If, like me, you wander through this world constantly thinking about Chicken Run, you too can expect at any moment to discover that the animal kingdom is actually made up of industrious, city-building creatures. But I hope they don’t try to attack us and tie us up if they ever get scolded.. Especially when the towns they create are as charming as those of the frog town builder Croakwood. I could watch their agitation all day.
The next game from developer Parkitect Texel Raptor, Croakwood puts you in the role of mayor and city planner of a small community of frogs. Hidden under the canopy of leaves and trees surrounding a small pond, it’s easy to not notice the amphibian population while wandering through their woods. Especially considering that the frogs themselves are only a few centimeters long.
But there’s a lot more going on in this city-building game than meets the eye, as the developers have explored ways to meet the challenge of a demanding management game without introducing the stress and pressure that traditionally accompany them.
After completing work on Parkitect, a modern take on the Roller Coaster Tycoon games with an emphasis on customization, developer Texel Raptor set about prototyping their next game. After various forays into different genres, the idea they kept coming back to was that of a city builder. 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 told me: “We wanted to do something with fantastic beauty and experiment with what a city builder is.”
Co-founder and programmer Sebastian Mayer grew up playing The Settlers and Anno games, but found that they always followed the same disappointing arc. “I loved the role of these games where you build the economy, but I really hated that these games always ended in some sort of conflict,” Mayer said. “It always ends in destruction and that pissed me off because I just wanted to keep the economy going.”
For Croakwood, Texel Raptor tried to capture this expanding economy, with leggy amphibian villagers bustling between production facilities carrying goods, but also finding ways to give you a purpose for all that work beyond building a war machine.
It says more about how I think about management games, that I hadn’t considered the reason I play Anno as a comfortable experience. When work is stressful, I often choose a game where you create and manage a complex economy. Anno 1800 pushes all thoughts of the day out of my head, demanding that I focus on producing the optimal number of shampoo bottles to keep my hotels running and my tourists happy. This brings me to a state where all my attention is on the trails in my city and refining what they do.
However, Meyer says they didn’t intentionally make Croakwood an enjoyable game, at least at first. “The goal wasn’t really to make a user-friendly game at first,” he explains. “It was just to create a game that wouldn’t involve the military and would lead to a friendly game.”
The difference between a game like Croakwood and the Anno series is not its complexity, but the pressure it puts on you. “For me and the rest of the team, none of us like to be pressed for time or forced into stressful situations,” says Randell. “For an economy game, it seems strange, but the key to Croakwood is that you can go at your own pace. Anno puts you in this zen, where you’re thinking about all the moving pieces and you’re really focused (on) solving all of these problems, (and) that exists in Croakwood, it’s just that we don’t force you to deal with it urgently.”
While in Anno you race other nations to expand your empire and lobby to keep your population happy to prevent them from revolting and deposing you, in Croakwood the punishment is less final. The city you’re building will slow down as frogs in hats and snail-shell construction suits wait for deliveries and green-skinned fishmongers raise their arms at their store’s empty baskets, but they’re not going to kick you out of town. “Your villagers will harass you a little more, and some might leave,” says Randell, “but your town will never completely collapse.”
And, just to highlight the choices made by Texel Raptor, eliminating combat doesn’t automatically mean lower stakes. Just look at Whiskerwood, an equally charming city builder which (crucial difference) sees you build a city for mice. This too doesn’t offer a fight at the moment, but there are much harsher penalties for miscalculating your economy. If you don’t get enough firewood or food, your poor mice will freeze in their house or starve to death in their beds.
However, avoiding combat and high stakes and keeping a city builder interesting proved a challenge. “At first it was difficult to understand the game design,” says Mayer. “Once you take away the pressure of conflict, you have to fill it with other things.”
That thing is delightfully customizable homes.
In Texel Raptor’s early city-building prototypes, construction was simple: you selected pre-designed houses and dropped them into the world, as you would in a real-time strategy game. The problem, according to Mayer, was “it was really boring.” It was only by merging Parkitect’s build system that they discovered what was missing. “It brought a lot of things and almost the whole game is built around it now.”
To grow your town in Croakwood, potential residents will tell you what type of home they are looking for. This can be as simple as the basics, like the size of a lot or how many windows it needs, but it can be more complex. Frogs “have different personalities and preferences,” Mayer says. “They’ll 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 goal of building your economy. You must find and seek out the goods, foods and furniture that will make your residents happy, expanding your economy with different trades to produce all of this in sufficient quantities so that no one decides to up sticks and move to the next frog town.
You can see from the recent trailer how much control you can have over customizing each frog’s home, and that depth should be what drives the game’s later stages. As someone whose two main joys currently are playing Anno 1800 and redecorating their apartment, I can see the appeal.
Croakwood won’t be released in Early Access until later this yearso until then I’ll just have to take a nature walk near my house, lifting logs and tearing up foliage to try to catch a colony of frogs by surprise in charming homemade dollhouses.
