Frog's Princess

Map of Great Britain over the ocean with Frog jumping out of it and text saying Launched in Great Britain 12 August 2021.

Map of North America over the ocean with Frog jumping out of it and text saying Launched in North America 4 April 2021.

Map of Australia over the ocean with Frog jumping out of it and text saying Launched in Australia 9 December 2020.

Poster titled Frog's Princess shows a prince and princess at night time heading away from a heart shaped well while holding hands. A castle shows on a hill in the distance.

Frog's Princess was nominated for Best Game in the South Australian Screen Awards 2021

Poster advertising the Australian Fairy Tale Society Conference in June 2021 with a photo of Kathy saying:

Presented at the Australian Fairy Tale Society conference 2021

Long-listed for the New Media Writing Prize 2021

Presented a paper at the inaugural Games for Change Asia-Pacific conference 2021: Frog's Princess: Making a diverse, inclusive and accessible visual novel

Poster advertising Game Plus Demo Night, undated.

Demonstrated at Game Plus Demo Nights in April, June and October 2021

Presented at the Australian Fairy Tale Society conference 2020

Presented at the Electric Dreams conference 2020

Exhibited at ACM SIG CHI PLAY conference 2018

Melbourne Playground supporters ACMI and MIGW logos

Exhibited at CHI PLAY Melbourne Playground 2018

Exhibited at Resilient Kids Conference 2019

Exhibited in AVCon Indie Games Room 2019 and AVCon Obscure Games Room 2019

Demonstrated in the inaugural Playback session at GamePlus in Adelaide 2019

Three years in development, Frog's Princess is a fully voiced, fully interactive, full-length English children's storybook.

Players don't change the story, they change their heroes' personalities.

We made it accessible to people who can't see well and people who can't hear well.

But what took so LONG, you ask. Well, we had the game made in 6 months, but we wanted players to be able to make characters who look like themselves. That meant figuring out how to change the hair style, hair colour, skin tone and eye colour of our prince and princess, and get their families to match a bit. And... we might have had over a thousand princes and princesses by the time we added up all their poses and expressions. So we experimented to see if we could change the colours automatically, using vector images. Everybody said it couldn't be done, and after a couple of months we decided they were probably right, but Scott our programmer kept trying, and after 6 months we started to see light at the end of the tunnel. Now here we are!

Fully subtitled and narrated, Frog's Princess is part game, part book, part movie. Suitable for reluctant readers, readers for whom English is a second language, and designed for players with muscle weakness, visual impairment and hearing impairment, Frog's Princess is available on iPad, iPhone, Android phone, and PC.

Save different versions of the story, for example, teaming a commanding princess with a hyperactive prince, or a fun princess with an laid-back prince, or make your own completely unique version by changing personalities with every speech.

The story

A year ago the Queen died. Now the Kingdom of Kassel is surrounded by darkness. Every day the bewitched woods grow closer.

Emma's sisters are clever and kind, brave and beautiful. Emma has always been told she is special because she is a True Princess, but she doesn't know what that means. She doesn't know how to save her kingdom.

Emma opening the curtain to the Great Hall, wearing her mother's clothes

So Emma dresses in her mother's clothes and takes her mother's great treasure, the Golden Orb, to try to summon help.

Unfortunately not all princes feel like helping.

Prince Francis standing on his horse, asking Iron Henry:

In the meantime Francis has been sent to find a bride among the princesses of Kassel because no other prince can get there. Only he has a bodyguard like Iron Henry who can get them through the bewitched forest.

Iron Henry lifting Prince Francis out of the mud despite the witch sending molten iron around his heart.

He has a little difficulty getting through.

Frog clings to Emma as she flinches away from the Red Bird adn loses her grip on the Golden Orb, which is falling into the well.

And he introduces himself by knocking the Golden Orb, the treasure of Kassel, into the well.

Features

* 6,286 lines of voiced dialogue
* 1,398 lines of action narration for blind players
* 1,435 sound effects in text
* 14 main speaking characters
* 918 storybook pages
* sound effects and visual effects
* animation
* original music composed by Christian Paterson
* the (fictional) national anthem of Kassel sung with the help of our sound engineers!

