From Frogspawn to Frog Sqwad: The Making of A Sticky, Snacky New Multiplayer Sport

After we shaped Panic Stations in June 2025, we didn’t need to spend years in pre-production. We had a objective to launch our first sport inside 12 months. We wished to maneuver quick. Having labored collectively beforehand, we jumped straight into growth. Our mission was easy: Maximize enjoyable per minute. To maintain that momentum, everybody at Panic Stations is hands-on. We’re all within the engine, breaking issues, making them higher, breaking them once more after which discovering success!

We began work on Frog Sqwad nearly instantly. We shortly found that frogs are the final word platforming protagonists. Their tongues even have a shocking quantity of makes use of. They can be utilized as grappling hooks for verticality, swinging for momentum, catapults for launching teammates, interacting with gadgets, and, most significantly, kissing your folks.

Our Design Director, Joe Walsh, began by specializing in the texture of our character and controls. After the fundamentals, he explored mechanics for gamers to work collectively in enjoyable methods. The extra we leaned into the tongue physics, the extra hilarious the multiplayer interactions turned. It felt like the proper match to mix 3D puzzle platforming with a friendslop extraction sport.

While many extraction friendslop video games lean into horror and darker aesthetics, our Artwork Director, Dan Hoang went the wrong way. We love these video games, however we thought there was additionally room for one thing extra lighthearted, goofy, and vibrant. With this in thoughts, we got down to make Frog Sqwad extremely saturated, daring, and memorable. Dan established the design of our frog characters actually early in growth.

As soon as the look was set, our animator, Kashif Ahmed introduced the frog to life. Since we established the artwork and animation fashion so early within the venture, we had a very expressive frog bouncing round placeholder cubes. Even with out textures within the surroundings, the sport was already making us chortle. That’s been one in all our inside compasses all through growth. If we have been having enjoyable and laughing whereas playtesting the sport, we knew we have been not off course.

Now that the frogs have been capable of transfer round and work together within the swamp, we wanted to start out engaged on some sewers for them to discover. Our Engineering Director, Steve Taylor, developed a customized procedural era system which locations hand-crafted rooms after which joins them collectively utilizing a sequence of pipes and tunnels. Steve labored intently with our degree designers to verify the sewer layouts felt intentional, difficult, and most significantly, enjoyable.

However what makes a ‘enjoyable’ sewer room? Initially, our designs have been extra cerebral, with logic puzzles and brain-teasers that wanted to be solved with a purpose to entry any meals. As soon as we began taking part in these in context, nevertheless, we discovered that gamers have already got sufficient stress from the time stress, making the entire thing really feel just like the world’s largest escape room. The tone of Frog Sqwad is far more manic than that, and gamers had a significantly better time as soon as rooms had clearer, extra lively targets that allowed you to get caught in with tonguing stuff.

We additionally discovered that rooms which have a transparent identification are properly obtained. Shouting “I acquired frogspawned within the room with the large historic pyramid” is much more useful than “…I’m on the bit with the pipes in?”. We attempt to verify each room has a second of co-op in there as well- whether or not it’s opening a lunch field, holding a door open, or slingshotting a hotdog throughout a lava chasm, we’re all the time making an attempt to nudge you to strategy content material as at the very least a duo!

We began out with very maze-like sewers, filled with twists and turns. This seemed nice from a hen’s-eye view, however made getting round an actual slog, because the sewer must wrap all the best way round bigger rooms. Issues felt significantly better going for one thing easy and straight – every room is all the time solely a room width away. We might then layer in changes to maintain issues attention-grabbing, like setting rooms again from the primary path and including just a few bends, whereas retaining the primary path by means of the sewer simply navigable and intuitive.

Bringing our first sport to Xbox has been a wild trip for the reason that first prototype in June 2025. We are able to’t await you all to hop within the sport and test it out for yourselves! Get able to change into a frog with your folks! Frog Sqwad is coming to Xbox Collection X|S, Xbox on PC, and Xbox Cloud June 2026 and will probably be accessible with Xbox Sport Move.