Popmates devlog

A logo with a Popmate for the O

2026-11-07T00:00:00Z

A game called Popmates, about balloons, has an O sitting right there in its name, and it seemed a shame not to use it. This post covers day 6, when the logo was settled.

Three directions

Three directions were tried, each made in code with the same pixel-art tool as the rest of the game, and each checked at full size and at real game size over the title screen's sky and meadow:

The three directions, at full size and then at real size on the title screen colours.

A, Balloon Twist, builds every letter out of a shiny balloon, in the five Popmate colours.
B, Popmate Peek, puts a Popmate in place of the O, so the logo also introduces the character.
C, Prism Marquee, sets chunky gold capitals on a gentle carnival arch.

The one that won

I chose Prism Marquee, with the coral Popmate standing in for the O and its string hanging below the word.

The logo, enlarged.

The letters follow the same rules as the rest of the art: gold ramps that are lit from the top left, a plain indigo outline instead of black, no magic colours, and strokes thick enough that the word still reads as eight letters at real size.

Small sizes are their own drawings

A logo also has to work small: on the loading screen, and as the tiny icon in a browser tab. Shrinking the big logo would smear its details, so the small versions are drawn separately, not scaled down. The small logo is about half the size, with thinner strokes and its own little balloon:

Enlarged: the full logo, the small logo for the loading screen, and the balloon icons used for the browser tab.

They are not perfect yet. The balloon O is a little shorter than the capitals, the A in the small logo nearly closes up, and the tiniest icon is busy for its size. Those are noted for a later pass.

The logo now sits on the title screen, on the loading screen and in the header of this blog.

Dressing a balloon

2026-11-07T00:00:00Z

A balloon with a top hat is funnier than a balloon without one. This post covers days 4 and 5, when the plan for cosmetics was rethought and the first draft set was made. Almost all of it is still planned; I will say which parts exist.

Styles and colourways

The plan has four things you can change: your body, a hat, your string and something on your back, such as wings, a cape or a backpack. Each piece is a style, one distinct shape, like a top hat or a baseball cap. Each style comes in two to four chosen colourways: the top hat in red, black or violet, for example.

Two rules keep this honest: two styles must look different in outline, and a new colour is never sold as a new style.

Shopkeepers and sets

In the plan, each island has two or three shopkeepers, and each one sells a themed set of three styles: a hat, a string and a back piece. A shopkeeper wears their own set's hat. The same shopkeepers hand out small errands, and an errand can reward a special colourway that you cannot buy.

You pay with tokens earned by playing. Everything is decorative only; nothing you wear changes how you score.

What got cut, and why

The first cosmetics plan had more in it, and several ideas were dropped on day 4:

Free dyes, where you could recolour any item. Every item started to feel like a recolour of every other one.
Auras and a "Pop Style" reveal effect. Too complicated for what they added.
Face gear, such as glasses. A Popmate's face is tiny, and it only has room for the eyes, a smile and blush marks. Test glasses hid the eyes, and a monocle disappeared at real size.

A first draft set

To test all of this, the first draft set is the Ringmaster's, for Carnival Isle (both working names). It has a top hat in Carnival Red, Midnight and Showtime Violet, and a bunting string (a string with little pennant flags) in Carnival Red, Gold and Showtime Violet. Its back piece does not exist yet, so the set is not finished.

The Ringmaster draft sheet: every style in every colourway on every body colour, then in greyscale and at real size.

Every set will get a sheet like this before it ships, to check that each colourway stays visible on every body colour, in colour and in greyscale. This one already shows two weak spots: the bunting is small at real size, and the Midnight hat is almost black in greyscale.

Here are the pieces on the test page, next to the three older test pieces (a wizard hat, a flower crown and a ribbon-bow string), which are kept only for testing:

The test page that checks every piece on every colour and mood. The wizard hats, flower crowns and ribbon bows are test pieces, not for sale.

Next, in the plan, come the first back piece and a string with a charm on the end, so strings read better at real size.

A world that floats

2026-11-07T00:00:00Z

This post covers days 3 to 7: how the world went from a map of ordinary zones to a sky full of floating islands, and the art made for it so far. None of it is walkable yet.