Credits

Lisa Fanto recording the voice of Princess Emma at Solarus Records

Acting for female voices by Lisa Fanto, acartsactinggraduates.com/lisa-fanto/
Advanced Diploma of Art (Acting)

Lisa's agent is at http://sacasting.com.au/voices-all/item/224-lisa-fanto

Acting for male voices by Gab Allani, www.facebook.com/GabAllani
Advanced Diploma of Art (Acting)

Gab can be contacted at Gabriel Allani <allanig@hotmail.co.uk>

Recording engineer Kyle Krishnappa at Solarus Records www.solarus.net.au/

The original Frog's Princess team: Scott (programmer), Gab and Lisa (voices), Sean and Kyle (sound), Christian (music), Kathy (lead), John (layouts), Riley (3D art), and Christy (2D art).

Original music by Christian Paterson, an Adelaide composer. www.linkedin.com/in/christian-paterson-442763150/

Bachelor of Art and Bachelor of Music

2D character art by Christy Butt, finalist in the Adelaide Park Lands Art Prize 2018. Portfolio at www.artstation.com/cuki

Bachelor in Creative Arts majoring in Graphic Design and New Media
Bachelor in Computer Science majoring in Multimedia and Game Development
Coursework Masters in Visual Arts and Design majoring in Illustration and Concept Art

3D fantasy medieval setting by Riley Hanlin, a Victorian artist who previously worked on highly rated indie title The Station. Portfolio at www.artstation.com/rilgs

Advanced Diploma of Professional Game Development (Game Art and Animation)

UI design by Frances Purcival and Vicki Borthwick.

Visual effects and layout by John Costello, Victorian art director for highly rated indie title The Station. Portfolio at https://www.artstation.com/thall

Advanced Diploma of Professional Game Development (Game Art and Animation)

John's first VFX task was to make bubbles.

via GIPHY

Programming design by C Morrison, a shy programmer in Adelaide, South Australia!

Programming by Scott Purcival, now programmer at The Eccentric Ape. scott.purcival.com/

Advanced Diploma in Professional Game Development (Game Programming)

Audio production and SFX by Kyle Krishnappa and Sean Bell at Solarus Records www.solarus.net.au/

Production, story and design by Kathy Smart writing as Joy Everafter joy-everafter.com/

Master of Creative Writing
Advanced Diploma in Professional Game Development (Game Design and Production)

Quality assurance, Anne Smith and Vicki Borthwick

Beautiful 3D settings created by Riley Hanlin for Frog's Princess

Hand-drawn map showing the forest path reaching the river and becoming the road to the castle of Kassel. Below the castle, paths lead away, one ending at the heart-shaped well

Gold path running through trees under a dull sky

Heart-shaped well at the bottom of a hill. Castle on top of the hill. Trees on the hill slope.

Dark clouds gather, with only a small break, over the heart shaped well by the lemon tree

Princess Emma's bedroom showing window where she often kneels and looks out.

Library with books on the shelves and books piled in front of a desk, with parchment on the desk and a wooden box.

View into the stables with bales of hay in front.

Castle well with rope and bucket, on castle grounds.

Front gates are closed. Crenellated walls show up against magnificent dusky storm clouds.

Huge tree trunk arches over the golden path, blocking it without touching it. The beautiful dark blue night sky has lighter coloured clouds.

The main table of the Great Hall has carved wooden chairs for the King and Lady Lorelei and 3 plain wooden chairs for the princesses. There is a chair at the side for Prince Francis.

This side view of the castle shows the wall around the castle and a turret of the castle silhouetted against a purple night sky.

Academic paper

Frog's Princess was presented at the ACM Computer-Human Interaction in Play annual symposium in Melbourne, Australia, in 2018, and is published in pages 127-132 of the proceedings.

Kickstarter fully funded!

We ran a Kickstarter crowd campaign in July 2019 to raise the funds to make the game accessible to blind people (by narrating the action) and to deaf people (by transcribing the sound effects). The generous folk in Adelaide helped us reach our target so it's full steam ahead for accessibility.

Dedicated website

For the Frog's Princess blog and to find out more about the storybook, go to https://frogsprincess.com/index.html.