Players are shown a fill-in-the-blank news story and must correct it before time runs out.
Loop brought me on in late 2024 to design the game, which we then passed to Samsung to develop internally. This was the third game I designed for Samsung, following The Six and Ripplash.
A mockup of a sponsored game intro and game UI
My original idea for the game was a newscast called "Broken News." Players fix a teleprompter for a news reporter before they read it back. The more you miss, the more the ratings drop.
We started designing Pop Off as a standalone game & ad break combo: the content would update daily with three stories per day, while a separate commercial break version would run on Samsung's free TV Plus streaming service.
Some quick mockups of how Broken News could look for the pitch deck
Since we wanted to stick to pop culture stories set in the past and avoid politics, we decided to shift to the angle of "gossip talk show" rather than news. To help with designing the host and set, we brought in my friend Mila Nery.
Mila came up with a bunch of great concepts for the host, but the Samsung team decided the safest bet for a lovable mascot character was a dog (we liked the pigeon). Her name is Pawla! Mila modeled Pawla and the set, and I colored the scene. I also built a fully functional prototype of the game in three.js to prove it would run on the TVs.
A demo of the three.js prototype I built to hand off to Mr Sammy Sung
We went through several feedback rounds refining the game, but eventually it was decided that Pop Off would only be an ad break and we'd need to cut the game length to two blanks. They also scrapped using 3D completely.
I redrew Pawla and the set Mila designed in 2D
"We'd like to try a version without the host." RIP Pawla.
Background concepts for the hostless version of the game
Since we had already tweaked the gameplay so much by this point, basically all I had to do was make a cool background and re-draw the UI to match.
The results screen, which shows automatically when time runs out
Pop Off is available as a Game Break on Samsung's TV Plus streaming service. You'll have to wait for some commercials to try to play this one, sorry!
The outro that plays when the ad break is over
Huge shoutout to the team at Loop (especially Ness, Mila, Nick, and Josiah!) for asking me to work on Pop Off! Thanks for reading!
