Hey everyone! Wyatt here, the Director at AFP.
Firstly, for all those who have wishlisted and tried out the demo for Waterjacked, THANK YOU! We've been building Waterjacked over the past five months outside of our day jobs, and to see how far it's come and have something we can show you, the players, is nothing short of a miracle.
The main purpose of this post is to introduce A Frog's Pond and what we're trying to do. Additionally, I'll lightly talk about our plans for Waterjacked, with a more in-depth post coming later this week, really spelling it all out. Without further ado, let me introduce you to AFP!
The idea of AFP started in November of last year when I was working on a tabletop card game called Fayren. I had recently dropped out of college and wanted to take a chance at something, so I decided to double down and make it a reality. Unfortunately, the tariffs made the project unrealistic for me to pursue, but I had learned a lot and met some really cool people who make up the core of the AFP team today. Over the summer of this year, the team really took shape, and we got started on a digital game code named Project Fjord (now Waterjacked!).
However, we're not trying to just make games for the sake of making games. We've grown up with them, and we're witnessing the industry mature, but not in a positive direction that keeps what makes games special at the core of it. We've watched, and still are watching, studios we used to love close down, go through layoffs, or have exciting projects cancelled. We've eagerly waited for a new game to release and been let down due to last-minute delays or poor launches. The worst experience of all is purchasing an interesting Early Access game that ends up getting abandoned.
I say all that to drill home that we get it. We're not a company that's going to throw corporate jargon at you or tell you how we want you to feel a sense of pride and accomplishment by spending money. We want you to have fun, enjoy our games, and most of all have a bond of trust between developer and player. We want to hear your feedback, regardless of how hot you come in with it. We want to make our games better, not just so we can be proud of what we make, but so you can have an experience with worlds worth exploring and stories worth remembering. A fresh website is currently in development that we'll be launching soon, so you can get a real, bulleted look at how we're trying to run a studio differently than what we've been forced to deal with. To give you a general overview, we will:
Never sell percentage chance drop items
Always provide free demos for our games that will always be available, so you can make an educated purchase
Never use DRM
Open source our games once we sunset them or when we feel the time is right
Never create a premium mod marketplace (mod-friendly devs here)
Have a reasonable and fair content-to-price standard ($70 my ass)
This is all well and good, but to make this a reality, our first objective is to make good games. And to do that, we need your help. We obviously want to change the way games are marketed, but we also want to change the way they're developed by putting the game in front of you as soon as we can. We'd much rather provide a free, early demo with rough edges and get your feedback from the get-go than work behind the curtain in an echo-chamber. We also don't want to just drop a demo and then run back behind the curtain. We need your continuous feedback to mold our projects into the best game they can be.
For Waterjacked, we'll be making updates to the demo over the next few weeks, addressing immediate feedback, such as UI adjustments, tool tips, animation improvements, and, of course, bug fixes. We'll also be adding new content, like new modules, more interactions between modules, and new enemies. We'll share more about the current road map for Waterjacked later this week. If you've got any ideas, comments, or criticisms about the Waterjacked Demo, please join the Discord and post them in the Waterjacked Feedback channel!
It's a pleasure to introduce AFP after months of hard work, and here's to making Waterjacked the best it can be,
-Wyatt
Obligatory social media links 🪷
Twitter/X: https://x.com/AFrogsPond
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AFrogsPond/
Discord: https://discord.gg/NwEWQaqFhV
Bluesky is currently down due to domain transfers