Poppytail Series

For Pixeltail, I think I want to start working on the enemies soon.

I'm going to aim for maybe 1-3 per week, as I'm a very busy person (aren't we all?) and I don't make games full-time (I would be bankrupt), but my workload is becoming less so I'll hopefully have more time to work on these games soon.

Also had an idea for Mousetrap. Mousetrap would only appear rarely and set up mousetraps on the ground. If you walk into them, you'll die (because you're literally walking into a death trap and also Mousetrap will attack*), but enemies will be stunned if you can lure them into the mousetraps. Mousetrap, Lulu, Eclipse, Cheesestick and ???????** will be immune, however.

*In the second game, Mama Tyranno would kill you if she or Mousetrap got too close, and Papa Tyranno would do the same for Lulu and Mousetrap. For those of you who made it to Chapter 3 or beyond in that game (not sure if anyone did, but here's the link anyway), but this was intentional. Mama's meant to be an overprotective parent, but favouritises Mousetrap over her other two children. Papa Tyranno just walks aimlessly reading his newspaper unless you go near his sons.

**The characters with question mark names are unrevealed characters. This one in particular is the one whose name is in between Papa Tyranno and Pink Poppy.

Here's a progress thingo for Poppytail 5 and Pixeltail. I'll edit the post with more info later.

POPPYTAIL 5
Rooms- 1.25/11
Minigames- 1.75/14
Enemies- 0/24
Endings- 0/?
Chapters- 0/10
Voice Acting- 4/29
Music- 8/?
Custom Chapters AI- 0/24
Overall- ??%

PIXELTAIL
Chapters- 0/25
Enemies- 1/52
Minigames/Nightmares- 0/40
Endings- 0/18
Voice Acting- 0/?
Music- 7/?
Other Important Feature- Roughly 5.5%
Quests- 0/24
Achievements- 0/?
Custom Chapters AI- 0/52
Overall- ??%

Poppytail has been completed.

Edit: Just to clarify, I meant the character Poppytail’s AI for the game Pixeltail. If you look on Page 16 you’ll see I’ve added what Poppytail does.

Poppytail- Will move in the same direction as the player vertically and the opposite horizontally whether the player is holding down a key or has released it.

The way each character has its own specific movement pattern makes this seem a lot more like a puzzle game than my first impression. If you designed the levels just right, to take advantage of how the patterns work together (chess was my first thought), then I think this could be an interesting twist on the top-down exploration/mystery game type.

The way each character has its own specific movement pattern makes this seem a lot more like a puzzle game than my first impression. If you designed the levels just right, to take advantage of how the patterns work together (chess was my first thought), then I think this could be an interesting twist on the top-down exploration/mystery game type.

Not all of them will have movement patterns. Some will move on their own towards you and some will move around randomly. I even had the idea of a character who will swap the controls when they're on screen (left becomes right and vice-versa, etc.) But I think this would be a good idea for some of the smaller levels (this would make larger levels such as PT2's Chapter 3, PT3's Chapter 4 and PT4's Chapter 2.

Another thing: this top-down running-away-from-papillons-and-other-things-that-want-to-kill-you game that has been the main gameplay since the first game will only be half of the game. I was thinking of having puzzle-like mechanics for a part of the game that the player will likely have to use multiple times. I won't say what this is, but if the player does things right, they can manipulate the characters so that they stop searching for you in certain levels, change the plotline, uncover secrets and other things.

The reason I want to keep this part of the game/mechanic is because I want to make this a surprise. It sounds like you guys would like to play this game, so I don't want to spoil what this is. I think this'll make this more interesting.

I've been working on a dialogue system where I have one scene for all of the game's dialogue. I have made one conversation between Alex and Alice as a test (although they're actually breaking the fourth wall because the player found something they shouldn't have), which will not be able to be accessed in game. It goes:

Alex: "What are you doing here? You're breaking the laws of the series."
Alice: "You need to stop. Now the canonicity of the game is ruined."
Alex: "You little hacker. You're not welcome here."
(Alex and Alice turn into glitch-like versions of Hoppy Tail)
The Game: "Erasing your save data... You deserve it."
(A few seconds later, the game closes itself)

Well, now I can't beat anything past Chapter 1 (as dialogue is meant to trigger before it ends, and now I've made this), but I know the dialogue system I have going works (and it's better organised than that of The Poppytales). And obviously, this isn't canon at all. As Alice said, the canonicity is ruined.

