Pop It - Toy Jam 2019

Pop It! was made for the 2019 Toy Jam organized by Philly Game Mechanics

Playing requires a touch screen.

The theme for the jam was making games that could exist simply as toys instead of games.

A friend of mine had an idea of a simulator where you graphically break a foot. I thought that was a bit much but had seen a lot of pimple popping videos in the past and thought that it would be an interesting approach to make a toy where all you do is pop pimples.

I decided to limit the toy to only having four visible game objects. A plane for the skin, a sphere for the base, a capsule for the pimple head, and a particle emitter for the eruption spray.

Local developer Gary DiCiano wrote a script to pick randomized colors and set it up in the game to generate skin, pimple, and pus tones.

I had only developed touch based games minimally, so wanted to focus on input controls. I created a system that would detect pinch gestures on the pimple, and scale its different components up and down to simulate a pimple about to burst. On bursting it fires off a sound event, particle emitter, and makes a new pimple.

Local sound designer Alex Cole provided dozens of pimple pop sounds of varying wetness, duration, and intensity. This provides most of the viscerality to the pop effect.