SongPop Party is now available on the Nintendo Switch™ and Xbox!
Originally released in 2021 as an Apple Arcade exclusive, SongPop Party is the fourth installment in FreshPlanet’s popular music trivia game franchise. What set SongPop Party apart from its predecessors was that it offered local and online multiplayer for the first time in the franchise, transforming the genre into a real party!
The Nintendo Switch and Xbox versions are no different and keep the SongPop Party spirit alive by supporting up to eight players at once in Party mode with over 100,000 exclusive and curated tracks!
This is the first time any SongPop game has been released on console, so to celebrate we spoke to Jocelyn Fung, creative director at FreshPlanet, about SongPop Party and one of the franchise’s most unique aspects: the art!
Hi, Jocelyn! Tell us about yourself and how you came to FreshPlanet.
As a lifetime gamer and designer, everything I've ever done has always pointed in this ultimate direction. I joined an ANSI/ASCII art collective in the ‘90s, trading artwork with people via BBSes on dial-up modems. I studied traditional art, animation, and game production and started out my career in the industry as a 3D environment artist in 2004, working on a variety of AAA console and handheld titles for about seven to eight years.
After the recession in the late 2000s, the industry went through some massive turbulence. It was then that I pivoted to mobile games where I got to dig deep into UI/UX design and HCI. This is what I love the most out of anything, and it serendipitously led me to FreshPlanet and the SongPop family of games.
What is your role at FreshPlanet and on SongPop Party?
I joined FreshPlanet two years ago in 2020 as the creative director. In a nutshell, I manage art production processes, the art and design teams, and overall branding and style consistency. I’m excited to be contributing to a console project again, it’s been about 10 years since I’ve had that opportunity!
How was SongPop Party’s playful art style created?
It has been a collaborative process involving lots of different designers and artists over the past eight years! All the SongPop games share the same art style, but the original concepts for the characters and backgrounds evolved from branding exploration work done by a fantastic design duo, Skinnyships, out of Portland, Oregon. We’ve since expanded on the original concepts to work with the unique needs of each SongPop game.
We love the flat, graphic, vector-based illustrations and characters. It gives us a huge amount of flexibility when it comes to representing tons of different music genres and seasonal events.
Can you take us through the creation process for the characters?
We work in a mixture of Illustrator, After Effects, Figma, and Unity. Our talented animators and illustrators come up with the concepts for our characters based on live ops event themes or music categories. We have templates for the basic sizes and shapes, but there’s a lot of creative freedom when it comes to what the characters look like in the end. Honestly, our art team is so creative that we usually have too many great ideas!
That being said, everything is a balance between style, efficiency, functionality, and fun. We always look at our art assets as a whole, taking care to pay attention to diversity in characters and making sure we’re hitting the right notes when it comes to how fun and functional each element feels.
The Mom and Dad characters are my favorites because they each have a cute little baby attached to them. I’m also partial to our only non-humanoid, Butters the Thanksgiving turkey.
What did you want to convey with SongPop Party’s art?
In SongPop Party, players can unlock and choose up to 30 characters to use as avatars, and each one has its own theme song, environment, and personalized animations to express themselves in the core gameplay. We wanted to convey each character’s mood, look, and feel to be specific to their own taste and story to allow players to connect to the artwork.
Music is something that appeals to everyone, but everyone’s taste in music is different and very personal. We’ve got a diverse set of characters to choose from, and while they can’t possibly represent everyone out there, it’s their themes that are hopefully relatable to as many players as possible.
What was the most challenging part of creating SongPop Party’s art?
Originally, our character animations were a lot more custom and complex. In order to take advantage of all the great motion plugins that After Effects has to offer, we decided to create the character animations as sprite sheets instead of in Unity itself.
They looked fantastic, but we ultimately had to spend some time modifying the character system so it was performant enough. In order to optimize them, we got some great advice and changed the structure to mix and match clips into various state machines. It was a huge learning experience for all of us.
What do you enjoy most about working on SongPop Party?
Testing the game in local Party mode. It’s meant to be played with people, and it always feels like a party when we’re playing it. SongPop Party is a game that makes people smile. It’s truly delightful and enjoyable, and the art and design are definitely a part of that. I’m super proud of our team!
I also enjoyed conducting user testing and see people’s reactions. Our test subjects were often apprehensive about what the gameplay would be like. When they saw the words “Guess the song”, they would ask, “Eek, do I have to sing?” The answer was no, but they always ended up singing along anyway—they just couldn’t help it!
We bet you won’t be able to help yourself singing along either! Get the party started by downloading SongPop Party on the Nintendo Switch with a 10% launch discount and Xbox today! Also be sure to join SongPop Party’s Discord server to keep up to date with the latest news.
