Popochiu 2.0 is HERE!!!

🎉 Popochiu 2.0 is HERE! 🎉

Oh yes, after 14 months of blood (no actual blood), sweat (a lot of actual sweat), and tears (okay, maybe a few tears), we’re thrilled to announce the stable release of Popochiu 2.0!

For those who have been under a rock (or busy making games - so we forgive you), Popochiu wants to be the go-to, developer-friendly, free, open-source tool for crafting point-and-click adventure games with Godot. And now, with Version 2.0, we moved a HUGE step forward towards our mission!

🚀 So, what’s new in Popochiu 2.0? Buckle up!

New Features? You bet! Looking back from when we forked from 1.9 and tested the code on the then beta Godot 4.0, a lot have been improved!

• A revamped scripting API that leverages GDScript 2.0 and provides auto-complete features. Smoooth!!!
• Character scaling using regions in rooms.
• Anti-glide function for walking characters.
• Player character following by secondary characters.
• Teleport function for characters.
• Three out-of-the-box production ready GUIs for your game, ispired by Sierra SCI, LucasArts 9Verbs and the lightweight left/right click that you can find in most modern Games like Deponia
• Aseprite Importers for rooms and characters, that will setup your props and character animations with a single click, enabling fast development iterations.
• Working Markers that represents fixed coordinates in the rooms that you can use for anything.
• Complete support for emotions in dialogues, allowing to change animation or closeup picture accordingly.
• Simultaneous or exclusive audio cues, configurable by a property.
• Experimental GUI autoscaling function to support higher resolutions.
• Full BBCode support in dialogues and dialogue selection panel.
• Many. many, many small improvements to the plugin GUI and the Engine inner machinery that will improve the quality of your life (miserable enough, considering you are an adventure game developer)

And more! We’re pretty sure there’s a feature or two we forgot to mention, but hey, you’ll discover them as you go. After all we have only 511 files changed from the last release… heh!

But it’s not just about features!

• A revamped documentation site, more solid and usable than the old wiki, based on the same technology and structure of the official Godot documentation (so you feel at home!)
• New branding for the product, contributed by our fellow @Papernoise, who made everything more professional and believable
• A whole set of under-the-hood improvements to our workflow: better organization of the issues, frequent maintainer meetings, a roadmap, a bit of automation, etc.

All in all, Popochiu is becoming a mature FOSS project, open to everyone to contribute and make yours. We are proud of this achievement: it takes its toll, but it’s already giving back!
In fact…

🥁 Shoutout to Our Heroes

Popochiu 2.0 is the product of an amazing community effort, and we want to give a MASSIVE shoutout to everyone who contributed. From bug squashing to feature building, and everything in between - y’all are great! 💪

• Carenalga (Mateo for friends) @mapedorr
• @stickgrinder (Paolo for the Federal Tax Office)
• @whyshchuck
• @papernoise
• @drbb
• Anthony Irwin
• Dmitry Maganov
• David Cordero
• Anthony Irwin
• Artur Maciąg
• Edmundo Ruiz Ghanem
• Filip Motyczka
• Juan Ferrari

📅 What’s Next?

In the next couple of months, we’ll be focusing on polishing the plugin and fixing bugs, because let’s be real, no release is perfect (but we’re getting there). Then, our plan is to switch to a smaller releases strategy: we’ll work on the next awesome features, and release what’s ready every 4 to 6 months.

We’re also going to share our roadmap with you, and (🥁 drumroll, please) we’re planning a celebration online party! There will be an Ask Us Anything (AMA) live session where we’ll answer all your burning questions - whether it’s about the plugin, game development, or what ~~dru~~ snacks power us through overnight coding marathons.

Stay tuned for more details on the party, and until then, happy game-making!