This is the home page for Batrachians, a clone of the 1982 Frog Bog video game for the Intellivision by Mattel Electronics.

Batrachians 0.1.2 is out (2009-02-26). This version links with the new flatzebra 0.1.3.

This release fixes a few compilation and portability problems, and one typo in the displayed instructions. The principle of the game has not changed since version 0.1.0. I still haven't bothered to draw actual frogs and flies. Check out the screen shot to see how ridiculous the game looks... I may eventually get around to draw those things with my limited talent, unless such drawings magically appear out of nowhere...

Requirements:
SDL, SDL_image and SDL_mixer on a GNU/Linux system. The sources might compile on other Unix-like systems.

Download

You need to get batrachians, flatzebra, SDL, SDL_image and SDL_mixer. The "-devel" RPM packages are only useful if you want to work on the Batrachians source code. (Note that all four games on this site require version 0.1.2 or 0.1.3 of flatzebra. If you have previous versions of those games, installing flatzebra 0.1.2 or 0.1.3 will require you to download and install new versions of the games.)

md5sum values of some of these files

If you want to build binary RPMs by yourself and need an introduction to the subject, I wrote a brief RPM Building Crash Course (also available in French). All of my source archives contain an RPM .spec file.

The sources are in C++ and can be compiled and installed with the familiar ./configure && make && make install sequence.

License

Batrachians and the "flatzebra" library are free software released under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later.

SDL is a free library distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License.

Documentation

Game Play

The command batrachians runs the game. If you use GNOME, you should see an entry for Batrachians in the Games menu.

You control the red frog, and your goal is to eat more flies and score more points than the computer's frog, which is gray. A game lasts three minutes, during which day becomes night.

Above your frog, you will see crosshairs of the same color. You can move it with the four arrow keys. The crosshairs designate the highest point of the jump you want your frog to make. Typically, you should put the crosshairs near the fly you want to catch, and then hit the left Ctrl key to jump.

While in the air, you must press the left Shift key to make your frog stick out its tongue. Your frog will eat any fly that its tongue touches. Avoid falling in the water, as your frog will waste time while it swims back to a lily pad.

These controls may be difficult to master at first. The original Intellivision game let the player use the 16-direction disk to specify the direction of the jump. I had to invent something different...

The Escape key quits the game.

Frog Bog

For more information on the original Frog Bog game, see the Frog Bog section of the Intellivision Lives! site.

I did not try to replicate the behavior of the original game exactly.

Contact

I can be reached (in French or English) by email at sarrazip at sarrazip dot com. My main Web page is Pierre and his Poor Pathetic Page (or La Petite Page Plate de Pierre in French).

Screenshot