Dev Log #1

Hi everyone,

Alexandre here, founder of La Grange, developer, and game director on Toads of the Bayou. I’ve been incredibly happy to share the progress we made on the game since we revealed it in March (on my birthday, sheer coincidence but still!). Developing Toads has been a crazy journey, and I want to share a bit more on that part too.

Before diving into more details, I suppose the most obvious question one could ask is: why the toads?

To be honest, at the beginning of Toads of the Bayou…there were no toads at all (but please, don’t leave yet!). Indeed, when I started working on the project in late 2020, the core idea was simple: a city-building game with a countdown to boss fights. The way player would manage resources would increase or reduce the countdown, and the goal was to use those resources to prepare for the next combat. I always wanted the game to be mildly spooky, so the characters at the time were living Jack O-Lanterns!

After exploring that concept for a bit, I felt like the pumpkins were a bit too much and did not look friendly enough. It felt a bit off to try to protect a city from the forces of Evil when the creatures you play look evil themselves. This is where I started considering the toads. All my life, I have been reading Disney comics trips, and especially Don Rosa’s Uncle Scrooge stories. Yet, it actually took me a long time to figure out what felt so right in those stories: the character, despite being animals, are utterly human.

At this point, everything regarding the setting clicked very fast. It is important to mention that the studio is based where I grew up, in Château-Thierry (North of France). This (very) small city is known for being the hometown of Jean de la Fontaine, a very famous French author from the 17th century. He wrote a tremendous amount of poems featuring humanlike animals, delivering subtle yet very critical messages toward the Power at the time. I suppose that his legacy is so important in my education that animals quickly felt like a perfect subject for sympathetic characters.

There might be a lot of other reasons for why I decided to go with toads in the first place, but one thing is for sure: I never regretted this choice! Once I fully embraced toads as the main protagonists of this universe, the general direction of the game became very organic. The setting was a very important early choice to me, and even three years after it all started, I’m still super excited when I’m looking at my little toad heroes.

That is all for this first dev log! I’m already super excited to speak more about the setting of the game, the choice of the Bayou, the voodoo aesthetic, so we’ll be covering that in detail in future posts!

Please let us know in the comments if you have any questions, it will be a real pleasure to answer them. Also, feel free to join the Discord server as well to follow the latest updates on the game!

Cheers!