When are you releasing this?

When are you releasing this?

I’m going to try and finish Poppytail 5 first, but I’m hoping to have Pixeltail released by October if not sooner.

Vaibhav Sangwan is now going to help make Poppytail 5!

Some old animations I made for an earlier version of the game.

Chapter 3 and 4's new characters for Poppytail 5:
- Dingo Cool
- Bad Bunny
- Cinder
- Skelisa
- G'day Gecko

Behind the player is a room (officially called the "South Room"). There are four rooms connected to this room: the player's starting location (and only access point), an off-screen room and two prison cells.

Starting in Chapter 3, the Dingo and Bunny will move from the off-screen room into the South Room. When they do, the player must enter the room and release one of the prison cells (containing Cinder). React too early and Bunny will kill you. React too late and Dingo will kill you.

In Chapter 4, Skelisa may also come out with Dingo and Bunny, in which case they must release the OTHER prison cell (containing G'day Gecko). Cinder/G'day Gecko will attack if you release the wrong cell and Skelisa will attack instead of Dingo if the player was too late and was meant to release Gecko instead of Cinder.

Sorry if that's a little complicated, but this is going to be another task the player must keep on top of (at this point, they must also avoid attacks from Jawlock, Nursina, Exister, Shyyon and Vehicle Dummy all at the same time.

Remember that old poster on one of the old placeholder backgrounds?

Well, here it is, with Shyyon (model made by GameJolt user JackAttackGames) included along with the other three.

I think that looks better than how crappy it used to look like.

What are you doing in here?

Two new characters for Pixeltail:

Easter Bunny- Will walk when the player runs as well as vice-versa. He will move in the same direction horizontally as the player but the opposite vertically.

Gremlin Girl- Will move one direction anticlockwise to the one the player is moving in. Like her appearance from the first game, she has no collisions when she walks upwards.

Also, little bit of trivia about Gremlin Girl. The idea of the character came from the name of one of my four dogs, G-G. I wanted to call her Gizmo before we got her (after the character from the movie Gremlins, but she was a girl, and Gizmo was a male character. G-G is really short for Gizmo Girl, but we commonly call her G-G, as it sounds like the name Gigi. (Also, Gigi is a French name and "papillon" (the breed of dog) is also a French word). Because of this (and also because some of my nicknames for my dogs are stupid), this is where many of the first few Poppytail characters came from.

Easter Bunny was simply because my eldest dog Pirate would put his ears back whenever I gave him a pat, which I thought looked like a Lindt gold rabbit. Since this happened a while after Easter, I thought it was a good nickname. This is why EB from the game isn't directly related to the holiday other than having its name in his.

Whenever I'd been testing Pixeltail, Alex had not been working the way I intended because I had to change the way he worked from the previous games. Someone here said they wanted me to add an 8-Way Movement behaviour to Alex, which did not turn out so well.

A common complaint I have received about the released Poppytail games was Alex's control scheme; arrow keys to walk and N, M, Z and X to run. Although most people ask me why I didn't use W, A, S and D, I thought of a potentially better way to go about this.

Now, instead of having to use eight different keys to make Alex move, you only need the arrow keys. I now have the X key to swap Alex's speeds from walking to running and vice-versa, as well as an HUD actor in the top right left of the screen, showing a pixelated figure which turns blue for walking and red for running, as well as text underneath telling you what mode Alex is on.

Making Alex's controls was also difficult because I have decided to make one character invert the controls, so that made things a little more complicated. This character who inverts the controls is Pork Chop, since the game's colours would be inverted in Poppytail 4 when her minigame was entered during Custom Chapters mode. Her AI isn't finished, however.

I also had another idea. The other character along with Pork Chop who was introduced in PT3's CHapter 2 was Orangu Tan*. Since Pork would invert the controls whenever she appeared on screen, I thought Orangu Tan* could make the screen shake violently whenever he was on screen. What do you guys think about this idea?

*Also, I'm not sure anyone understood why Orangu Tan was named how he was. In case you didn't figure it out (no one I know had figured it out before I told them), those red spots over Orangu Tan's body are meant to be sunburns (which is also fitting since the chapter in which he first appeared was outdoors). He is meant to be a primate-like creature, hence "orangutan", but the "tan" makes up the other part of his name's etymology, since tans and sunburns are commonly linked.