When Grace Bruxner was growing up in Darwin, she wouldn't play video games, she would just watch others play.
"Or I would play games in this very passive way where I wasn't engaging with the game itself," she tells ABC Arts.
"I'm not a gamer, I don't play many games at all. I've never really identified with that subculture."
But she was always illustrating her own little worlds.
"No one was really paying attention to anything that I would create, because it's just a drawing and they look at it for five seconds and they're like, 'Great, nice drawing,'" she says.
"And then I thought about how when you play a game, you have to sit down and really concentrate on it … It is the perfect medium for people to pay attention to me — people will just have to live in my world for a little bit."
So she decided to make her own games.
Fast forward to 2022: At just 25 years old, Bruxner has completed her magnum opus — a trilogy of comedy adventure video games about the second-best detective around.
Frog Detective and its three instalments — The Haunted Island, The Case of the Invisible Wizard and Corruption at Cowboy County — have found an impressively large audience for a game made almost entirely by Bruxner and programmer Thomas Bowker (under the moniker Worm Club) in Melbourne.
That audience is only growing, as their little indie game is now available to the more than 25 million people who are subscribed to Xbox Game Pass.
Those who pick up the games are treated to a surprise appearance by Bruxner herself.
The games designer explains: "Putting myself in the game is just saying, 'Hi, it's me. I made this,' in a very simple sense, and just because I think it's funny.
"But I think it's also probably pretty good to have a visible woman game developer who won't let you forget that she made [the game]."
The origins of Frog Detective
After Bruxner graduated from high school, she worked full-time as she developed a portfolio to get into the Bachelor of Games Design at Melbourne's RMIT University.
The first games she made — including The Fish Market and Alien Caseno — were experimental.
"I didn't like the idea of making games that have a lot of mechanics and systems," she explains.
"But I did realise that if I wanted to be commercially successful or be a game developer in the traditional sense that I would need to branch out a little bit … I needed to know that I could survive in the industry."
And so she decided to make Frog Detective — and make it "a more traditional game".
In The Haunted Island, a Frog Detective Game, a frog simply called ''The Detective" must help the inhabitants of a mysterious island with a ghost problem. The case is solved by exploring the island and interacting with its weird and wacky residents.
"It's [Agatha Christie's] Poirot meets The Muppets," says Bruxner.
Bruxner had tried her hand at surrealist stand-up comedy in high school, but Frog Detective was her first attempt at more formal joke writing.
"It was a very new avenue for me … and I was not very confident about it," she recalls.
Despite her uneasiness, the final result is a game filled with charming characters and laugh-out-loud dialogue.
Frog Detective finds an audience
Bruxner made the first Frog Detective over six months — with her partner at the time, Bowker — as a final-year university project.
She says few people in her cohort released their games commercially.
"It's not the traditional thing to do … Commercial game development generally takes a lot longer than we had for that project," Bruxner says.
While she was studying, Bruxner also worked at Melbourne indie games company League of Geeks, an experience that exposed her to the inner workings of the games industry.
"As someone who didn't really know anything about business or the games industry … that made it easy to branch out a bit," she says.
Bruxner's RMIT teachers also encouraged her to submit the game to competitions and conventions: It won the title of 'Most Fantastic' at the 2018 Fantastic Arcade in Texas; was nominated for a 2019 Independent Games Festival award; and was selected for the Day of the Devs at the 2018 Game Developers Conference (GDC).
Bruxner describes the success of the first Frog Detective as a "slow burn". It ended up finding a dedicated audience online, including on Twitter, where she regularly posts, and chat app Discord.
"I just really liked the game and wanted to talk about it all the time and I think that lends itself to marketing a game — if you are obsessed with it," Bruxner says.
Bruxner says fans started gathering together to perform dialogue from the game and they showed up to physical events — most recently at this year's Day of the Devs.
"It's absolutely bizarre how we've managed to basically do no community building or management and then there's this lovely community just showing up and they behave themselves."
The mystery continues
Bruxner had intended to make and release Frog Detective while she was studying, and then leave her hero frog behind.
"Then it blew up after that, and I was stuck — but in a fun way," she says.
Bruxner and Bowker ended up taking the demo of the Frog Detective sequel to GDC in 2019, pitching it to various publishers and game development funds.
They told people they had recouped the cost of the first Frog Detective within six months.
"Which was technically true because we did have a budget of zero dollars," Bruxner laughs.
"I don't know how much we'd made, we hadn't made that much but it was like a lot for us. It was successful enough. The publishers and investors were like, 'Oh, that's good. Obviously, this is going somewhere.'"
With that chutzpah, they secured funding to finish the second and make the third instalment of the Frog Detective saga — primarily from Superhot Presents, a new fund from the indie team behind the hit game Superhot.
This meant Bruxner, fresh out of university, and Bowker could work full-time on Frog Detective for the next few years.
In Frog Detective 2: The Case of the Invisible Wizard, released at the end of 2019, our determined amphibian must get to the bottom of who spoiled a parade for an invisible wizard, the newest resident of Warlock Woods.
By this time, more and more streamers (including those with huge followings, such as Limmy and Jerma) started playing the game.
Suddenly, half a million copies of the first two Frog Detective games had been sold.
"I was living off this assumption that everyone was buying it just to be nice to me," Bruxner admits.
"I didn't really think that anyone was super into it until we hit that mark and I was like, 'Oh, I don't know half a million people. People actually probably like it.'"
The games industry
Writer and critic Jini Maxwell wrote in ScreenHub that "the unique wit and humour of the Frog Detective series has helped define the face of Australian indie games".
Bruxner is self-effacing about this assessment, but explains: "Melbourne is a playful place and Australians are playful. I think it's a testament to how things can get done [here] with a small team and keeping the scale small."
She says VicScreen (previously Film Victoria) funding has been key to the success of her games and other distinctive local works (Bruxner cites Olivia Haines's upcoming game Surf Club).
"It's honestly the best thing that the Melbourne games scene has in terms of fostering creativity — a funding body that wants you to make and create cool things."
She says investors that were originally indie game studios — like Superhot — are reinvesting money into smaller games.
"They're more willing to take risks on games that they are just interested in, rather than [games] they know will definitely sell," says Bruxner.
It was partly due to Superhot that Frog Detective is now available on the Xbox's subscription service Game Pass.
"It means we're getting this new audience that we didn't have before … We don't really care about the money, we just want people to play it," Bruxner says.
Goodbye Frog Detective
In Frog Detective 3: Corruption at Cowboy County, released in October, our hero goes west on the trail of some missing hats (even though he can't wear hats) but in the process uncovers a rot that goes to the heart of the criminal justice system.
"We were really worried, because we are closing out the series, that people would want more. So we spent a lot of time making sure the ending would really feel like an ending," says Bruxner.
"I think we're super lucky that that landed and people are happy with how it ended."
Now, Bruxner is taking a little break.
"When I was in university, I didn't give myself the option to fail so I worked far too hard and really burnt myself out … I'm still recovering from how hard I worked for all these years."
After unexpectedly dedicating the last five years to the games, Bruxner feels that now is the right time to conclude that version of the Frog Detective story.
"I am the sort of person that just wants to make little things quickly, so spending this much time on anything just exhausts me," she says.
"For my own creative stuff, I just want to make something new and weird and I think if people like Frog Detective, they'll probably like whatever else I make next."
