- Devlog #12 - A Tale Of Optimization - 10 August 2026
We've recently started working on Mac support for Croakwood. While there's still some work left to do it's generally working now, but the performance initially wasn't quite as good as we were hoping. So we investigated what's going on and here's the story of what we found :)When rendering a game, the CPU needs to tell the GPU what it's supposed to draw, so it needs to send a long list of instructions to the graphics card that say which material you want to use for drawing and what mesh you want to draw. So it's something roughly like this: "I want to draw something that looks like stone; I want to draw the round_stone mesh; I want to draw something that looks like stone; I want to draw another round_stone mesh somewhere else; I want to draw something that looks like stone; I want to draw the angular_stone mesh; I want to draw something that looks like wood; etc".Having to do this for ev…
- Early Access Release Window & Gameplay Trailer - 6 June 2026
We're on track to release Croakwood into Early Access this winter!Check out our new trailer that's giving a look at lots of new things:What is Early Access?Early Access means the game is available to buy and play while it's still being actively developed. The game regularly receives free updates with the newest completed features and content.Why Early Access?We think that we are able to make a better game by working together with our community. We experienced this with Parkitect, where the feedback we received has been incredibly helpful to make a bigger and better game than we would have been able to do on our own. While Croakwood has the benefit of so many of the lessons that were gained through that process, it is a very different game that both leans on our strengths and pushes into new territory for our small, but mighty team.We have been developing this game for many years accordi…
- Devlog #11 - World Design - 1 June 2026
Hey! Don't forget to check out Wholesome Direct this Saturday :)This month we made a lot of progress in how our game world is put together and designed. The way our game world works is a bit like a puzzle. We have individual pieces that we design by hand, and then the game automatically pieces them together to create the world. We can rotate pieces, randomize where the connection points are and add some random content into the pieces for some additional variety. This way we can create a unique world for every player while still having a lot of manual control over the design of the pieces to make them look beautiful and interesting.Here's what our editor for these pieces looks like:We can add terrain to a piece, define where the playable area and possible connections to other pieces are and add decorations. This isn't a tool that's intended for players currently, but eventually it would…
- Devlog #10 - How villagers interact with the world - 5 May 2026
Hey, it's been some time! If you want to know what we've been up to, make sure to check out Wholesome Direct on June 6th :)In one of the previous posts I described how the villagers navigate around the world and in this one I want to talk a bit about how they decide where to go and what to do. Let's take this woodcutter hut for example:There's a tool rack containing an axe, a few trees around the hut and a place where logs can be stored. It's quite obvious what needs to happen here in order to produce logs, but how do we put this into program code? An easy solution would be having some code that says "if you're a woodcutter, here's step by step what you need to do: get the axe, chop a tree, carry the log to storage and put away the axe". This could be done quite easily with a state machine or if you want something a bit more powerful with a behaviour tree.That's how we implemented it in…
- Devlog #9 - Object Placement Tools - 8 December 2025
In preparation for Game Garden and in the time afterwards we've spent some time on polishing how placing objects works.Placing objects is one of the main things you do in this game of course, so it needs to feel good and be intuitively understandable. There's a few considerations we have to make for these tools. There are some restrictions we need to make simply due to how the game works, but generally we want to give players a lot of freedom so they can design their town however they want. At the same time we want everything to feel playful and easy to understand, and not like you're using some sort of 3D modeling software. How fast you're able to get to a good looking result is also a very important consideration. We want players to be able to design a full house within a few minutes.One basic tool that helps with this allows you to quickly duplicate any existing object:Oftentimes thi…
- Croakwood at Vancouver Game Garden - 18 September 2025
We're bringing a first demo of Croakwood to Vancouver Game Garden on September 27-28, alongside many other great games from local independent developers.If you happen to be in Vancouver we'd be excited if you come and give it a try! The demo encompasses a slice of roughly the first hour of gameplay with a focus on town building mechanics.The event location is the Roundhouse Community Centre at 181 Roundhouse Mews in Vancouver. Entrance is on September 27 and 28 from 11am to 5pm and is completely free.It's the first time we're showing the game in public, so it'll be very interesting to see what kind of feedback we receive and what works well and what doesn't :)
- Devlog #8 - Movement - 7 July 2025
When we started working on Croakwood, programming the villagers seemed to be relatively straightforward - they just have to walk around in whatever environment the player created for them and interact with certain objects. In that sense they are very similar to the guests in Parkitect and so we thought we could easily apply most of what we had learnt there to Croakwood.This was sort of true, but when we got to the details it turned out to not be quite that easy!It's a fairly big topic so I've split it into two posts; this one is about movement and the next one will be about interactions with objects.The first problem we had to solve was the pathfinding, so figuring out which route the villagers should take to get to their destination (ideally taking more or less the shortest possible path). Initially we thought that, much like the guests in Parkitect, the villagers would mostly stay on…
- Devlog #7 - Rendering - 10 April 2025
