Last Tuesday was a really, really exciting day for us. We showed the most important part of the game in public: the actual gameplay in a video. We are so thrilled of all this attention we got with it! BIG thanks for all the feedback and warm welcome to you all, our new fans! It’s really nice to hear that you guys like the unique atmosphere and gameplay we are building.

This really gave us an extra kick to release the game as soon as possible. However, we do not want to rush as we want BADLAND to be as great and polished gaming experience as possible. We’ll tell you about our release plans as soon as we are able to say better.

A few answers to questions that have been asked quite a lot:

“How do you control the character?”
BADLAND uses one touch controls. When you hold your touch on the screen, the character flies up, and when you release your touch, the character falls down. So, you do not have to rapidly tap the screen to flap the wings. Depth in the gameplay comes from the imaginative level design and various “items” that the character must (or must not) collect in order to survive. Some items make the character bigger, some make it smaller, some make it roll like a tire and some clone the character as can be seen in the gameplay video. There are still lots of items which we haven’t shown or talked about yet.

“Is it an endless game with random generated content?”
BADLAND consists of various handcrafted levels. What you saw there in our gameplay video was an example of one of those levels. However, we are trying to achieve something a bit different than just random levels after another. The whole gaming experience should feel more like a solid adventure than just separate levels that don’t have anything to do with each other.

“Will it come to Android/Steam/PSP/etc.?”
We would like to release the game in all the possible platforms but we want to focus on one platform at a time. We want to really polish the game to the perfection first on iOS, and then we will check out the other platforms.

Many sites noticed BADLAND.

Big thanks to them! Here’s a list of few of them:
TouchArcade – Check Out ‘Badland,’ An Upcoming Side-Scrolling Platformer
EDGE – Former Trials Evolution devs release first gameplay footage of Badland
Eurogamer – Trials Evolution dev’s upcoming Badland shows off gameplay
Destructoid – Badland delivers brutal, beautiful sidescrolling to iOS
Joystiq – ‘Badland’ by former Trials devs doesn’t look so bad
PocketGamer – Sumptuous side-scroller Badland makes a good first impression

Finally this day has arrived! We are thrilled to show the first gameplay video of BADLAND along with the first screenshots. Here you go!

Screens:

BADLAND is an atmospheric side-scrolling action adventure located in a gorgeous forest full of beautiful trees, flowers and various inhabitants of the forest. Although the forest looks like it’s from some beautiful fairytale, there seems to be something terribly wrong. The player controls one of the forest’s inhabitants to discover what’s going on. Through his journey he discovers astonishing amount of imaginative traps and obstacles.

BADLAND takes side-scrollers to the next level with its innovative physics based gameplay combined with the extremely beautiful atmospheric graphics and audio.

BADLAND has been designed specifically for iPad, iPhone and iPod and uses one-touch controls to give the player the best possible control mechanics. In addition, the graphics have been designed to fully use the retina resolutions of these devices. The result is an highly immersive, addicting gaming experience.

What you have seen this far is just a glimpse of what BADLAND is going to be. We would like to tell you everything, but we’ll rather show them in videos and screenshots. To be a bit more specific, we can hint that we have two really big feature announcements to make regarding to BADLAND. More about those later this year… Meanwhile, subscribe to our blog, like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about BADLAND. Stay tuned! :)

Feel free to give any kind of comments and feedback.

Time to show you what it is like after dawn in BADLAND. And, what’s that thingy in the water?

Btw, Juhana made that picture using only in-game assets.

We have so much to tell you about BADLAND but rather than writing about all the stuff, we are working hard to show you first gameplay video footage from BADLAND in the upcoming weeks. Stay tuned!

Let’s continue this hugely popular series concerning BADLAND’s visual inspirers :)

This time I’m going to show you some old masters that has inspired BADLAND’s colorful look. I’m a big fan of American art movement called The Hudson River School. It was a mid-19th century group composed by landscape painters. Rather than tell you all about that movement, I’m just going to present some of my favorite works from those influential artist.

Thomas Cole:

Asher Brown:

George Inness:

And of course we want to show some new BADLAND art. It’s a little sneak peak to the future, what ever that means…

Some people have wished behind the scenes stuff + concepts and sketches from BADLAND. Well, here we go! The following blog post will start a series of entries concerning BADLAND’s visual inspirations. I’ll start by telling you about the influences that ultimately kicked off the visual development.

The most significant inspiration source: Nature

At the very beginning when we started composing ideas of an atmospheric and interesting gaming environment we thought of some sort of curious forest. I think there’s always something mystical when you go to the woods because you’ll never know what you’ll see or find there. You can find harmony in the forest. At the same time a bear can come and eat you while you are still alive. Because of that thrilling contrast a forest is a perfect surrounding for BADLAND.
Finland is a very beautiful country full of forests and lakes (and bears). To find a good reference material you just have to go out and take your camera with you. While there are influences from Finnish environments in BADLAND the main focus was still in tropical forests. We didn’t want BADLAND to feel too familiar so we created this place with an intriguing mix of various features from the forests all around the world.

Here is a little collage which contains reference images gathered mainly from the internet or from my own photo collection. If you find a picture here that you have copyrights and don’t like it to be here tell us and we remove it.

