Frogger Design

From Gamewiki

Frogger is a classic arcade style game from 1981 developed by Sega. This design is about a frogger-like game which is a good first game design activity for students with no programming background.

Contents 1 Gameplay 2 Tutorials 3 Examples 4 Design 5 Skills 6 Computational Thinking Patterns 7 Standards 8 Objectives 9 Sample Frogger Lesson Plans 10 Requirements 11 External links 12 International

Gameplay

You are a frog. Your task is simple: hop across a busy highway, dodging cars and trucks, until you get the to the edge of a river, where you must keep yourself from drowning by crossing safely to your grotto at the top of the screen by leaping across the backs of turtles and logs. But watch out for snakes and alligators! (Sega, 1980).

Tutorials

• Frogger tutorial part 1: user controlled frog, road with trucks moving on it, frog can be hit by truck.
• Frogger tutorial part 2: rivers with logs and turtles; frog is transported on log and turtle, frog cannot swim, game is won when frog reaches grotto.

UNDER CONSTRUCTION:

• New Frogger Tutorial: An attempt to make a more effective tutorial by reducing the text and adding short videos to describe each step.

Examples

• Scalable Game Design Arcade froggers

Design

Follow the gamelet design process:

• identify game objects, called agents, by locating nouns in the game description
• categorize agents into user controlled agents (hint the game is called Frogger), agents that move or do other things by themselves (sometimes also called artificial intelligence agents) and completely passible agents acting as props such as the road.
• identify agent interaction by locating verbs in the game description

Skills

This is the Scalable Game Design starter game. You need no background in programming, AgentSheets or other tools.

Computational Thinking Patterns

• Absorb: Trucks, turtles, and logs will need to be absorbed (erased) with truck absorber, log absorber, and turtle absorber agents.
• Collision: Trucks collide with frogs. We will use a simple form of collision to deal with trucks colliding with frogs.
• Generate: Trucks, turtles, and logs will need to be generated with truck maker, log maker and turtle maker agents.
• Transport: Logs and turtles transport the frog. This slightly more advanced pattern will be used in part II of the frogger tutorial.

Standards

ISTE National Educational Technology Standards:

• Creativity and Innovation. design and implementation of a game, create originals works: creating artwork and game levels
• Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making. Plan and manage activities to develop a solution or complete a project: follow game design process.
• Technology Operations and Concepts. understand and use technology systems: use authoring tool, organized project folder; troubleshoot systems and applications: run, test and debug program.

ACM K-12 Computer Science Curriculum

Objectives

• make your first simple but complete game
• apply design process to identify objects and interactions
• computational thinking: basic object interaction, stacks, creating object instances, rule based programming, message sending.

Sample Frogger Lesson Plans

• Sample frogger lesson plans

Requirements

• educational game design course requirements

External links

• detailed description of original Frogger game in Wikipedia

International

Versions translated via Google Translate. Notice, these translations are generally not all that great and often include unintended humor. If you find them to be almost usable please let us know and help us to fix them up.

• German
• Greek
• Italian