I'm back! With the Creators still busy working away on the New Poptropica, I've been having a dearth of sensational new islands to post about, and that's why I've been taking somewhat of a break. With the holidays coming up, the Creators will be taking a break, and most likely can't keep their promise of delivering New Poptropica before the New Year. We'll all be waiting excitedly for when it arrives! But there's been quite a bit of news in the Poptropica world meanwhile, and I'm here to report it to you, loyal readers.
The Creators have started a series of nominating one or two islands each month to be "Islands of the Month," often according to a theme of the current time of year. Whenever an island is nominated, the Credits reward for completing it goes up, and -- if it was a Members-only island -- it becomes available to all for that month, as well as limited time items coming back to the Store for Members only.
With each IOTM, we also get some sneak peeks of sketches and ideas from the time of that island's development, which have been pretty interesting so far. Some are character sketches, but the ones that I love are those that show what the Island's designers were thinking when they created what they did (click to zoom):
The first one (from Poptropolis Games) shows that even though Poptropica uses multiple designers, they all have a common style guide to follow -- which explains the remarkable level of consistency in the visual quality of Poptropica islands over the years. Also, judging from the signature on one of the notes, it looks like Jeff Kinney himself still has a creative hand in the game that he founded!
The second picture (from Shrink Ray) reveals how the Creators design game mechanics, another very important factor in the success of an island. The mechanic shown here didn't actually make it into Shrink Ray, and I can understand why -- from the notes, it seems they might have found it to be too tedious or difficult. I would agree with that, but I imagine it might have been fun to swing around the level whilst clutching for dear life onto a treacherous improvised hot air balloon, followed by the satisfaction of just barely sticking the landing onto a platform high-up somewhere... ah, the possibilities.
This month's select are Wimpy Wonderland and PoptropiCon; playing the island or any of the episodes will net you 500 Credits each -- for a total of 2000! Now you may think that's an absurd amount of credits, especially if you have been playing the game for a while, and you'd be right. This has been going on for most of this year, as the Creators gave credits away in the Daily Spin Wheel, raised the medallion reward to 300 credits per island, started awarding credits for replaying islands, and held frequent special events, like IOTM. Why are the Creators suddenly causing massive inflation in the Credits economy? The answer is simple: because bigger numbers are more fun.
This doubtless makes the game a lot more engaging, as players (especially new ones) enjoy the rush of getting a large payout of credits and then dashing it all in the Store. It's actually not a bad idea; before this, buying cool items and costumes from the Store was not even worth it for non-Members. Saving up for a single item, let's say one that cost 350 Credits, would require you to complete five islands. Not only is this disproportionately difficult compared to the unlimited borrowing enjoyed by Members, you would run out of islands! Perhaps the new way is how it should be.
Congratulations to Massive Sun for winning the last Poptropica Hide & Seek competition! (This one lingered around for a rather long time because of my inactivity, but it turned out that it was somewhat difficult anyway, so it all turned out fine. Remember, the first entry that is correct and detailed enough is the winner, even if others also got it right!) She correctly guess the image below. As always, there's another challenge up already, so head on over to the Hide & Seek page and take a shot at answering it!
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Hard to believe, but this guessing competition has been running for over five years now! It used to be called "Guess Where I Am," and here's the original post that started it all. Sadly, I haven't kept very good archives, so I don't know for sure how many snapshots we've gone through, but based on my guess that I post a new one every two months on average, I would guess that there's been at least 30.
Now I can't promise anything, but I might have dug up enough material for one last post before the year's end. Keep your fingers crossed...
