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