This fall, a new contender is hopping into the platforming genre. Croak, the debut title from Woodrunner Games, aims to capture players' attention with its distinct art style and core mechanic. The game features a frog prince as its protagonist, whose sticky tongue serves as the primary tool for navigation and interaction, a concept that has been central to the game's development since its early stages.
Max Petroff, CEO and co-founder of Woodrunner Games, explained that the studio was inspired by a variety of platformers, including hardcore Super Mario World levels and indie darlings like Celeste and Cuphead. The team's goal was to create a precision platformer with a single, well-developed core mechanic, avoiding power-ups to focus on skillful execution. "We wanted to have one core mechanic and push it to the maximum," Petroff stated. Accessibility was also a key consideration, with a focus on small puzzles and immediate progression to prevent frustration.
Initially, the game explored different art styles, including pixel art and 3D, before settling on its distinctive hand-drawn animation. Tina Nawrocki, a lead animator who previously worked on Cuphead, was instrumental in shaping the game's visual identity. The protagonist was not always a frog; an early iteration featured a duck named Quack. The transition to a frog, and specifically a frog prince, was inspired by the evolving mechanics, particularly the tongue-grapple and a subsequent gobble-and-spit feature.
Nawrocki elaborated on the character design, noting that the frog's round and chubby appearance was somewhat accidental but proved to be a fun design choice, aligning with a story that incorporates food. "Most of the characters in this game are round and chubby," she said. "It was just really fun to draw them that way — I love squashing and stretching. I love Looney Tunes."
The development of Croak involved significant iteration, with art and mechanics influencing each other. Petroff highlighted the iterative process of level design, beginning with simple gray-box prototypes to test new mechanics before refining them. Community feedback from their Discord server has also played a role, leading to the incorporation of ideas like pinball-style launches from environmental elements. "We think of cool ideas, then we just test it out. We're just roughing with black and white, gray-box, no animation at first, just random stuff. Try new mechanics, just real quick, buggy as hell, but is it fun?"
One notable mechanic that emerged from this iterative process is the 'super bonk,' which evolved into a pinball-like propulsion system. This mechanic, requiring precise use of the frog's tongue to recoil and launch, became a key element of the gameplay. The team also focused on adding visual