay shortly before launch, these were all flaws I was aware of at that point. It felt validating. It meant I was right about the flaws. I learned and knew what I was doing now. Every flaw in Frogsong's gameplay, big and small, is something I learned from. If you were to try out my new secret game I've been working on, oh baby, you'd be able to tell how much I've improved. So many people told me that despite the flaws in the gameplay, the story and characters were engaging enough to stick with it. Imagine what I'm fucking capable of now that I can make an actually fun game.

While working on Frogsong I met and worked with so many amazing people, including people whose work inspired me. That is rare. I am so incredibly lucky for this. 

And people enjoyed it even if it was nothing fantastic. Sure, it's nobody's favourite game, but it has really positive reviews on Steam. I watched somewhat large streamers play the game and saw their chat boxes explode into rainbow hearts and pogs when Chorus says they're non-binary. I've watched people on stream laugh at jokes and cry at emotional story beats. I never get tired of watching people jump from Bufo's funeral to the dream sequence. I never get tired of people seeing Annora's house in the Swamp of Glune. I never get tired of seeing people losing their minds over the Snnikt's fucked up form. I've also realized... I don't care that much about actually watching strangers play the game. It's so much more fulfilling to see friends play it.

Not too long ago, I watched a new good friend of mine play through the whole thing. It had been a long time since I watched anyone play it, and the whole time I kept thinking to myself... "wait, this story kind of rocks???" Seeing this friend engage with the world and appreciate so many little details and laugh at the jokes and theorize about the radio tower in the background and freak out during Chorus's dream and marvel at Annora's house and ponder what the Snnikt is going to "really" be and be excited about traveling through the factory that had been in the background this whole time and then be hyped as hell when it turns out that the Snnikt really is just a fucking space demon or something that shoots giant lasers and meteors and slime spikes at you and cheer in the epilogue when Rana and Basalt become girlfriends... after over a year of the game being out, I remembered why I loved this game to begin with. I remembered why I wanted to make this game. I remembered that I made something special. I cried watching the credits roll.

People have drawn incredible fan art. It's not much, but it is there. A couple people have even made Frogsong OCs. Some people sent me pictures of frogbuns they made after I posted the recipe for the item in the game. I'm still obsessed with this artist who drew the minor ferryman frog NPC as a hot buff dude. 

I think sometimes about the comment I saw once where someone said they recently realized they were non-binary and they had been thinking of a new name, and that "Chorus" was now a contender. I have no clue who that person is or what name they chose, but just the fact that they considered naming themself after a character of mine still boggles my mind.

Some people have asked for a sequel or a prequel or some sort of spin off. The fact that people are asking for more is amazing. I'd be lying if I said there wasn't more I wanted to explore in the world of Frogsong. There's more stories I want to tell there, and there's even ideas and characters and settings that have bounced around in my head... but I can't promise anything right now. I'm pretty frogged out, and honestly making a direct follow up to a game that didn't do fantastically is a terrible financial decision. Maybe there will be more one day, though.

It's been so so hard decoupling my feelings on how it did financially from my feelings on it as a piece of art. They don't tell you that that's going to happen when you get into this and your game doesn't blow up. Hell, I can imagine blowing up would have also led to some negative feelings of pressure and stuff. Putting your soul into a project and letting a bunch of strangers put their hands all over it is terrifying. 

I won't lie, it's been a difficult few months. Earlier this year, due to a rough series of circumstances (my financial situation being a major part), I had to move back to my hometown and back in with my parents after living in Vancouver for a year. It probably won't come as a surprise if you've played Frogsong to hear that I hate my hometown and feel like I don't belong here. It's a pretty right-leaning oilfield town, I'm just not the kind of person this town is meant for. It's been difficult not feeling even worse about the sales stuff given the fact that my life is currently notably more miserable. I don't want to be living with my parents still!!! I do really wish the game had done better, but it is what it is at this point.

I've been working on a new game, and I've had mixed feelings working on it. I've been keeping it a secret for now because I'm kinda desperate to make a big splash when it's announced rather than showing off early crappy alpha footage like I did with Frogsong. I'm working towards having enough done to do a good announcement trailer and have some stuff to post for a bit. It's been hard, though, keeping it under wraps. I want so badly to talk about it. It's been so much fun learning from the above-mentioned mistakes and work on a game that's way better. It's also been difficult thinking about the future of this game. Money is running out and sales are dropping. I'll be lucky if I make $5,000 on Frogsong next year. I'm going to have to do a Kickstarter, and I'm planning on doing some smaller, faster, cheaper games alongside my multi-year games to help supplement my income. Games that are a bit more widely marketable, as gross as it feels to say. But in order for these little games and the Kickstarter to succeed, I need an audience, and I've basically had to rebuild that twice ever since Twitter turned to shit and Cohost shut down. I don't have access to as many people as I used to.

Back in August, I went back to Vancouver for a bit for the first Vancouver Game Garden to show off a demo of this secret unannounced game. Reception to Frogsong's first alpha demo was pretty lukewarm, and for some reason I didn't take the right lessons away from that, so I wanted to get this game into the hands of strangers before there was even a public announcement so I could see what problems existed. To my surprise, the response was really really positive. People loved the movement and the combat. They responded well what little bits of character interactions I had. There was a puzzle at one point that was a joy to watch people slowly piece together. I loved watching people gradually figure out a strategy for fighting the boss, everyone's approach varying slightly. One of the creators of Celeste complimented the dash in the game. I've become a lot more motivated to work on this game now, knowing that people are going to like it. I really think it's going to be something special. I just need to be able to reach people.

I haven't been able to stop worrying about money for the past 18 months. I worry about the future of my next game. I don't know how long I can keep trying to make game development work as a job.

I don't have much choice but to take it one step at a time, though. I'm a million steps above where I was when I started Frogsong, and I made that work.

I'm going to find a way to make this next one work too.

Thank you for playing.