Alert: It's basically impossible to discuss this game and its impending sequel without spoilers. Consider yourself warned.
How do you deceive an audience when they're expecting your deception? That's the challenge facing indie game developer Jim Crawford as he plans a sequel to his bizarre, hilarious browser game Frog Fractions.
Frog Fractions began as a joke taken too far–so far that it became funny again.
It all began when Rachel Sala, the game's lead artist, came to Crawford in the fall of 2011 with some animations she had been working on. The idea was to make an edutainment game inspired by Atari's classic arcade game Missile Command. Instead of defending against enemy nukes raining down on your cities, you'd play as a frog protecting his fruit from a swarm of flies. Somewhere in there, you'd learn about fractions.
It was a tongue-in-cheek parody of edutainment games, more about fun than learning. But it wasn't fun, either.
"I had made all these gameplay experiments, like different control schemes," Crawford, who lives in Oakland, California, said. "They were all fun for about 30 seconds, but you wouldn't want to sit and play this game for an hour. Or even for 10 minutes."
In one attempt to salvage the project, Crawford took all the control schemes he'd iterated and put them in a single build, allowing the player to switch gameplay modes via a role-playing style upgrade system. Some upgrades were throwaway jokes that effectively did nothing; others changed the game completely. You could add a chain lightning effect to your frog's tongue, or gain the ability to move around the screen, which caused the bugs to start firing a hail of bullets.
Showing the game to friends, Crawford found they all had more ideas to add. How about a Dance Dance Revolution rhythm game? An amphibian courtroom drama in the style of Phoenix Wright? A classic text adventure?
"I think everybody has those conversations," Crawford said, "but really the only thing that made Frog Fractions exist–the one secret to it–is I just sat down and actually did all those things my friends thought would be cool."
Once you found the secret of getting out of the initial Missile Command-style amphibian math level, the game spiraled into an insane mashup of genres and mechanics, permeated with the same oddball humor and references to classic games, chronicling a frog's unlikely journey across the galaxy.
What made Frog Fractions special was the sense of discovery. You never knew what you'd be doing next, and it was thrilling to learn how much this seemingly simplistic, deceptively boring game hid beneath the surface.
Crawford and his team finally had a fun game on their hands. Crawford included a pop-up tutorial describing how each of the game's upgrades would change the experience. He worried that players, if not given a hint that Frog Fractions offered something more than a lame edutainment game about basic math, wouldn't play long enough to discover the real experience.
"I had no trust that anybody would ever find anything," Crawford said. "Looking back on it, I had not yet discovered the point of Frog Fractions."
Everything changed, he said, the day he showed the game to his childhood friend, game programmer Tim Ambrogi. He was playing Frog Fractions, but skipping all the tutorial text. For half an hour, Crawford watched helplessly and with growing frustration as Ambrogi dutifully licked bugs on the surface of the pond, oblivious to the secrets being spelled out in the tutorial.
"I was pulling my hair out thinking, 'Dude, just read the popup text!'" Crawford said.
But when Ambrogi finally discovered Frog Fractions' secret on his own, he was blown away by the discovery. This is magical, he told Crawford, like finding out you could burn bushes to reveal hidden pathways in the original The Legend of Zelda, in the days when players were left to their own devices to figure those things out.
"That was, I think, the turning point in the development of the first game, and frankly of my life," Crawford said. "That was when I realized I could do something really special. That I could give people this experience of uncovering a truly unexpected, mysterious thing."
Frog Fractions 2 Isn't Frog Fractions 2
"Back in the '80s, when I grew up playing games, every game was a mystery," Crawford said. "Weird things would just happen, things that you felt like you would never understand. And you would tell people about it at school and they would go home and try to replicate it. There was all this community engagement, to take a term from marketing, and every game got that for free."
This is something largely missing from modern gaming. We live in an age of spoilers. Between strategy guides, preview coverage, forums detailing a game's secrets, and many other sources, it's nearly impossible to have a purely organic experience of discovery. Even if you want to, avoiding spoilers is hard work.
"The human mind wants to know, and it takes the easiest path forward no matter what it is," Crawford said. "The human mind isn't very good at denying itself things that it wants immediately, even though it probably would enjoy them more if it did."
This meant the biggest challenge facing Crawford as he pondered a Frog Fractions sequel was having to recreate the joy of discovering the first game. He always knew–even immediately after Frog Fractions was released–that he would be able to build another roller-coaster adventure of myriad genres. It was finding a way for that game to even have a possibility of being surprising to players that has taken him a year and a half.
Crawford couldn't very well call it Frog Fractions 2, as that alone would give away the surprise. But if he wanted the money to create a bigger, better game, he'd have to be candid about its development.
So there's a Kickstarter, ending on April 9, for Frog Fractions 2. Instead of a browser game, it'll be a downloadable standalone program for PC, Mac and Linux. As is usual with gaming Kickstarters, Crawford says he'll send copies to those who back the project.
But he won't send them immediately.
When the sequel is complete, it won't be called Frog Fractions 2 and it won't even say that it was developed by Crawford or Twinbeard, his studio. Instead, it will slip quietly onto the Steam distribution service. Maybe it'll be a unicorn-themed typing tutor, or a tiger-based spelling bee. More likely, it won't be an edutainment game at all.
It'll hide in plain sight, waiting for someone to download it and play it long enough to figure out its secret. Once "the jig is up"–once word spreads around the digital schoolyard about an unassuming game on Steam that's the next Frog Fractions–Crawford says he'll go public and mail rewards to his Kickstarter backers.
A clever idea; perhaps too clever by half. While Kickstarter campaigns usually promise a great deal of transparency and insight into the development process, Crawford's campaign cannot even discuss his ideas for the game.
Kickstarter already requires a large degree of trust, one that some gamers are still coming to terms with. But Crawford's takes that trust to an entirely different level. He jokes about this: The campaign, he says, is tantamount to looking at the audience, holding out his hands, and saying: "C'monnnn."
As of today, Frog Fractions 2 remains $10,000 short of its modest $60,000 goal. Should it succeed, Crawford says he will release the game sometime next year, hoping players find it by chance, uncover its secrets and spread the word. Just as they did in the old days.
Crawford says he intends to hide many more secrets within the new game. It will still be fairly easy, so to speak, to progress without much effort–there will be no situation where you can really fail or lose. But there will be much more to it for those who go poking around, even after the big reveal.
"Like Frog Fractions," Crawford said, "the 'more to it' is probably going to be the other 90 percent of the game."
