Last year, Kathy went to GCAP.  She was delighted to meet up with Riley Hanlin, our wonderful 3D environment artist who achieved so much in such a short time.

This year, Scott went to GCAP, and Kathy couldn't go!  Scott has been on the project for a year and has yet to meet any of the team members.  That's what happens when you live in a remote country town in Queensland.

What a lot of work went into this image.  Look closely - every piece has been individually vectored and coloured.  Vicki Borthwick has rendered Cleopatra exactly.

What kind of dog is she, you ask?  She is a Cavoodle, a cross between a King Charles Cavalier Spaniel and a Toy Poodle.

Players have often suggested Frog's Princess could be used to improve reading skills for people for whom English is a second language.  So we tried it out!

5 volunteers from the Women's Community Centre (SA) Inc kindly agreed to play the game.  Kathy was hoping they would play for 30 minutes.  After 60 minutes, she was thanking them and offering them drinks.  After 90 minutes, she was explaining they probably wanted to finish up.  After 120 minutes, the battery ran out on the MAC and the session ended.

The verdict was not all positive, however.  There are cultural issues surrounding the frog's request to sleep in the princess's bed.  Also the language is old-fashioned, to suit the fairy tale setting, and therefore difficult to understand in places.  Finally there are no reading education tools, such as allowing a player to highlight a word and read a definition of it.

Here is Kathy surrounded by those of the 5 volunteers who were not too shy to appear on social media.

Some of you may recall that one of the Kickstarter rewards was putting your pet in game.

You could choose to have your pet as a villain stalking through the woods, or as an innocent creature at one page at the end.  Nobody wanted their pet to be a villain!  So talented artist Vicki Borthwick has created this gorgeous image of Holly.

Take a close look - there is no shading in this image whatsoever.

 We were extremely lucky to be situated at AVCon beside game journalist Lauren Harradine who was helping demo the VR game Backyard Cricket.  Naturally we subjected her to Frog's Princess!  She has been kind enough to write an article about Frog's Princess which was published today in PowerUp!  https://powerup-gaming.com/2019/09/05/kathy-smart-on-fairy-tales-self-empowerment-and-developing-frogs-princess/

What's wrong with the buttons I made? Scott asks.  Sorry, Scott, we are about to have a major UI upgrade thanks to artist Frances Purcival.  Here is the parchment background she created for the Settings.  Look closely and you can see Riley's map!

We were delighted to receive our photos from Chris Keesmaat Photography.  At AVCon we were in the back corner which was really dark but Chris got some lovely shots for us which we will be able to use for promotion.  Chris got waivers from everybody and set them at ease so they are all smiling.

This one proves that even squids like the game.