After we shaped Panic Stations in June 2025, we didn’t need to spend years in pre-production. We had a aim to launch our first recreation inside 12 months. We wished to maneuver quick. Having labored collectively beforehand, we jumped straight into improvement. 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 rapidly found that frogs are the last word platforming protagonists. Their tongues even have a stunning 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 pals.

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 grew to become. It felt like the proper match to mix 3D puzzle platforming with a friendslop extraction recreation.

While many extraction friendslop video games lean into horror and darker aesthetics, our Artwork Director, Dan Hoang went the other 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 improvement.

As soon as the look was set, our animator, Kashif Ahmed introduced the frog to life. Since we established the artwork and animation type so early within the mission, we had a very expressive frog bouncing round placeholder cubes. Even with out textures within the surroundings, the sport was already making us giggle. That’s been certainly one of our inner compasses all through improvement. 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 in a position to transfer round and work together within the swamp, we wanted to begin 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 collection of pipes and tunnels. Steve labored intently with our stage designers to ensure 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 view 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 way more manic than that, and gamers had a significantly better time as soon as rooms had clearer, extra lively objectives that allowed you to get caught in with tonguing stuff.

We additionally discovered that rooms which have a transparent id are effectively obtained. Shouting “I received frogspawned within the room with the massive historic pyramid” is much more useful than “…I’m on the bit with the pipes in?”. We attempt to ensure 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 method content material as not less than a duo!

We began out with very maze-like sewers, stuffed with twists and turns. This appeared nice from a fowl’s-eye view, however made getting round an actual slog, because the sewer must wrap all the way in which 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 principle path and including a couple of bends, whereas holding the principle path by the sewer simply navigable and intuitive.

Bringing our first recreation to Xbox has been a wild experience for the reason that first prototype in June 2025. We are able to’t watch for you all to hop within the recreation and test it out for yourselves! Get able to grow to be a frog with your pals! Frog Sqwad is coming to Xbox Sequence X|S, Xbox on PC, and Xbox Cloud June 2026 and might be out there with Xbox Recreation Go.

Frog Sqwad

Panic Stations

☆☆☆☆☆

★★★★★

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Storm The Sewers for the glory of the Swamp King! Swing, bounce, catapult your pals, and eat eat EAT till you develop right into a humongous Megafrog. A co-op extraction puzzle-platformer for as much as 8 gamers. Squad up together with your frog mates for a friendslop social gathering on this slapstick physics journey!