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

When we formed Panic Stations in June 2025, we didn’t want to spend years in pre-production. We had a goal to launch our first game within 12 months. We wanted to move fast. Having worked together previously, we jumped straight into development. Our mission was simple: Maximize fun per minute. To keep that momentum, everyone at Panic Stations is hands-on. We’re all in the engine, breaking things, making them better, breaking them again and then finding success!

We started work on Frog Sqwad almost immediately. We quickly discovered that frogs are the ultimate platforming protagonists. Their tongues actually have a surprising amount of uses. They can be used as grappling hooks for verticality, swinging for momentum, catapults for launching teammates, interacting with items, and, most importantly, kissing your friends.

Our Design Director, Joe Walsh, started by focusing on the feel of our character and controls. After the basics, he explored mechanics for players to work together in fun ways. The more we leaned into the tongue physics, the more hilarious the multiplayer interactions became. It felt like the perfect fit to combine 3D puzzle platforming with a friendslop extraction game.

Whilst many extraction friendslop games lean into horror and darker aesthetics, our Art Director, Dan Hoang went the opposite direction. We love those games, but we thought there was also room for something more lighthearted, goofy, and colourful. With this in mind, we set out to make Frog Sqwad highly saturated, bold, and memorable. Dan established the design of our frog characters really early in development.

Once the look was set, our animator, Kashif Ahmed brought the frog to life. Since we established the art and animation style so early in the project, we had a really expressive frog bouncing around placeholder cubes. Even without textures in the environment, the game was already making us laugh. That’s been one of our internal compasses throughout development. If we were having fun and laughing while playtesting the game, we knew we were heading in the right direction.

Now that the frogs were able to move around and interact in the swamp, we needed to start working on some sewers for them to explore. Our Engineering Director, Steve Taylor, developed a custom procedural generation system which places hand-crafted rooms and then joins them together using a series of pipes and tunnels. Steve worked closely with our level designers to make sure the sewer layouts felt intentional, challenging, and most importantly, fun.

But what makes a ‘fun’ sewer room? Initially, our designs were more cerebral, with logic puzzles and brain-teasers that needed to be solved in order to access any food. Once we started playing these in context, however, we found that players already have enough stress from the time pressure, making the whole thing feel like the world’s biggest escape room. The tone of Frog Sqwad is much more manic than that, and players had a much better time once rooms had clearer, more active goals that allowed you to get stuck in with tonguing stuff.

We also found that rooms that have a clear identity are well received. Shouting “I got frogspawned in the room with the huge ancient pyramid” is a lot more helpful than “…I’m at the bit with the pipes in?”. We try to make sure every room has a moment of co-op in there as well- whether it’s opening a lunch box, holding a door open, or slingshotting a hotdog across a lava chasm, we’re always trying to nudge you to approach content as at least a duo!

We started out with very maze-like sewers, full of twists and turns. This looked great from a bird’s-eye view, but made getting around a real slog, as the sewer would have to wrap all the way around larger rooms. Things felt much better going for something simple and straight – each room is always only a room width away. We could then layer in adjustments to keep things interesting, like setting rooms back from the main path and adding a few bends, while keeping the main path through the sewer easily navigable and intuitive.

Bringing our first game to Xbox has been a wild ride since the first prototype in June 2025. We can’t wait for you all to hop in the game and check it out for yourselves! Get ready to become a frog with your friends! Frog Sqwad is coming to Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, and Xbox Cloud June 2026 and will be available with Xbox Game Pass.

Frog Sqwad

Panic Stations

☆☆☆☆☆

★★★★★

Storm The Sewers for the glory of the Swamp King! Swing, jump, catapult your friends, and eat eat EAT until you grow into a humongous Megafrog. A co-op extraction puzzle-platformer for up to 8 players. Squad up with your frog friends for a friendslop party in this slapstick physics adventure!