Island Discussion #28: New Dimension

Hello everyone!

We have reached the end of May which – importantly – only means one thing; we are slowly creeping towards a finished project that yet remains “super secret” to us. Project: Super Secret can be a lot of things that we possibly couldn’t even imagine. Even though it has been through a few years of production and will continue to do so for the rest of this year (possibly) this project still lives up to its name and I applaud Club Penguin for that. On the other hand, it makes it so much harder for us to assume what it could be and the hype may end up driving us completely insane – if it hasn’t done so already!

To be fair, we have received several sneak peeks since last year and they are becoming more frequent and expected. By the end of each month, the team will continue to give us a sneak peek into what they are creating until they finally announce it. Now, from what we have seen, the project seems to have a lot of depth and by that I mean a variety of aspects that could push the boundaries and turn Club Penguin into something totally new! Maybe it is a good thing? Possibly not? Well, I think it is about time Club Penguin takes a new step since they have succeeded for a noticeable amount of years as an Adobe Flash based game. However the last couple of years haven’t been so good and that is not because the team are becoming lazy. It is quite the opposite, in fact! They have been working on this super secret project for a while now and we are soon from witnessing the final outcome, possibly by the end of this year.

So in this post today, I feel would be useful to recap everything we know about the project but what I am really interested in is how we get there. Not just from one game to another, but also from Club Penguin (2D) to Club Penguin (3D). It highlights a huge leap so it would be fair to say that some people will be blown away by this game. But because of how different it is, will this make the acceleration from one game to another unrealistic? It depends how creative the team are. But I am going to be talking about this later because, right now, I need to recapitulate what we know about Project: Super Secret – currently. We are going chronological so back we go to June/July 2015 when we received our first sneak peek.

Remember when Riyita (owner of Club Penguin Space) visited the Club Penguin Offices in Kelowna last year? It must have been a pretty amazing opportunity that I would snatch up any time, if I could. Anyway, Riyita was lucky enough the test out a “small” sample of Project: Super Secret. This was the Clothing Customizer. So after he had left Kelowna and was able to manage his blog once again, Riyita was given permission to show what he had made – with the Clothing Customizer – to the rest of the Club Penguin Community and (believe me) we were drowned with hype! This was the first time we managed to have a look at a physical representation of Project: Super Secret so you can imagine how surprised and thrilled we were.

A few days later (early July) Club Penguin officially confirmed this sneak peek and showed off a little video of what the early Clothing Customizer looked like at the time. Since it was a year ago, development of the app was obviously not final so what you see in the video may not appear in the official product. Below I have left an image of a fully customizable hoodie that featured in the video. If you want to see the video, click here. You can also check out Riyita’s small sneak peek right here!