First post of 2016! I'm going to kick the year off with an exciting start by showing off some evidence and sneak peeks, relating to an upcoming overhaul of the Home/Tutorial island on Poptropica! And it's quite a big update.
First of all, a lot of recent sneak peeks starting from mid-November of last year have some surprising similarities: they all hint at some sort of large ship. In the first one, you see the distinctive style of Home Island: the building in the foreground hovering on rocks above an ocean full of Poptropica Islands below.
From these, it looks like there's soon going to be a ship-themed update to the Home island. Instead of the current version with shops spaced out on a street, the new one will be a large ship with doors to various shops and interactive things pertaining to your Poptropican. Cool!
Looking at the last two, it seems like your Island Medallions will be showcased in a room on Home Island as well, rather than on the Friends page as they are right now. This brings up a lot of interesting possibilities: will everything eventually be converted from its place on the classic Home screen (like Friends and the Daily Pop) to rooms on Home Island? Maybe Friends could even become a sort of common room!
But it gets even better. Poking around in the unreleased files of Home Island, I found these highly interesting scenes and schematics which (partially) confirm my theories:
Skydock
This first image is a preliminary look at what the Main Street of the new Home Island will look like; apparently it'll be called "Skydock." The buildings in this image will lead to the rooms below (click to view full size):
 Town Hall |  Saloon |
These are actually scenes by the Creators that are in the earliest stages. Even though they're mainly just line drawings and text on a black background, the descriptions are already getting me excited for the update :). It looks like the Creators are planning a lot of creative additions to Home Island this year.
Another thing that I found while looking at the code for Home Island, is that these rooms (Skydock, Town Hall, and Saloon) might even be common rooms! That's right, you might be able to chat, friend, and battle with other players while also enjoying Home Island. Now I'm not 100% sure if that's true based on the code, but it would be a reasonable enough assumption ;)
It looks like the Creators themselves are still working out the details though, like for instance how the rooms will look like and how they'll be connected, so the final product may be different from what I've outlined here. But so far this looks like the gist of it. And I'm definitely looking forward to this huge update!
Ever wondered why exactly the medallion shards are scattered all over the place when you play the Tutorial, and why there's a pilot there talking to you? Well, another update to Home Island (that might be coming sooner than the ship-related one) gives the backstory to that. This dialog file shows what seems to be you talking with the pilot while you're both up in the blimp:
You: The view is great from up here! |  |
Then the pilot offers you a choice to either do the medallion-shard-finding tutorial or to go to Home. So basically, the medallion is in pieces down there because the Pilot dropped it from his own balloon. Interesting backstory.
Anyway, those are all the exclusive Home Island sneak peeks that I've got so far! Looks like the upcoming update is full of fun new things to do or to just enjoy looking at. The Creators haven't officially announced it yet (though they did give hints of it in their New Year's post), so we don't know when it's coming. But it sure is something grand to look forward to :)
| In other news... Congratulations to Fearless Melon, who won the previous Poptropica Hide & Seek competition! She correctly guessed the image below. If you want to know the answer to last week's or, better yet, try your hand at it again, the newest image is up already at the Games page.  |  |
