Hello everyone!

I'm Ila(QbieShay) and today I will talk a little about the birth of this game.

Brief history

The first Poongoon concept was born in northen hemisphere winter 2017 - when I was talking with Thomas(Karroffel) about a game I played when I was a child on PS1.
To my great disappointment, there was no way to show him the game I was talking about: I didn't know the title and I couldn't find anything about it on the internet.

That's when we decided to make Poongoons. Since the original game was unavailable, we'd make our own.

Early design

When Poongoon was born, it was supposed to be a twin stick game, with movement control separated from the aim control, like the original game it was inspired from.
The first implementation didn't have the second stick for aiming, and we decided to keep it like that, shaping our first design pillar for Poongoon: Playful and Goofy. 

The lack of the aim control made shooting harder and less precise, which felt like a good path to take for our game.  At the beginning it wasn't that good, hitting someone on purpose was very hard. 

We went through some adjustments and, after resizing the snowballs to a bigger size and giving the penguins the ability to dash, we reached the alchemy that we were looking  for.

Emergent Gameplay

Penguins is a physics based game, which means that it heavily relies on physic calculations to function.
The engine we are using, Godot Engine, had a pretty good buit-in physics engine which allowed us to fiddle around with all its parameters: weight of the penguins, weight of the snowballs, gravity, forces, but, most importantly, friction and bounce.

Tweaking all these parameters was one of the parts of the development process where we had more fun so far.
Below you can see our penguins moving way too fast.

One of the nicest characteristics of a game that relies on physics like Poongoons does, is that it possess a certain degree of unpredictability:  we didn't always made the game, sometimes we just discovered it.

There are already some fun "glitches" in Concordia station, and I hope you will have fun flying your penguins on top of containers and launching your snowballs from unlikely places.

About Antarctica

The development of Poongoon has been, so far, very sporadic.
We started in winter 2017, wanted to make a playable demo for early February but, unfortunately, university and work claimed a lot of our time, so we paused the development for a while.

Around the 21 of April 2018, we discovered that the 25 of April would have been the world penguin day, so we knew it was time to get back on development. 

Since then, we decided that Antartica would play a bigger role in our game. We want, without being too intrusive, to spread some little knowledge about this cold continent, its traditions and its history.

If you like our game, or penguins, or snow, stay tuned for more, as the Midwinter celebration in McMurdo station approaches!

💙 🐧

- Ila