This post is about a few different aspects regarding how the game is being rendered. It's mostly technical but I figured it might still be interesting to see behind the scenes a bit. We're using Unity as the engine for this game. A game engine is a piece of software that provides various features for you, such as systems for animations, the UI, or how things get drawn (rendered). This brings a bunch of benefits for game developers - creating all of this yourself is a big non-trivial task, so using an existing engine can save a lot of time. Plus if it's an engine that's already been used by many other games that probably means it comes with many helpful features have been proven to work well. On the other hand, using something that has been created by others to work across a wide variety of games can also mean that despite being adaptable to your needs it's probably not going to be a 100…
- Devlog #6 - Houses - 7 February 2025
A big part of Croakwood is providing cozy little houses that your frog villagers can live and work in, so let's take a look at how the houses work! All of the buildings are created from individual pieces, so every wall, furniture item and decorative object is an individual object that you can place. This is a system that's similar to the one we used in our previous game, Parkitect. We really like that it allows a lot of creative freedom while still ensuring that houses a pretty quick and easy to design due some restrictions on what you can and can't do. Paths, walls and furniture objects are locked to a grid so they always fit together nicely, and to make sure that things the frogs need to interact with are accessible. Purely decorative objects like lamps or potted plants can be placed freely. One somewhat annoying thing with the building pieces in Parkitect were doors and windows. In P…
- Devlog #5 - Water - 12 November 2024
In a game about frogs you kind of need to have water, which means you need to program a water shader. A shader is basically a short program that calculates what color a pixel should receive. To me as a programmer they can be somewhat intimidating to create - you need to write some code that, somehow, produces something that matches a certain artistic vision. Whenever I'm working on a shader I find that oftentimes the result looks terrible for a long time until eventually a tiny change is made and suddenly everything looks great, but figuring out what tiny change is required can be a long process of trying lots of different things. Oftentimes it's also not clear from the start what the artistic vision is, especially when the art style of the rest of the game is still evolving, but you have to start somewhere. So one of our first tests around late 2021 for the water looked like this: We l…
- Devlog #4 - Art Direction - 12 September 2024
In this post our art director and concept artist Marve gives some insights into her thoughts on the setting of the game and some of the influences for the art direction. Mood We decided pretty early on we want to keep the overall style semi-realistic and not wander too far into fantasy. From earlier conversations we referenced story-book like elements a lot, and its still one of our guiding elements in various design choices. The story-book feel is reflected in the vibrant color scheme, stylized light and extra warm shadows, to really emphasize this almost dream-like warm summer day. The perfect time for frogs to be active! Most importantly, there is no human involvement in our world. You wont encounter any stray tin cans or bottle caps. We really wanted to keep the forest and all the natural elements very untouched and wild. In a way the forest is a character on its own. The light won'…
- Devlog #3 - Frogs - 9 August 2024
In a game about building frog towns the frogs are unsurprisingly pretty important. Here's a look at how they developed over time and what we had in mind while working on them. First of all, as with everything else, figuring out their look took some time and we went through some revisions. The first try was a more biologically accurate version with the eyes on the side of the head. When viewed from the front the model looked like a perfectly fine frog, but in game it was a bit weird... Left: first test version. Right: an updated version to fix some of the issues with it (but not quite the final version yet) ...especially when viewed from a more top-down camera, as you'll oftentimes see them in the game: The positioning of the eyes made them look kinda angry from this camera view, so we changed this by moving the eyes more to the front. The head shape was also changed so you're more likel…
- Devlog #2 - Terrain - 8 July 2024
Where do you even start developing a game? There's so many things you need to work on at the same time. A good starting point probably is the terrain and general environment, so let's take a look at how that developed. As with any feature, it starts very simple. Over time we get a better idea for what exactly we need and we keep iterating to improve and expand. Since we knew it would be a grid-based game again our starting point was the Parkitect terrain. The main challenge is that you have to be able to build paths and buildings on the terrain, which means the terrain can't be too bumpy, but we still wanted it to look somewhat smooth and natural. First Croakwood terrain tests, ~early 2022 What we came up with is not too different from Parkitects terrain actually - it's secretly still using the same blocky slopes that work well for putting paths on them, but then we add a bunch more pol…
- Devlog #1 - Hello! - 14 June 2024
Whew! Feels good to finally have this game announced and be able to talk about it 😊 Seeing all the reactions to the announcement trailer was incredibly thrilling, and we're all very happy that people seem to be quite excited about it and sent so many nice comments. You never know - obviously we think this game is cool, but it's very hard to judge if anyone else thinks so as well before actually showing the game. So this is very reassuring! With that, let's continue where the previous blog series left off and properly start the Croakwood devlog. We have been working on this game since late 2020 roughly and still have a lot of work ahead of us before release. So, there's lots of stuff to talk about that's already been done, and then over time we'll catch up with what's going on recently. Obviously we did end up deciding to make a town building game, despite the prototyping attempts chron…
- The makers of Parkitect have a new construction game coming, and it's a froggy colony sim called Croakwood - 8 June 2024
Here's a lovely little surprise in the midst of Summer Game Fest: the makers of the excellent building and management sim Parkitect have been cooking up a little something in secret. Today at the Glitch Future of Play showcase, developer Texel Raptor revealed a new game, and it looks fantastic... Read more.
