In this post, I want to talk about the Global Game Jam 2025 game that I worked on. It’s called Frogue’s Odyssey, which is not a typo but rather our made-up word to describe a rogue-like game starring a frog as the main character. The goal is to stay alive along as possible while a pike tries to eat you. To make matters worse, there are also turtles eating the lillypad leaf on which you are. But if you manage to survive long enough, you have regained enough strength to leap to the next leaf to survive a while longer. And, while you jump, you are able to improve your skills. The theme of the 2025 Global Game Jam was “Bubble” which you’ll also find in our game: The frog is able to shoot air bubbles onto the turtles which will eventually make them fly away if you hit them with enough bubbles.
A special challenge during the development was the implementation of the turtle-lillypad-interaction: It took me about 6 hours during the second night of the jam to get this done. I first tried to re-use our edge-detection solution for the lillypad leaf itself, which uses the alpha value of neighboring pixels to determine the edge. However, this was to costly to compute after every turtle bite. So, in the end, I chose a less sophisticated solution with a collection of circles, which is checked for collisions with the frog in addition to the lillypad leaf to determine whether the frog has fallen into the water (which kills you because the pike eats you) or not.
We worked on this game in a group of 6 people – 5 devs and 1 artist. The engine we used is LibGDX, which is a Java-based game engine that I have already used in the past for multiple projects. Being a familiar engine, it allowed me to be quite productive, although it definitely has some shortcomings and I wouldn’t recommend it as a go-to game engine, if you want to learn a new one. Next year, we will most likely use a different engine, but we have to prepare for that a little bit in advance so that we also get a game done during the jam.
If you are interested, feel free to visit the game page for more information and a link to the open source repository.