AstroFrog was one of the earlier projects I had worked on in my college's game studio department. The basic idea of AstroFrog is that you maneuver a frog through a zero-gravity environment, by steering it left and right and shooting out a sticky tongue that would pull the frog towards whatever surface it hit, somewhat like a grappling hook. The frog can also use their grappling tongue to eat flies, the game's enemies. I wouldn't consider it a quality game by any means, but it was pretty fun to play for a 6-week group project, and I learned a lot about how to work on a team there.
For the first few weeks of the game, after documentation had been dealt with, I had mainly been tasked with creating enemies for the game. Since AstroFrog was turning out to be a precision-based game, it was fitting to make enemies that needed a bit more care to approach and attack. What we ended up with was a fly that puffs up and becomes poisonous if the frog gets too close to them, and a fly with a shield that protected it on its front side. Enemies like these gave the level designers (like me!) opportunities to create simple puzzles - for example, to take care of a shielded fly with walls on either side of it, one had to take a long way around it and eat it from the back.
I learned to value all of my skills on this project, not just the stuff that fell under my major. Late into development, our environment artist had been swamped with work and said that they wouldn't be able to make the asteroid tileset that was planned for Level 2. Then I offered to make it myself, as I'm a decent sprite artist. I normally work with lower resolutions, but I was able to start with 16x16 tiles and draw over them with larger brushes to get this.
I also worked on some of the game's UI, including a win screen that tallies how many flies the player's frog ate and their clear time, which would then be saved on the level select screen if they had a new best. What I'm proudest of, though, was the level I got to work on for the game, specifically Level 2. Level 2 is unique from the other two levels in several ways - it's the only level to feature the poison flies, a jetpack powerup I created, and an asteroid tileset.
Before building the level, I sketched it on paper. On the left is a photo of the sketch, and on the right, a screenshot of the level halfway through its construction. A tricky part in making it was to keep to the structure of asteroids, a bunch of rocks floating in space, while giving some concrete boundaries to the level (with one exception). In the end there were a bunch of asteroids floating around that you can grab onto, but the walls of the level are made up of several asteroids linked together. It was the most open of the three levels made for the game.
