Meet the Frog

Hide your beloved pet slimes, because the frogs are hopping your way! The Wild Update is coming soon, which means these little amphibians (and some other new friends) will soon find a place in your worlds, and hopefully your hearts. But before you welcome someone into your base, it’s customary to get to know them a bit – so I chased down our very own Vanilla Gameplay Developer, Alexander Östman, to chat a bit about our new sticky-tongued friends. 

Let’s start at the beginning: when did the idea of frogs first come up? 

Alexander: A while back, both the goat and the frog were in the same mob vote, but the goat won – so my personal headcanon is that this is the frog’s comeback after losing to the goat!  

On a more serious note, when planning The Wild Update, we knew we wanted to have mangrove swamps in there, and it made sense to introduce the frogs at the same time since they would live there. They were also the optimal mob to make the existing swamps more interesting and create a connection to the mangrove swamps. 

Also, it’s not a big leap to add frogs to Minecraft because they’re such iconic animals and we could use more amphibians in Minecraft. We added the axolotl in Caves & Cliffs: Part I, but I think we could always have more real-life amphibians. It’s also cool to add really fascinating made-up mobs, but I really like the touch of realism you get with mobs inspired by real life. 

So how come frogs eat slimes? They don’t seem particularly appetizing, but maybe the frogs are onto something! 

Alexander: The slimes are natural inhabitants of swamps, and we knew that’s where the frogs would live too. So why not just have the frogs eat the smallest slime? And then we started prototyping and thought it was super fun how the frog would eat the slime and then burp out a slime ball. 

Additionally, we knew that there would be different variants of frogs, and we wanted each of them to have something unique about them – so we came up with the froglights. We thought it would be cool to have a block that emits light and is similar in appearance to its corresponding frog. But how would the frog produce it? We figured that if the frogs ate small slimes, they could also eat the small magma cubes since they’re very similar in appearance. Basically, if a frog sees a small magma cube it thinks it’s a small slime and thinks to itself “Yeah, I know those are yummy!” and eats it. Once it realizes its mistake, it spits out a cool shiny block! 

Aww! Such simple creatures. But slimes weren’t the mob they were supposed to eat initially...

Alexander: No, the original idea was for them to eat fireflies, but when the community let us know that they can be poisonous to many real-world frogs, we started working on a new source of food – slime and magma cubes. We did something similar with parrots back in the day. They originally ate chocolate chip cookies, but you should never feed a parrot chocolate in real life because it’s very poisonous to them.

After we made that design change for the frogs, the scope for fireflies was smaller. When we had to choose where to put our efforts for this update, we decided to keep working on other features that we felt added more value to the game.

Somewhere along the way, there was another mob that the frogs developed an appetite for. Can you walk us through what that was and what happened behind the scenes? 

Alexander: When I first implemented the eating behavior, the frog was hardcoded to only eat the slime. But when we came up with the froglights, we had to extend that to other entities, namely magma cubes. 

So we decided to make the “eat mob” behavior of the frogs to be editable for our creators, so they could also allow the frogs to eat different mobs if they wanted to, or even create new mobs that could eat any other mob. When testing this behavior, I made the frogs able to eat goats just because I thought it’d be funny – and it worked! The frogs were eating the goats and we were very pleased. 

Not long after that, we shipped the first beta release of the frog. It was a great success, people loved the frog and we were getting some amazing feedback. We posted about it in the afternoon Swedish time and I watched people reacting to it on Twitter until I went to bed. It was really great. 

The day after, I woke up to a message telling me to take a look at Twitter. When I did, I saw that a community member had posted a video of frogs going around eating goats! They even had a huge goat farm and the frogs were picking them off one by one. Turns out I forgot to remove the code that made frogs eat goats for the beta release! I literally fell off my chair laughing, I was SO embarrassed, but it was also absolutely hilarious. 

I, of course, then immediately fixed it, but the funny thing is I got so much pushback from the community when the fix came in! So many people tagged me saying that I shouldn’t have removed such a cool feature and that they wanted the goat-eating frogs back. To this day, someone occasionally tags me to bring back the goat-eating frog. It’s even become a bit of an inside joke in our team.