Poptropica
Poptropica is a basic platformer and problem solving game aimed to be played by the 6-14 year old children demographic. Each "island" is a new plot, new story line for the player to immerse themselves into. Once completed, the player is awarded a medal to which they can show off to their friends and peers.
Originally the game was created in Actionscript 2.0, which was not complainant with mobile. I was a part of the team hired at the Family Education Network to upgrade the product to Actionscript 3.0, create new islands, and help launch on iOS. As FEN transitioned to Story Arc Media I worked my way up to become the Lead Software Engineer of a small development team that has continued to deliver new content for both the web and mobile platforms.
The Poptropica team transitioned the product into Unity. I personally was responsible for teaching myself the basics of Unity and the code base formed from it in C#. They decided to create a whole new world instead of Poptropica instead of porting over the massive game that already existed. We created a brand new framework inside of Unity to help make development of islands much faster. One of the main plugins needed for our characters was Spine. Another plugin that we built with the help of Tricky Fast was called CAT. This was key for helping develop islands faster and giving more control to the product and art team.
Challenges
My biggest challenge on this team was making the change to agile development while also making the system change to Unity. As mentioned, the game was originally created in Flash and Actionscript. The goal was to make a new revamped game in Unity to release on both web and mobile and in order to do that I had to help build the framework of the game from the ground up. At the same time our team began working in an agile environment so we were consistently learning and adapting our workflow procedures. I help alleviate a lot of the problems by stepping up and becoming a lead engineer for the team. I took ownership of the project and nailed down our time cycles so the company could better gauge timelines. In the end we released a new Poptropica Worlds game with 5 new islands and began to port over old islands into the new Unity based game.
Another big challenge I faced was some of the math and physics based gameplay. The Flash based game didn't have a physics engine and therefore I not only had to try implementing a real physics feel to the game, but I also had to make it work in the world engine that was already create. I solved this with some real physics math and adjusting the algorithms to basically be faked to look real in Poptropica. It took some time and research but in the end it all turned out to look realistic.
