Unbelievably, after all this time, there was a typo in one of the Prince speeches - thank you, Kristian Leadbeater, for pointing this out.  We also fixed The Incredible Shrinking Soldier in Chapter 7 Scene 4 Page 4, made the ghost prince disappear in Chapter 1 Scene 2 Page 14  and slowed some trees down in Chapter 9 Scene 2 Page 2.

We could spend all day for days fixing character sizes, animations and positions on pages and improving our SFX, but we are working on designing the next story.  The real reason we made an update was that there was a small glitch in the Accessibility for people with vision impairment which had to be corrected.

While the PC and Android updates launched without a hitch around the 17th of June, we hit snags with the Apple update which we squeaked in on the 29th of June.  Phew.

Here is a video made before the prince's disappearance was properly calibrated.

For the second time, Kathy has been honoured to present Frog's Princess at the annual Australian Fairy Tale Society conference.  This time she spoke about how visual novels can be made accessible to readers with vision impairment or deafness or colour vision deficiencies.

Now as everyone knows, the important part of a conference is the swag.  Here are AFTS mugs!

How embarrassing.  Many of the GIFs on the website had the old UI!

So we recorded new shorts in Unity, tidied them up in PremierePro, added them to Vimeo, uploaded clips of them to Giphy and decorated them with titles.

Here is a before and after comparison.

Kierron Stach of A Few Dragons has studied trailer design extensively and he put his skills to good use creating a new trailer for Frog's Princess!

Lisa Fanto created all our female voices - yes, the young voice of Emma, the bossy voice of Hilda, and the calm voice of Ramona was also that screechy witch!

Well, she went on to star in the web series LOVE, GUNS & LEVEL UPS.  Not only did it win an honourable mention in the DC Webfest 2021, but Lisa is nominated for Best Actress in the biggest celebration of web series in Germany @dieseriale!

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
  

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.

We are delighted that Frog's Princess was listed by Gabriel Price in the annual Game Keys Under the Radar edition for games with high quality graphics and addictive gameplay.  gameskeys.net/under-the-radar-games-on-android-in-2021/

Canada, United States and Mexico, here we come!

Due to popular demand, we changed the last page of the demo game.

Players were finding it hard to figure out what was happening in the demo version of the game.
If you choose the Emma storyline, you start in Chapter 2 and end on this page.
If you choose the Frog storyline, you start in Chapter 1 and end on this page.

You can still go back and start a new book to see the other chapter.

We also added a store button which can only be seen in Android or Apple iOS devices.

We hope this makes things clearer.

We didn't think it was fair that Lisa missed out on being interviewed just because she had to work, so we interviewed her separately and we are pretending she was at the launch party after all.

Kathy even wore the same shirt!

Lisa is a consummate voice actor, getting the best out of every line.  As we show in the video...