Frog Fractions

Frog Fractions
Developer(s)	Twinbeard Studios
Platform(s)	Adobe Flash[1]
Release date(s)	October 25, 2012[2]
Mode(s)	Single-player

Frog Fractions is a 2012 browser game developed by Twinbeard Studios, a company composed primarily of founder Jim Crawford.^[3] The game, released on October 25, 2012,^[2] has been described as a spoof of the edutainment game genre. In the game, the player begins by controlling a frog to eat bugs and defend fruit. Later on, the player may spend points on upgrades to improve their frog's abilities.^[4] The game does not actually teach the player about fractions;^[5] the player's score is given in fractions, but no knowledge of them is necessary to play.

Gameplay

The game's first level. The player controls the frog, which rides a flying dragon, and must dodge the projectiles fired by attacking insects.

Frog Fractions begins with a frog sitting on a lily pad. The player controls the frog, and must use its tongue to attack insects, while collecting and protecting fruit. The game later introduces upgrades that the player may purchase, including lock-on targeting, a cybernetic brain, and a flying dragon.^[3] When the player collects enough fruit, they can buy a warp drive, which lets them ride their dragon through an asteroid field to Bug Mars, where the player then battles an alien robot squid. The player is then sent to Bug Court, where they sign their work visa. The player then travels under the water below Bug Mars, while listening to a narrated history of the creation of boxing. At the end of the maze, the player activates a spaceship, and must complete a text adventure game to return to Bug Mars, where the game appears to end (actually fake credits). Upon returning, the player runs for president in a music simulator game. Regardless of how well they perform, they succeed in being elected president, and must complete a business simulator manufacturing bug pornography to unlock further upgrades. Once all required upgrades are collected the game concludes.^[5] The game takes about one hour to complete.^[1]

Development

Crawford originally created Frog Fractions to entertain his friends, and to see their reactions when they first played it. Later on, he felt that with the indie genre taking off, Frog Fractions was taken more seriously among gamers. Crawford noted that although critics often described the game as a satire on old educational games, he never intentionally developed Frog Fractions with that in mind. Instead, Crawford explained that Frog Fractions had an educational theme because of the name's alliteration, and because he considered educational games a part of his youth.^[6]

Originally, Frog Fractions included tutorials to teach the player how to progress through the game. However, after Crawford asked his friend Tim Ambrogi to play test the game, Ambrogi stated that he did not want to read any of the informational popups that appeared throughout the game because he was too busy focusing on the gameplay.^[1] Crawford added transitions that made the game feel like a "dream-like progression", which he believed would better appeal to players. For transitions in the game's latter half, Crawford wanted the transitions to entertain players more, rather than attempt to make any sense of the game's story. PC World complimented Frog Fractions for using the transitions to draw connections between each scene to add a feeling of consistency, despite the often strange transitions that take place.^[6]

In order to make money from Frog Fractions, Crawford first sold the game's soundtrack, with part of the proceeds going to the game's music team.^[6] He later decided to sell T-shirts containing jokes from the game in order to benefit its art team.^[1][6] While developing Frog Fractions, Crawford said that he came up with a lot of other video game ideas, but he then realized that he could implement them immediately into Frog Fractions rather than start a new project, due to the game's unpredictable nature.^[6]

Release

Crawford released Frog Fractions earlier than he wanted, when he sent an incomplete version to the 2013 Independent Games Festival^[1] as a "Main Competition Entrant"^[7] but was told that he needed to increase the game's popularity before it would be accepted. Subsequently, he let Gamasutra editor and popular Twitter user Brandon Sheffield play the game, who enjoyed it so much that he shared it with his more than 3,000 Twitter followers. Within a day, tens of thousands of people had played the game.^[1]

After the game's release, players began requesting new features, such as more updates, a high definition version for tablets and smartphones, and a sequel. Crawford is interested in developing a high definition version in which he could include some leftover ideas, but admits that he is unsure if this will ever materialize. He notes that he created Frog Fractions to gain visibility for himself rather than to profit from it.^[1] Frog Fractions has been described as being possibly the "greatest game of all time" by Rock Paper Shotgun, who credit the wild range of gameplay mechanics.^[4] It has also been called "the most deranged thing you'll play this year" by Eurogamer,^[3] and "either the best or worst piece of math edu-tainment in history" by the Gameological Society.^[5] The game won Giant Bomb's "URL of the Year" award for 2012.^[8] In March 2014, Twinbeard launched a Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund the development of a sequel entitled Frog Fractions 2.^[9]

Sequel

Frog Fractions 2 is a sequel to the free, browser-based game Frog Fractions, which was developed by the game studio Twinbeard, founded by Jim Crawford. In the style of the original, Frog Fractions 2 is intended to have hidden elements that will reveal themselves to careful players.^[10] Crawford stated that Frog Fractions 2 would be released publicly without any announcement from himself or Twinbeard, and it will be the players' job to find it.^[10] The lead-up to discovering the game is the subject of a multiple-year ARG, or Alternate Reality Game, and the subject of much media attention.^{[10][11][12][13]} Eventually, the game will be available as a downloadable standalone program for Windows, OS X, and Linux.^[10]

Funding and development

The potential future existence of Frog Fractions 2 was announced as part of a Kickstarter campaign. The campaign was started in March 2014 and was funded and complete on April 11, 2014, exceeding its original goal of $60,000, for a total funded amount of $72,107 with 2,571 backers.

A video accompanying the Kickstarter page held a series of clues that led interested participants to find out more information about where Frog Fractions 2 would eventually appear on the internet. These clues have been discussed and analyzed in online forums, and there have been a few attempts to summarize early puzzle in the ARG. Although the ARG is a critical part of the eventual revelation of Frog Fractions 2's release, it is a large, collaborative effort to solve the puzzles written for it, and is functionally a different game than the downloadable version promised in the Kickstarter campaign.

References

External links

• Frog Fractions
• Boxing narration script