Back Lot Island, Sneak Peeks

It disappeared as quickly as it came. (Back Lot Island!)

If you’d go to the Creator’s Blog right now, you’d see a post that looks like this:

Picture yourself on Poptropica

When you travel somewhere, the best way to remember your trip is by taking photos. The same is true when you journey into Poptropica.

Ever since we launched the Photo Album feature last year as part of Poptropica Friends, we’ve been adding four new photos to every Island. At this point, there are 133 unique photos that you can collect, simply by playing through each Island!

But Poptropica photos are even better than the ones you take on vacation, because you can actually costumize off of what you were wearing in each one. The same is true when you look through your friends’ photo albums!

If you haven’t opened your photo album for awhile, take look — you might be surprised at what you find.

However… that wasn’t the post it was at first.

*cue DUN DUN DUNNN*

When this was first posted, it was talking about something else… here’s what it said:

Sneaky. Very Sneaky.

“What’s the next Island going to be?” That’s the question we hear over and over when we talk to our fans. Well, if you want a hint as to what we’re working on next, the best thing to do is visit Sneak Peeks in the Daily Pop!

In Sneak Peeks, we post concept art and other work in development for unannounced Islands. If you’d been checking Sneak Peeks through January and February and seen images like the one posted above, you probably would have surmised that we were working on a movie-themed Island… long before we announced Back Lot Island!

Sneak Peeks is updated five days a week. All you need to do to check it out is to visit Poptropica and click on the “Daily Pop” icon to see the latest.

We’re usually working on more than one Island at a time. Can you guess what we might be working on next?

If you peruse that post a little bit, you’ll see this set of words: Back Lot Island.  I tested to see if the Creators bought that domain name and sure enough….

http://www.backlotisland.com/

They did. So I guess we have our island name now! You think you could let that one disappear like you did with Cryptids Island, didn’t ya? Well, you were caught. 😛

BT out!

Steamworks Island

The Hub: Stage 2

The hub! The hub! What’s up with the hub?

Is it a robot, so big and so tall?

Or just a building? Is that really all?

Is it a HUBby, someone who’s fat?

Or maybe a factory! Now how about that?

A really tall tower? A dirty one to scrub?

The Hub! The Hub! What IS with the hub?

Yeah, my poetry is very lame. 😐 But I thought this post needed some spark, to make it stand out. 😉

…ANYway, the new PCB post, The Hub! 

O, the Hub! The Hub! What dangers you hold?

Random Person: GET ON WITH THE POST!!!!! 

Green Boa: Sor-ry 😐

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Time for a pop quiz: Can you tell the difference between the picture we posted yesterday and the one below?

Most of the background elements still look the same as they did yesterday: flat and monochromatic. We’re adding more detail to the Hub on Steamworks Island. We’ve colored in some of the more important foreground objects. They really pop off your screen!

That doorway in the upper-lefthand side of the screen looks mighty intriguing, wouldn’t you say?

The Hub certainly is taking more shape, more realism, more excitement! I still can’t wait to find out what Steamworks island will be like, any way, Cya laters Alligators! 🙂
…….. ALLIGATORS?!! :O *runs for life*
Pranks, Web Development

Poptropica Fools!

April Fools Day, 2009

aprilfoolsplan

April Fools day. A day for foolery and miscious. And PHB had a go at it.

The logo used in the PHB April Fools, 2009 Prank.
The logo used in the PHB April Fools, 2009 Prank.

For 3 days before, during, and after Aprils Fools day, the PHB team changed the whole site to appear as if it was now serving another online game called “Club Penguin”. And boy did PHB fool alot of people!

Crying, thrashing, tearing, yelling, “WE WANT PHB BE BACK! WE WANT PHB BACK!”. We got dozens of comments and emails of pure panic that the site had mysteriously changed over night.

Not only was it the readers that got fooled but the Poptropica Creators Blog (PCB) got fooled too:

Rest In Peace – Help Blog

We wanted to acknowledge a certain “Help Blog” for Poptropica that recently changed formats. They had a lot of talent, and we’ll miss them terribly. Good luck guys.

Whether or not this was the creators just joining in on the foolery, or maybe they were just completly fooled, or maybe they were just talking about another site (unlikely 😉 ).

So what on earth did we do to make it look so much like we had changed.

Heres what the site looked like.
Heres what the site looked like.

First off Codien designed the header, making it as real as possible as if we were really a help blog serving Club Penguin.

Now we had to write the posts and pages.  We were stuck. We had to write lots of posts and pages in less then 3 days. We couldn’t do it. So we emailed a very good friend of ours and asked her if we could use her posts for the prank.

This person was Happy Pippi – Happy Pippi owns a  wonderful, amazing, well organized blog involving Club Penguin. Her blogged is filled with amazing posts and pages.

When we asked she was very happy in letting us use her posts (Suggesting the name 😉 ).

We would like everybody to give a very big thanks to Happy Pippi. THANKS HAPPY PIPPI!

Please visit her amazing site by clicking on this link:   http://happypippi.wordpress.com/
Or you can access it by clicking on the link button saying Happy Pippi in the right hand bar.

We will add more stuff to this latter. With a more detailed explanation and behind the scenes work.

April Fools!

-PHB Team-

Scary Tomato
Smockers
Codien