If, like me, you walk through this world forever thinking about Chicken Run, you too may expect at any moment to discover the animal kingdom is actually made up of industrious town-building critters. Though, hopefully they’re not looking to attack and tie us up if ever they’re rumbled. Especially when the towns they’re making look as delightful as those in frog townbuilder Croakwood. I could watch their hustle and bustle all day.
The next game from Parkitect developer Texel Raptor, Croakwood puts you in the role of mayor and town planner for a small community of frogs. Hidden under the canopy of leaves and trees surrounding a small pond, the amphibian settlement would be easy to miss as you stroll through their wood. Especially when you consider the frogs themselves are only a few centimeters tall.
But there’s more going on in this townbuilder than meets the eye, as the developers have been exploring ways to capture the challenge of a demanding management game without introducing the stress and pressure that traditionally comes with them.
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After wrapping up work on Parkitect, a modern take on the Roller Coaster Tycoon games with an emphasis on customisation, developer Texel Raptor set about prototyping their next game. After various forays into different genres, the idea they kept coming back to was a townbuilder. In those early days the project had nothing to do with frogs, the team just knew two things, studio co-founder and artist Garrett Randell tells me: “We wanted to do something with a fantasy beauty to it and experiment with what a townbuilder is”.
Co-founder and programmer Sebastian Mayer grew up playing The Settlers and the Anno games, but he found they always followed the same disappointing arc. “I loved the part in these games where you build up the economy, but I really hated that these games always ended in some sort of conflict,” Mayer says. “It always ends in destruction and that was annoying to me because I just wanted to keep the economy going.”
For Croakwood, Texel Raptor have been trying to capture that expanding economy, with long-legged, amphibian villagers bustling between production facilities carrying goods, but also finding ways to give you a purpose for all that industriousness beyond building a war machine.
It says more about my way of thinking of management games, that I hadn’t considered the reason I play Anno as a cosy experience. When work is stressful, I often reach for a game where you create and manage a complex economy. Anno 1800 forces all thoughts of the day out of my head, demanding I focus on making sure I’m producing the optimal number of bottles of shampoo to keep my hotels in business and my tourists happy. It coaxes me into a state where all my attention is on the pathways of my city, and finessing their action.
Though, Meyer says they weren’t intentionally making Croakwood a cosy game, at least at first. “The goal wasn’t really to make a cozy game initially,” he explains. “It was just to make a game that doesn’t have the military and that kind of leads into a cozy game.”
The difference between a game like Croakwood and the Anno series isn’t its complexity, but the pressure it puts on you. “For me and the rest of the team, none of us like being time-pressured or forced into stressful situations,” Randell explains. “For an economy game, that sounds strange, but the key to Croakwood is that you can take it at your own pace. Anno puts you in that Zen, where you’re thinking about all of the moving pieces and you’re really focused [on] solving all these problems, [and] that exists in Croakwood, it’s just we don’t force you to deal with it in a time-sensitive manner.”
Whereas in Anno you’re racing other nations to expand your empire and pressured to keep your populace happy to stop them from rioting and deposing you, in Croakwood the punishment is less definitive. The town you’re building will slow down as frogs in snailshell construction hats and overalls wait for deliveries and green-skinned fishmongers throw up their arms at the empty baskets in their shop, but they’re not going to boot you out of town. “Your villagers are going to nag you a bit more, and some might leave,” Randell says, “but your town will never outright collapse.”
And, just to emphasise the choices made by Texel Raptor, taking out combat doesn’t automatically mean lower stakes. Just look at Whiskerwood, a similarly charming townbuilder that (crucial difference) sees you build a town for mice. That, too, doesn’t currently feature combat but there are much more severe punishments for miscalculating your economy. If you don’t source enough firewood or food, your poor mice will freeze in their homes or starve in their beds.
Though avoiding combat and high stakes, and keeping a townbuilder interesting proved a challenge. “Early on it was difficult to figure out the game design,” Mayer says. “Once you take away the pressure from the conflict, you have to fill that with other stuff.”
That stuff is delightfully customisable homes.
In Texel Raptor’s early townbuilder prototypes, construction was simple: you would select pre-designed houses and plop them down in the world, like you would in a real-time strategy game. The problem, Mayer says, was “that was really boring.” It was only when they merged the building system from Parkitect that they found what was missing. “That added a lot and pretty much the entire game is built around that now.”
To grow your town in Croakwood, potential residents will tell you what kind of house they’re looking for. That might just be the basics, like how big a plot it should be or how many windows it needs, but it can be more complex. The frogs “have different personalities and different preferences,” Mayer explains. “They will make requests like, ‘I really want to have more plants in my house. Can you help me?” stuff like that.”
Satisfying the needs and tastes of your frogs is the purpose for building your economy. You need to find and research the goods, foods, and furniture that will keep your residents happy, building out your economy with different trades to produce it all in sufficient amounts so no one decides to up sticks and move into the next frog town over.
You can see from the recent trailer how much control you can have over the customisation of each frog’s home, and that depth should be what drives the later stages of the game. As someone whose two main joys currently are playing Anno 1800 and redecorating his flat, I can see the appeal.
Croakwood won’t be out in early access until later this year, so until then I’ll just have to go along the nature walk near my house, lifting up logs and pulling back foliage to try and catch a colony of frogs in charmingly homespun doll houses by surprise.