Hi everyone,
Actually a VERY productive week for the POPGOES team! Lots of things to talk about and show, including the new POPGOES x Youtooz pin set!
Fanart Showcase:
by Adamations - (Source)
by Megabito - (Source)
by HeavyCream - (Source)
by Jova - (Source)
Top Supporters (last 30 days):
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Thank you to everyone for placing charged stickers on my posts!
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The next Blackrabbit piece in my Game Jolt sticker pack is Blackrabbit's Right Arm! It's now active. Hope you all managed to get a left leg last week! I've seen lots of POPGOES stickers, emojis, and reactions recently. Very fun.
myPOPGOES:
The latest POPGOES game, myPOPGOES, now has over 7,600 downloads on Game Jolt and has done surprisingly very well on YouTube!
This week, some of the myPOPGOES team members and I have been working on content for the seemingly inevitable premium version of the game. I am quite confident that this theoretical expansion will happen, though I haven't had a confirmation just yet. Regardless, there's no point in waiting, so here's what we've been up to...
myPOPGOES Toy Skins - NeeTroo and I have begun working on unlockable reskins for the myPOPGOES toy. These are entirely cosmetic, but they will feature some cool cameos!
Playable Characters - Emil and I have also worked on new unlockable characters for myPOPGOES. You'll be able to unlock and select these characters during the "week". These won't drastically change gameplay, but I like the idea of them having different stats (like karts in Mario Kart). Some characters may be more susceptible to hunger, but have faster movement speed...
Placeable Stickers - Sian has worked on some brand new sticker artwork. We plan on having five slots on the myPOPGOES toy (no matter which skin you're using), and a selection of maybe 20-30 unlockable stickers, including non-canon references of stuff like FNAF+, Animdude, the Popgoes Pizzeria (which only exists 15 years in the future...), etc.
Hope you like the plans, and the look of the new stuff. We'll continue working on this and I will update you all when I get more Fanverse news.
POPGOES Evergreen:
Despite the work on myPOPGOES, it's actually been a very productive week for Evergreen as well. Though, when I say "productive", I must also pair it with "destructive". Because, and bear with me here... the post-night sections have been scrapped.
Okay well, only kind of.
Last Sunday I took some time to reflect on our progress with the current post-night section concept, and made the decision to talk with the entire Evergreen team on the idea of redesigning them due to the low percentage of completion so far. In my head, I felt like we had only one option, which was to scale them down, prioritise different things, with a simple, major goal: get this finished.
And after a 2-hour voice call with everyone involved, a conclusion was made. That being yes, we should absolutely redesign the post-night sections, entirely, to serve their core purpose, and nothing more. And during this call, we DID come up with a new concept that, in theory, works very well and will be much easier, faster, and more fun to work on.
I won't spoil what the original plan for the post-night sections was, but the gist of it involved you collecting something important each night by completing (fairly complex) puzzles. You could compare it to something like an escape room experience. The most integral part of this experience, and I suppose why this section even exists in the first place, is the thing you end up collecting. The puzzles were "filler" (not the best word, since I suppose literally all gameplay here is "filler" for a story). The other necessities of this section are a tense survival experience, and a great part for the False animatronics to play.
So, in our brand new version of the post-night section, everything has been downscaled to provide an experience that focuses almost entirely on surviving against the False animatronics and capturing an important item. This essentially wipes out all of the escape room filler, and to be honest most of the unique puzzly gameplay we had planned, in favour of a simpler setup that should take half, or even a quarter as much time to develop.
Pros:
- A lot easier for us to plan
- Easier to understand
- Darker and more horror focused
- More of an active focus on the False animatronics
- May feel more nostalgic
- Actually might release
Cons:
- Not as original
- Nowhere near as visually impressive
- Less "grounded"
- Potentially less challenging
- May feel a bit repetitive
Eventually I will show and explain the original post-night gameplay. We had finished the environment work for ONE section, out of FIVE. So even though that feels like a small amount of work, trust me, that one section looked awesome. And we will reuse what we can. But, for now, it's back to square one. But the squares are much smaller this time. Wish us luck - this will be worth it.
