Category: PHB Series

Hey Poptropicans! 😀

I recently came across a couple of interesting Poptropica PowerPoint presentations by Christopher Barney, a Creator thought to be Triton. These were made for the Game Developers’ Conference (GDC), the largest annual gathering of professional video game developers.

In 2013, Chris spoke on the topic of Poptropica Friends, and in 2015, the talk was on Poptropica Realms. As you go through these PowerPoints, you may already be familiar with some of the info presented, but keep in mind that this was for other game-makers who may not know much about Poptropica. While there are a lot of slides to sift through, it’s still worth a look!

GDC 2013 | 100 Million Friends You Can Never Know

In this Poptropica Friends presentation, we see the inside of the Creators’ process in creating the Friends feature. Below are some of the more interesting slides (it looks like a lot, but this is only part of it!). Click to enlarge the images, or click here view the full presentation!

Interspersed between some neat graphics, we can find a lot of information:

• Pop Quizzes were originally going to be text-based.
• Photos were made to reward progress as players went through islands. More than that, they were originally going to be Badges! This explains (as we can see on one of the slides) a sneak peek of Badge Albums we uncovered years ago.
• The Creators carefully considered our experience with ads, and decided to spare us from bad ad placement. We appreciate it!
• One slide shows a scene that appears to be from Shark Tooth Island, but there’s a hay tipi beside an “Enter Poptropica” sign that goes to the blimp. Is this an early idea for account creation?
• Early designs for the Friends feature was Facebook-like with several vertical screens, and a player room with platforms was also considered (not sure how this may be different from common rooms).
• The Map was originally going to have zooming, but it was too disorienting.
• Girls are likelier than boys to change their mood on their profile. Happy and excited are the most popular moods. Bashful is the least popular.
• Some Poptropicans choose a different country identity than where they’re from. (Side note: Why do they recognize Hong Kong as its own ‘country’ here, yet Hong Kong is not an option in the actual game when you select your country on your profile?)
• Tribe members’ “play habits” conform to the theme of the tribe they’re in.
• Tribal home pages and challenges may be coming in the future.

2015 | Turning 100,000,000 Friends Into Game Developers

A couple of years later, Chris presented a sequel to the previous talk, this time focusing on Poptropica Realms and how it adds user-generated content to Poptropica. Check out some of these noteworthy slides, or click here view the full presentation!

Some interesting takeaways from this presentation include:

• There are about 8 million active users on Poptropica per month.
• “Success makes innovation harder.” Hmm, food for thought.
• Realms was created in part to give a new gameplay experience that still felt “Poptropica”.
• Poptropica has to prioritize COPPA standards (children’s online privacy) when they allowing any form of sharing/user content.
• Realms was originally thought of as a single infinite random world, and eventually became many worlds.
• There’s some technology jargon in there for those interested.
• Not everything went right the first try: prototypes had no tutorial, intros were too long or short, etc.
• They sure got this right though: “Raising our (under age) players’ desire for membership does not increase their parents’ desire to buy it for them.”
• Earlier Realms designs lacked a strong art style, player progression, motivation to build, and narrative direction.
• Limited features meant there was not a lot to do for the less creatively-inclined player.
• On average, Realms players spend over twice as much time on the site than those playing islands. Among the stats, 1.4 million players use Realms.
• Sharing Realms would take more time to implement, so they held off on releasing that feature. Lots of public Realms have been visited, but only by about 30,000 users (not a lot compared to the other statistics).
• Future plans include tying Realms with Friends, catering to more player types, multi-user Realms, tying island gameplay to Realms, and more.
• Out of about 40 developers at Poptropica, the team dedicated to Realms is capped at 4, so that others could work on other Poptropica projects outside of Realms.
• Chris Barney thinks it’s funny to end his presentations with an image of the Jersey Devil, often cited by players as one of the scariest Poptropica moments.

Well, that concludes these fascinating Poptropica presentations from a game developer’s perspective! Hope you enjoyed these insights! 😀

Stay popping, Poptropicans. 🐠🐠

Continued from Part 1…

(The remaining AUTHORS are sitting in BLAKE’S office, as STRANGE MONSTER and POPULAR WOLF hold the door shut.)

Blake: Wow, I actually thought shooting them again would stop them.

Fishy: You just made it worse! Now they’re after us.

Blake: Well maybe someone should pay for lessons to teach me how to read, eh? How was I supposed to know the label said “Puppy Love?”

HP: I honestly thought it would turn them into dogs or something. But no, now they want to kill us.

Skinny Ice: Honestly? Not how I wanted to go down.

Ylimegirl: Yeah, I know. I wanted to go down on a beach in Paris, shooting down the enemy armies as my fighter plane barrels into the ocean..

(The ENTIRE GROUP stares in shock.)

Ylimegirl: What? Too vivid?

Blake: Um, yeah. So anyway, how do we stop them? Taking them down isn’t an option, since two of them are our own.

GH: There’s so many of them!

Paul: Well maybe SOMEONE shouldn’t have released them into the streets of Back Lot Island!

GH: You know, I thought that would work. You know, zombies LOVE Queequeg’s.

Paul: Have you been reading the landlord’s collection of zombie fanfiction again?

GH: Maybeeeee…

(The DOOR shatters, as SD pokes her head inside.)

SD: Hey guys! You guys wanna let me in there? I can show you the love you desire!

PW: They’re breaking down the door! What do we do?

Blake: It’s quite simple, actually. You see, if I just walk over to this crate and open my “Emergency Plot Point Kit,” I retrieve my..

(BLAKE pulls out a small bottle of black liquid.)

Blake: ANTI-LOVE SERUM!

WKF: Really? You couldn’t have pulled that stuff out when you shot them originally?

Blake: Shhhh…don’t ruin my moment.

(BLAKE aims carefully, and hits SD in the arm with an arrow dipped in the Anti-Love Serum. She quickly reverts to normal.)

Blake: Thank you, Plot Point Kit! Now, everyone grab a bow from the crate and start shooting!

(LATER *since I didn’t want to write the same sequence over and over…*)

Blake: Well, it looks like everything worked out alright in the end!

HP: It is a shame that nobody but us will ever see that epic action sequence we went through.

SD: Well, it is  a kid’s blog!

(THEY ALL laugh.)

Blake: Now, come on. Who’s ready for some Valentine’s pizza?

(The CROWD cheers as they all walk out of the entrance. Enter TALL CACTUS and CUDDLY KNUCKLE, drenched in mud.)

TC: Hello?  We made it!

CK: Yeah, whenever the bus crashed, we ended up in a mud bank, and went on a journey of self-discovery!

TC: Cuddly, I think the special’s over..

(A strange BLACK FIGURE materializes.)

Black Figure: Not necessarily… How would you two like to join my Monster Army?

TC: Gladly!

CK: Yeah, we’re sick of getting 2-paragraph cameos at the end of things.

Black Figure: Excellent. Let us begin…

To be continued in the 2016 PHB Halloween Special…

Hope you enjoyed the PHB Valentine’s Special!

Happy Valentine’s Day! ❤