Here is a small sample on how sometimes a reference image offers you almost exactly what you were looking for.

And related to all that, here is some new BADLAND art:

Both of us here at Frogmind have a long history of gaming starting from the late 80’s. We have played thousands of different games starting from Commodore 64 all the way to the new iPad. In the process we have learned what are the elements we like and dislike in games and in game business.

We think that games should be developed by constantly thinking from the perspective of the player. The player eventually playing your game is the king. He/she is the person whose enjoyment is in the hands of your game. Thus, the end-user experience is the most important goal in our games and we want it to be flawless in BADLAND. We think we are able to achieve this as we are active gamers ourselves. We are developing BADLAND for us too. We want to enjoy it as much as you will do.

So, what do we think brings better gaming experience in games especially in iOS devices? Let us give a few examples:

We think that immersion is very important in games. The best games are those which really give the player the feeling that he/she is in the game world. It can be really hard to get the mind to the game’s world but it’s super-easy to get it out there. For example, while playing, a pop-up suggesting you to spend real money to buy stuff, is the prefect immersion killer. Seeing real world references, such as price tags with real world money currency, can easily take the player’s mind away from the game world spoiling the gaming experience. Moreover, spending real money is not fun and still so many games remind constantly the player about it with different in-app purchase possibilities. In our opinion, this eventually ruins the game’s fun. We are not saying that in-game purchases in general are bad thing but they can be done wrong so easily. For example, we think that buying additional real content, such as level packs, inside the game through menus can be totally OK. Another example of ruining the immersion is to underestimate players by having lengthy tutorials explaining everything by hand. We could continue with more examples how to spoil the immersion, but these two are good examples as they can be seen in games in the AppStore. We want to make sure that you have as immersive gaming experience while playing BADLAND as possible.

Another good example of what we like in games especially in Apple’s iOS AppStore is their universality. When developing a game or any application to the AppStore, the developer can decide whether to develop the game as a universal application or not. A universal application means that the application has been designed for all the iOS devices: iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. In most cases it means that the end-user can play the same game in all of his/her iOS devices with the UI and the graphics designed for each device separately. With universality, given that the game is available for all of the iOS devices, the player does not need to buy multiple versions of the game in order to get the best experience in all of his/her devices. Only one purchase is required. We think that players want to play games in all possible iOS devices they own with best gaming experience possible, but do not want to buy the same game multiple times. Thus, BADLAND will be an universal application with the gameplay, the UI and all the graphics designed for the iPhone retina resolution, the iPad resolution and for the new iPad retina resolution. You get all this with one purchase, and after that, you can play BADLAND with beautiful graphics with all your iOS devices.

This list could go on with more examples, but we hope that these two examples give you some grasp of us as game developers and what kind of gaming experience we want BADLAND to be. Feel free to ask us questions in the comments or in Twitter/Facebook.

This week’s big thanks go to:

IndieGames.com
http://indiegames.com/2012/07/frogmind_games_reveal_action-a.html

AppAddict.net
http://appaddict.net/2012/07/23/finnish-indie-studio-frogmind-sets-up-devcam-to-offer-gamers-a-birds-eye-view-badlands-progress/

Game Side Story
http://www.gamesidestory.com/2012/07/21/badland-lonirisme-sur-ios/

Indie-game.fr
http://indie-game.fr/badland

In the next blog post Juhana is going to start a blog post series concerning the creation of the visual look of BADLAND. The picture below is a quick sneak peek of the series.

You might have already noticed the little window in the right. It’s our development camera and it shows live video from our indie studio. Now you can see what we are doing here, and maybe spot something about BADLAND we yet haven’t told or shown. There is usually one of us around in the office on weekdays between 8:00am – 8:00pm (GMT+2).

We moved to this nice little office space just two weeks ago in the same day we announced BADLAND. Before that we had mainly been working from home. This moving also meant us that we now can fully focus on BADLAND as we finished our subcontract project.

The office space has been rented for us by Aalto Startup Center. It’s just perfect for us two. The address is Frogmind Ltd, Energiakuja 3, 00180 Helsinki, Finland (in case you want to send us fan/hate mail)

The best part: we have a beautiful sea view. :)

This week’s big thanks go to our new French fans at ApplicationIphone.com:
http://www.applicationiphone.com/2012/07/news-presentation-artwork-badland-frogmind/

To TechZwn.com:
http://techzwn.com/2012/07/atmospheric-side-scroller-badland-makes-its-debut/

And to EpicBrew.net:
http://epicbrew.net/2012/07/17/first-look-badland/

We announced our first game BADLAND and it was very well received! Although we teased BADLAND with only one image it captured people’s interest nicely. We like to thank all the people who helped us promoting BADLAND in all the forums, Facebook, Twitter and so on. Also pages like Pocketgamer.co.uk, Mobile Gaming News and Finnish V2.fi noticed us nicely. Because we are a small two-man studio with no big publisher behind us we need all the help we can get. So THANK YOU!

Special thanks to nickname ‘arta’ at TouchArcade.com:

http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?threadid=143204

And to ‘Salad’ at Systemwars.com:

http://systemwars.com/forums/index.php?/topic/96720-teaser-shot-of-badland-for-ios-redlynx-devs-trials-evolution

Here is also new artwork from BADLAND. Once again created with in-game assets: