Stop the Pop! Popcorn Game Now Released on iOS and Android!

I am proud to announce that Stop the Pop is now available on iOS and Android!

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/stop-the-pop/id1166315634?ls=1&mt=8

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.stopthepopgame.stopthepop

Stop the Pop is a 2D platformer game where you play as a popcorn kernel. You have to help our hero on his adventure through hazardous environments and face strange foes. The aim of the game is to keep your temperature down and stop our hero from popping into popcorn. 

Game Origin

I have been working on Stop the Pop for almost three years! It has been a great journey and I have learned a lot throughout that time. 

I came up with the game by thinking if a popcorn kernel was alive, how would he feel when he turned into popcorn. Since the kernel turns inside out, I thought that the process of popping would be a very traumatic experience. He would got extremely hot and would start to go through a painful transformation of popping. I am a big fan of platform games so I decided to make Stop the Pop a 2D platformer. 

Development

I originally started developing Stop the Pop in libgdx but then I decided to switch to Unity. Libgdx is a great library but I preferred the visual aspect of the Unity inspector. I thought it would be easier to lay out levels in the inspector instead of building a bespoke level editor for libgdx. 

In October 2014, I switched to Unity and within a month I had a prototype up and running. 

Before this project I never created any digital artwork. I seen some amazing demos of drawing tablets so I purchased one. I found the results were not as I would have hoped, mainly due to my inexperience. I started looking into other options and I came across a vector graphics  program. I updated the graphics with this program and I think they look a lot cleaner.

The next big thing I changed was animations. You can see from the sprite sheet below that each pose was drawn. The problem with this was I found that the animations were not very smooth and it would take a lot of images to make the animation smoother. Since I was targeting mobile devices, I needed to keep file sizes small.

I came across an interesting video showing a different way of animating where the limbs and face are different sprites and you use Unity to animate the position and rotation of them. I found this gave a much better result. 

Release

Stop the Pop was released on iPhone and iPad on February 23rd 2017 and Android on March 5th 2017.

If you want to stay up to date with Stop the Pop, you can follow it on Twitter and Facebook.

https://www.facebook.com/stopthepopgame

https://twitter.com/stopthepopgame

http://stopthepopgame.com