From biomes to islands

The first plan had five zones you would expect in any game: a meadow, a forest, a snowy peak, a shore and a cave. They worked, but they felt generic, and nothing about them said "balloons". So on days 3 and 4 the world was rethought around the obvious question: if everyone is a balloon, why are we on the ground?

The new world is the Sky Archipelago (a working name, like all the names below): eight small floating islands in three layers of sky. Each layer has its own light, which never changes:

Cloud Sea, the lowest layer, is always at dawn.
Open Sky, the middle, is always at midday.
Starlight, the top, is always at dusk, with stars.

The three skies, built: Cloud Sea at dawn, Open Sky at midday and Starlight at dusk. Each is made of layers that scroll at different speeds.

Small islands, big sky

Each island is planned to be small, about two screens wide and two tall, with its own look: a carnival, a windmill, bouncy clouds, a storm, a crater of fallen stars. The world should feel big because there are many places and a lot of sky, not because each map is huge. Distant islands drift in the background of every sky.

In the plan, every island is open from the start. Rope bridges join the islands in a layer, updrafts carry you between layers, and a world map lets you hop straight to any island, so friends can meet wherever they like. The map will also show a few foggy "Uncharted" islands: places that do not exist yet, waiting for later updates.

Carnival Isle, as a picture

To settle the look before building any island, there is one finished still picture of Carnival Isle (a working name), with a big top, two stalls and the portal for two-team matches:

The Carnival Isle look picture, approved on day 4. It is a single image, not a playable map.

It took two rounds of fixes to the clouds to get there: clouds must never have flat bottoms, and their undersides are solid shapes with no speckled fading.

The edges of the world

On day 7 the island edges became a real tileset: a grassy lip, two bands of cliff and a craggy underside, which a small tool fits together around any island shape. The same tiles are recoloured for all eight islands.

The island-edge test page in Pop Plaza (working name) colours. Keys 1 to 8 switch between the eight island recolours.

Next in the plan is the first real island, the hub where everyone arrives, but only after the server, accounts and matches exist.

Meet the Popmate

2026-11-07T00:00:00Z

Every player in Popmates is a balloon, and the balloon is called a Popmate. This post covers how it came together over days 1 to 3, plus the walking test from day 7.

Small on purpose

The game is drawn on a 480 by 270 pixel canvas, so a Popmate is tiny: its body is 21 pixels wide and 25 tall, and with its string it is 38 pixels tall. That size was a rule from the start: a Popmate has to read clearly at its real size, not only when zoomed in. Here is the reference sheet, enlarged:

The reference sheet from the art test. The row on grass shows the real game size, before enlarging.

Five colours, five moods

There are five colours, coral, sky, mint, sun and lilac, and five moods, happy, joy, wow, wink and game (game is its game face). Every colour is the same drawing with a different set of colours swapped in, so all 25 combinations come from one design:

The game sheet, enlarged: every colour with every mood.

In the plan, the five colours are free for everyone, and your mood is the face your Popmate wears when it is idle. Emotes and moments in a match will swap the face for a second. The face is deliberately simple: round eyes with a glint, a small smile and blush marks. There is no room for glasses or anything else on the face, which turned out to matter later, when planning the cosmetics.

The string and the bob

There is only one drawing of a Popmate, facing you. It never turns to show its side or back. Instead it shows movement with a flip when it changes direction, a gentle bob and a little squash, with its string trailing below. The string is a separate piece, so that later it can be swapped for a fancier one.

The first walk

On day 7 a Popmate took its first steps:

The walking test: a Popmate on a test map, steered with the arrow keys or WASD.

You steer with the arrow keys or WASD, in eight directions. The balloon slides along water and the map's edge instead of getting stuck, bobs as it goes, and does a one-pixel squash when it settles. The camera follows it. Automated tests check it at 1080p, at 1440p, at two ultrawide sizes and at a laptop size, so the pixels stay square on all of them.

It is a test map, not a real island, and you walk alone: other players, and the server that would show them to you, are still to come. But it is the first time a Popmate goes where you tell it to, and it is very pleased about it.

Days 1 to 3: an engine test and a look

2026-11-07T00:00:00Z

This post covers days 1 to 3, when two decisions had to be made before anything else could start: what the game runs on, and what it looks like.

