Scott gets job at The Eccentric Ape

Our amazing programmer Scott Purcival starts work at The Eccentric Ape today, and we wish him all the best.

Scott began working on Frog's Princess on 26 July 2018, when the game was still in a greybox state.  He began working during the hiring call!  He has been an amazing asset to the team and made every feature we asked for, including:

PLAY FEATURES

• getting the game into a playable state in 4 weeks so we could get ready for our first Kickstarter campaign
• making a Back button which is a significant alteration of the Fungus storytelling program
• separating the Storylines
• creating Contents so that the player can go to any page - Scott also added pictures to the buttons and frames around active buttons
• creating an entire Character Customisation feature for svg files which remain high quality even when enlarged
• implementing the (slightly buggy) Unity Accessibility Package so Frog's Princess can be read on a screen reader by players with vision impairment
  

INSIDE STUFF

• collaborating with artists Christy, Riley and John to help optimise their art for the game
• wrangling cameras and culling VFX and including images with off-camera settings
• making a tool for Kathy so she can change character expressions on a page at the click of a button
• many other changes to enable Kathy to make the game such as separate Voice, SFX and Music control
• optimising the assets so game size went down from 1.3GB to 580MB (and most of that is Kathy's fault as she kept adding characters and background layers and audio)
• improving performance so we get to the next page in 0.3 seconds usually, instead of the 3 seconds it was taking during production
• suiting Frog's Princess to devices with hard memory limits by redesigning the chapter loading routines
• building a Multibuild feature for us so we can produce demo and main games at the press of a button
  

via GIPHY

UI

• building a Save Game system which we call the Library, which can fit any number of books, as Scott, a father of three, thought of students making games in class
• redesigning the Menu system to keep up with all the changes  
• surprising us with Swimmy Frog - yes, one day Kathy found a fish in the well beside the main menu.  She pressed it and was transported into the well playing a minigame!
• but Kathy's favourite of all, as regular readers will know - Scott made our loading frog

Scott is a joy to work with.  As the game design matured he not only kept up with changes but suggested a few himself.  He is completely unstoppable – he keeps at a task until he gets it working, makes it efficient, and has a clean console.  We think the Eccentric Ape are very lucky to get him.