Fonze

Hey all, it's been a little while! I hope everybody has been well since I was last active here *hugs* I figured I'd make a blog post rambling and sharing one of the things I've been up to lately.

I recently have been learning to make maps for a fun little platformer called Frog Hop (made by an indie dev that also made a very fun metroidvania I speedrun now), where you play as a 🐸 doing frog things such as hopping, jumping, and using your tongue as a weapon. It's very similar to Mario but if frog instead. You move slower on the ground than in the air, so you want to hop a lot, and there are triggers, switches, conveyor belts, movable blocks, little nodes you can lick to bounce/swing/slingshot off of, difficulty flags for objects (similar to doom), objects can be 'tied' with other objects to move/etc with them, etc. There are also no limits on map size, number of maps per world (level), complexity, object limit, and lots of other stuff. Needless to say, lots of freedom in map design and I like that.

I've always liked watching kaizo (and non-kaizo) mario hack videos but I've never made maps for a platformer before so it's been a fun learning experience so far! I just finished my third map minus some small finishing touches, so I'm starting to figure some things out and have some tricks I've picked up on, but I also know I'm only scratching the surface and have so much more to learn. Anyway, rambling aside, here are some screenies and... more light ramblings!

Myfirstfroghopmap.wad.world: Jungle Jumpies

An idea of how much is shown on the screen in game:

Other than chosing a color palate, I have no idea how to do aesthetics for 2d maps, or for doom maps either 🤓 so eventually I gave up and tried to make it look nice in the editor since that's what I was looking at the whole time. I'm not sure how well it translates over to the gameplay side of things but I'm hoping I keep it not so busy that it isn't clear what is a background block and what is a foreground block. I wanted something kaizo-light, small, and simple for my first map (all the nodes do different things depending on their color) and I think this did okay for that. It is fairly easy with a couple tricky spots, tons of checkpoints because yes please and even has a little speedrun skip accidentally built in at the start lol. For my next maps, I took the luxury of being able to place checkpoints everywhere and totally neglected it 🙃

My second map: Frantic Fugues

I wanted at first to make a more traditional kaizo-ish level with bouncing on enemies and stuffs in 3 parts, with this being the first one. For this, I started experimenting with making diverging paths so each would lead to a different door I could use to tie into a separate map for each difficulty, so I wouldn't have any problems with tiles being immovable between them. I also wanted to make easy difficulty an autoscroller if the player wanted it to be, and in the process quite liked the interaction with one of the enemies that flies off horizontally at a fast speed and having the player go that same speed just in front of them, like a chase scene, which made this map very long/big. I also made a 2nd, more casual way to play the map on each difficulty in case the player wants to explororize and doesn't want to jump on enemies' heads the whole time. That influenced heavily the rest of the design for medium and hard and thus this map is not at all the kaizo thing I had originally envisioned, but instead an easy-going, layered experienced that encourages players to make their own fun and I think that's pretty cool! Even if I didn't place any checkpoints in the map 😈

On a dev note, I made a large-scale, quite ugly grid tile layer to use during this map to make lining up/measuring jumps and distance easier, especially while in game, which helped a ton, and I did different things with the aesthetics, trying to envision some light source from the top right. Jury's still out on that one but given there was so much I think it ties itself together(?); it was cool to try. I also made a really silly short story for it involving aliens because why not 🤪

Here's a video to show what it looks like in game:

My third map: Red Velvet Cake Land 

This one is kinda the 2nd part to go with the previous map. I'm not sure if I'll stitch them together or not at this point given the difficulty spike between them but for now with this being standalone I made starting and ending maps to match the previous and next ones. I also made it so each difficulty level gets moved to its own separate map, so I have total freedom to tune them, cut parts out, add stuff in, etc, as I wish. I really liked the color palate I chose for this map, largely inspired by doom's red turning brown as it gets darker, and it made me think of red velvet cake. But you can't have cake without icing and it took a while to figure out how to get the icing right. Eventually I found out that in Tiled, you can give tile layers offsets, so I made a couple new tile layers and gave them offsets, which allowed me to make the phat icing look without it looking super blocky like the clouds in the previous map. I didn't go crazy with lighting in this map and I def could have done more with the icing to really smooth things out since I made the 2 offset layers at different times and I could prolly do better with more foresight going into it, but I think the effect and overall aesthetics turned out pretty decent! This map makes me hungry now and I like that 🤤

I got the kaizo feeling down more for this one which seems to transfer well to this game. Controls are tight and responsive so it meshes well and there is a lot of room for creativity in map design and object/player interactions. I put in a setup early on where you guide an enemy projectile through a set of doors by jumping alternating on 2 big crabs 3 times each while hitting a green switch above/between them each time you pass it in order to cycle open the doors below you which let that projectile pass through so you can bounce on it on the other side to reach the next area, which is very much something I saw in a mario hack somewhere, so little homage there.

Anyway, thought these would be fun to share here since I haven't posted in a while and this community has so many mappers in it; it would be cool to hear ppl's opinions! If there's interest, I'll post more level pics as I make them 🐸