Test the scary parts first

Popmates runs in a web browser, on Phaser 4, a game engine for the web. Phaser 4 was quite new, and a pixel-art game asks a lot of things an engine can quietly get wrong. So the first job, on day 1, before anything depended on it, was a test page that tried the risky parts and checked the results pixel by pixel:

Crisp scaling. The game draws on a small 480 by 270 pixel canvas and scales it up by whole steps, so every game pixel becomes a neat square. The test checked this on screens with different pixel densities, where blurry or uneven pixels usually sneak in.
Glow and shader effects. Portals need to swirl and shimmer. The test ran a glow effect and a custom swirl effect.
Maps. Tile maps made in a map editor had to load, with no thin seams between tiles.

Everything passed, so Phaser 4 stayed. The pixel checks from that test are still reused by the game's automated tests.

With the engine settled, the next question was the art style. The art in Popmates is made in code, with a pixel-art tool called pxl: each sprite is a small script that lays out its pixels, which makes it easy to recolour, check and rebuild.

The style was chosen in a blind comparison of two attempts at the same brief, each of which came back with a finished test scene. I looked at both without knowing which was which and picked one.

Inside the winning attempt, three palettes were tried first:

Three palettes from the winning attempt. A became the chosen style; B lost contrast, and C was too dark.

Palette A won, and the style is now called Prism Light. Its rules are short: every material gets a ramp of four to six colours that shifts cool in the shadows and warm in the light, one deep indigo replaces black everywhere, and cyan and magenta are kept for magic, so anything magical or clickable always stands out.

This is the test scene that won:

The winning test scene. It is a mock-up: the score panels, the Skins stall and the place names on the signposts come from earlier plans.

Why bother

A blind pick sounds fussy, but it stopped me from choosing a style for the wrong reasons. And settling the look on day 2 meant everything after it, from the Popmate to the logo, could follow one set of rules. By day 3 the winning balloon had moved into the game itself, matching the test scene pixel for pixel. The next posts are about those things.

Hello, Popmates

2026-11-07T00:00:00Z

Hello! This is the devlog for Popmates, a pixel-art party game in the making. It is one week old. This first post is a quick hello and covers days 1 to 7 in broad strokes; the next few posts go into the details.

The plan in one breath

You are a balloon, called a Popmate. You float around a world of small islands in the sky with other players. When you fancy a game, you step through a portal, a category pops up ("things in a kitchen"), and everyone has 30 seconds to type as many answers as they can. An answer only you thought of is worth 2 points; one somebody else also found is worth 1. Then you drift back out, maybe buy a silly hat, and go again.

The What is Popmates page has the longer version.

What a week gets you

Here is the title screen as it stands today:

The title screen today. The sign-in buttons are placeholders: there is nothing to sign in to yet.

That one picture is most of what exists. By the end of the first week the art style was settled, the Popmate came in five colours with five moods, and there was a logo, three skies, a set of island edges, a title and settings screen, and a Popmate that walks around a test map in a web browser.

What does not exist yet is everything you would actually play: there is no server, no accounts, no categories and no matches. Popmates is not playable yet, and I am not going to guess at a date.

How this blog works

The build is split into stages, and I plan to write one short post each time a stage is finished. The Progress page lists every stage and marks each one done, up next or later. It has no dates on purpose, because I would rather be late on nothing than late on a promise.

When I describe something in a post, I will say whether it is built (it exists and was tested), planned (it is only in the plan so far) or still open (not decided). Place names like the islands' are working names and may change.

If you want to follow along, the RSS feed is the way. There is no newsletter and no comments, just posts.

Thanks for floating by.

Popmates devlog

A logo with a Popmate for the O

Three directions

The one that won

Small sizes are their own drawings

Dressing a balloon

Styles and colourways

Shopkeepers and sets

What got cut, and why

A first draft set

A world that floats

From biomes to islands

Small islands, big sky

Carnival Isle, as a picture

The edges of the world

Meet the Popmate

Small on purpose

Five colours, five moods

The string and the bob

The first walk

Days 1 to 3: an engine test and a look

Test the scary parts first

Picking a look, blind

Why bother

Hello, Popmates

The plan in one breath

What a week gets you

How this blog works