A Celebration of ‘Frog Smashers’

Off to The Island!

In 2016 or so I was giving a talk about Moosebox (my animated 8bit pixel art pilot set in a videogame world) at a Joburg games festival called ‘Amaze Fest’. The talk went well. Thereafter, I was kindly invited to take part in Game Jam Island; a collaborative game-making project set in Mauritius hosted and organised by Free Lives – a Cape Town games studio that made BroForce. I decided to just say ‘yes’. So off I went to Mauritius. I was super excited, and had no real plans or expectations other than to hopefully make something cool.

I took my laptop, little Wacom drawing tablet, and some clothes. I was jogging pretty much every day at the time and was feeling WELL. At the villa, there were interesting devs/guests from all over the world to jam their games. We all sat around a table and decided what games we were going to jam, and with whom. I had an idea called NPC where you ‘play’ the role of an NPC (non-player character) shopkeeper in another hero’s videogame. It was a bit of an arty idea, an ‘anti-game’. Nobody really got it; some were trying to figure out what the gameplay was and others suggested mechanics, but the whole point and joke is that there was none, lol. So, I put the idea on the backburner. 🥲

Good Seeds, Good Fruit

Ruan Rothmann, whom I had just met, said he’d make something with me. We discussed some initial concepts, he seemed keen to make an idea loosely based on Samurai Gunn and Lethal League. I sketched some ideas, at some point he suggested a game with frogs – they’re derpy and funny-looking. Thanks to Ruan for reminding me, in his own words:

“I wanted a confined environment where you would want to knock the other players into something… so I thought we should do frogs in a blender 🐸 lmao.”

Keef! While the blender never made it into the game 😅 knocking frogs around in a confined environment certainly did. Over the course of a week or two we ended up with a super fun couch co-op game called Frog Smashers, kind of like Super Smash Bros but with frogs and baseball bats. I didn’t know it back then but quickly learned that Ruan’s a flippen’ S-tier gamedev coder who can work incredibly fast. My first exposure in gamedev of working with such a great dev spoiled me a bit.

Playtests would often result in shrieks of laughter from the players. Even though Frog Smashers looks cute, it’s a white-knuckled skill-based game. A major benefit to the villa is that there were always other people around to playtest the game. As a result we iterated quickly on Frog Smashers – adding stuff, testing it out, making adjustments, rinse and repeat. Ruan was a great director and had a clear idea of what was good or bad, and drove the project along well. This was refreshing to me as some of my previous projects at the time suffered from ‘death by committee’ where ideas get second-guessed until they’re not fun anymore. Working on Frog Smashers hardly felt like work, even though we did a LOT of work in a short amount of time. It was satisfying seeing immediate implementation and results. Others contributed music, sfx and level designs. It was peak games collaboration.

Game Jam Island was a treat – the food was amazing, the beach was great, the jammers were awesome, seeing everyone working on their projects was inspiring, and being around for Free Lives’ launch of Genital Jousting was fun. Frog Smashers was eventually released publicly on itch.io to a great reception. I think itch featured the game, it was part of some game festivals locally and abroad, and was played live during a livestream of a Devolver E3 Press Conference. The game currently has over 28k downloads, an average rating of 4.7/5 stars and a lot of great comments.

I always wanted to do more with it, like release it on Nintendo Switch (I think it’d be perfect for the Switch’s classic 2-button controls), but Ruan’s a busy guy – he was also working on his VR game Gorn in Mauritius that went on to be a critical and financial multi-platform success, and continues overseeing projects at Free Lives. We had an initial call with a boutique games manufacturing company about possibly doing a limited run physical cartridge release of Frog Smashers for Nintendo Switch. Ruan suggested we’d need to add a lot more content to the game to warrant a commercial release. We tried working remotely on more Frog Smashers content but it never really panned out, and wasn’t nearly as fun or fast working in situ.

An Unexpected Branch

On a trip up the river on a put-put boat with my Mom and her sister in 2021 I mentioned I’d dig to get more into making videogames. A day or two later I got an email from Ali and Andrew from the US. They were looking to base a game on the Frog Smashers code, and asked if I’d consider working on it. We asked Ruan if we could use the code (the code had been made open source by that point) and he kindly gave us his blessing. I signed on as a contractor to do pixel art for what became a company called Nifty League. We added networked multiplayer, new levels, character tribes and special moves and in short order had a working online multiplayer 2D game called Nifty Smashers where people could customise and pay to mint their NFT Degen character on the blockchain, and immediately play with it against other players’ Degens in Nifty Smashers – a game that ran in a regular web browser. Even by today’s standards it’s impressive tech. I later got rolled into Nifty League as a co-founder, we reworked the game into 3D and it’s now available for free for PC on Steam and on mobile for iOS (via TestFlight) and Android. It’s still in soft launch. I’ve since left Nifty League to focus on my own projects.

Credit Is Due

The reason for writing this post is to celebrate Ruan Rothmann who first had the idea for Frog Smashers, coded it, and didn’t ask for anything in return for us using the code besides proper credit. Given that the NFT/Web3/Crypto space still has an (arguably deserved) bad public rep, it’s maybe a blessing in disguise that the connection between Nifty Smashers and Frog Smashers wasn’t widely cited or immediately evident. Because I’ve left Nifty League and have no more say there (other than holding equity) the least I could do in my personal capacity is honour and credit both Free Lives and Ruan for planting a seed that ended up branching off in some interesting, and – at times – surprisingly successful ways.

Frog Smashers was a great introduction into game development for me. I believe without it, Nifty League wouldn’t have had such a successful NFT sale with its impressive fun and fully-working 2D game ready at launch that was adapted from Frog Smashers code, and I wouldn’t have had a 3-year run in the NFT/Crypto/Gaming space, which in itself has been full of useful lessons.

Here’s raising a bat for Frog Smashers, Free Lives and especially Ruan Rothmann. 🥂🍻🏏🐸
If you’d like to check out Ruan’s other games, here’s his itch.io channel: https://raithza.itch.io

The Future of Frog Smashers

I was recently contacted by someone expressing keen interest in developing Frog Smashers further. Ruan and I have had Discord text chats with the indie dev in question. Given that the Frog Smashers code was made public some time ago (I’m surprised it hasn’t been used by more people tbh) and that the dev and his friends’ intentions seem noble – to release the game for free on Steam – I think it would be cool to see what they do with it, especially if it still retains the Frog Smashers moniker, look and feel, and especially if it becomes a true expansion of the original.