In other news, thanks to Garrett rendering practically everything needed for the office gameplay, we have begun working on the programming side of it. Sort of. Garrett and Emil have been working together on setting up the reflection shader for the front view, so that we can have super realistic lighting from the screen just like in POPGOES Arcade. This will affect the desk, surrounding items (barely), and perhaps most importantly the little tray in front of the monitor that slides open to reveal the Simon Says buttons.
We soon realised that Emil's original shader for Arcade doesn't actually work very well (if at all) with the distorted panorama monitor in Evergreen. It was designed for rectangles. So Emil developed a new version of the shader that will take input images (the camera feed) and duplicate it twice essentially - once onto the distorted monitor shape, and then again for all of the reflections. I can't really explain how this works, but he sent this image which was funny:
I've seen it in motion and it looks great. Hopefully next week I can show it off on the monitor itself.
Oh also, Garrett had a go at converting the myPOPGOES toy into a usable phone case for Evergreen. It's not finished, and we'll get back to it eventually, but you guys can check out this WIP:
Last week I said: "In terms of old FNAF characters getting some time to shine in POPGOES Evergreen, I can confirm that the Toy animatronics are NOT the only ones with that privilege. Model work has begun on others. Though they aren't enemies like the Falses. Still fun though."
To clarify a bit, there are indeed other classic FNAF characters being added to Evergreen, for the sake of lore. Similar to maybe Cody, Owen, and the others from POPGOES Reprinted. Purely visual, but still important. When I wrote that last week, Alexis was halfway done with one of these characters, and today that character was finished, and so was another one! So epic.
Another thing, all of the images on the POPGOES Evergreen Game Jolt page (five rooms) have been updated with new renders. Some have changed more than others. The Party Room has probably changed the most, and the Server Room the least. These aren't brand new updates, the images just haven't been changed in a while!
Last thing to mention - Ellie has worked on more booster pack artwork. 7 out of 8 packs are now done. Nice to have these checked off. Once these are done, all visuals for the trading cards will be finished and maybe we can start programming how they work in-game (buying them, opening packs, dupe cards, holos, etc).
Merch:
A big day for POPGOES merch, because the POPGOES x Youtooz pins have been officially revealed with brand new images and a store page!
You can check out the page here: https://youtooz.com/products/popgoes-pin-set
These pins will be available to pre-order for only two weeks, starting on the 21st of April (next week) at 3PM EST. They are $29.99 ($5 per pin, not bad!) and are SUPER high quality. I guess you expect me to say something like that, but I'll try to prove it.
Firstly it's worth mentioning that these are truly collector's items. The box is beautiful, the packaging inside is extremely precise, and the pins themselves are basically perfect. They are made of a heavy metal, cold to the touch and super sturdy. You can just tell they're very well made, and actually quite large.
To provide a reference on their size, I've taken some photos:
^ on Benjamin
^ on my corkboard, with other various pins
^ with his brethren
Also look at how cool the backs look. Again, super thick, heavy, cold. It's like a giant coin. But with Popgoes on it.
I also can't stress enough how nice the packaging is. It's a nice material and has cool details everywhere. The product is obviously designed so that you can use the pins or display them, very nicely. I also have to say, it's utterly surreal to see the POPGOES Evergreen logo on an official FNAF product (oh and *cough cough* no Fanverse logo...)
It looks so gooood.
As always with these kinds of things, please let me know if you have any questions and I'll be happy to answer as honestly as I can. These products are amazing, but I won't mislead people.
That being said, I'm extremely excited for this drop and I hope you are too. And if you already want even more pins from Youtooz, then we've got you covered - actual development has officially begun on the Halloween set illustrated by Jayfer! They shooould be ready by Halloween. As is the point. But we'll see!
Holy moly this was a big one. Lots of progress and big moves happening behind the scenes. Thanks everyone for your continued support.
- Kane
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