Frogger: He's Back Randomizer

Fall 2020, Summer 2021

Frogger: He's Back was a sequal to the arcade game Frogger and released in 1997 for the PC and PlayStation 1. As a child growing up, it was one of my favorite video games we had for our computer. In the game, you play as the frog Frogger and need to rescue the 5 color-coded baby frogs in each level.

Being a fan of the game, I thought it would be fun to replay the levels I had long since memorized by moving the start locations and baby frog locations in each level. To keep things from being too random, I pre-selected a list of resonable locations on each of the level maps and recorded them for the randomizer to select from. Then based on the random input seed, the selections are chosen, the maps updated, and the executable re-packaged with the new locations.

This builds highly upon the level editing tool Froglord created by Kneesnap of the Highway Frogs community which provides a Java API to unpack the executable and provide access to the internal game data in a much-more-friendly-than-binary-code format as well as a custom level editor. Though, I don't make the most use of the level editor as the randomizer does everything from a set of scripts I wrote to update the game data.

I also built a simple GUI application using the Godot game engine which is used to select the files and options for randomization.

The initial version of the randomizer randomized only the start and goal locations. The second version also updates the tile graphics of the target tiles which are drawn under the frogs in addition to randomizes the car, turtle, and log arrangements of the Retro Zone levels.