Happy One Year Anniversary!

Hello, everyone!

A year ago, today, Club Penguin Island officially released on iOS and Android devices!

The year has gone so quick! I still keep thinking Club Penguin Island is a new game, but now that it is one year old, I think it’s fair to say that it is well into its development. In my opinion, so much has happened to Club Penguin Island since it launched on 29th March 2017.

The day of launch was quite a frustrating one, indeed. If you weren’t in the loop back then, Club Penguin Island was published several hours before the shutdown of Club Penguin. Even today, people still complain about the team’s decision to have done this. Fortunately, I don’t think it detracted the community away from Club Penguin: a 12-year old game. On the other hand, it detracted people from playing Club Penguin Island immediately after its release. And, surely, you can see why.

As a result, the new game didn’t have the best beginning at all. It received many negative reviews due to lack of content, big bugs and its “lack of respect” to its predecessor game. Besides, it wasn’t a big deal for the people who tested the game during its geo beta (mid-December). The divide between members and non-members was pretty significant. Non-members were not even allowed to sit down. Let me say that again. Non-members weren’t allowed to sit down. It was that bad.

Of course, the team acknowledged there ought to be a “hook” to persuade players to buy a membership. But, at the time, the game was almost like “pay to play”, despite being a free app. As you can expect – across the board – there were minimal features. Some players were patient. Others were not. Before the long, the community started to crack and divide into separate factions. Club Penguin Private Servers (CPPS) started to evolve and steal the spotlight, and this was declining the audience of Club Penguin Island. Many disputes occurred throughout the days of its launch. Even skipping forward a couple of months later, the community was still unhappy (overall). Nonetheless, new features began to shed some light on the game. Chapter 2 of Aunt Arctic’s adventures was a much-needed addition to surge more life into the game.

In retrospect, its been a tough year for the Club Penguin team and the community.

Top 5 ‘Quality of Life’ Improvements

Hello, everyone!

Wow – it certainly has been a while! I am going to break the month-long silence with a cool post that should hopefully provoke some discussion in the comments section. One of the recent posts on this blog was my personal review of Club Penguin Island (so far). At the moment, I rate it as a good game! Of course, there are always things to improve on. With Club Penguin Island, there’s no exception. While it does satisfy some of its players, it has been a victim of so much hate, but has the hate been fair? I’d say that the constructive criticism is fair because Club Penguin Island is still on the road to being a great game.

In this post, I am going to be sharing my top 5 improvements for Club Penguin Island. These aren’t bold ideas like the ones I have been proposing beforehand, they are more like amendments that can significantly improve an average player’s “quality of life”. It is important for the team to go big in updates, which we have been witnessing in the recent updates! On the other hand, I still think that updates can still be just as good without the addition of something big. The good thing about “quality of life” updates is that they can still keep the player base entertained without too much time being spent on them.

Here are my top 5 improvements I would love to see being made to Club Penguin Island…

---

Expressing Yourself

Do any of you remember that sneak peek of Project: Super Secret, back in 2015, with the 3D penguin expressing several emotions?

You may recognise some of the actions because they can actually be found attached to some of the quick chat options in the game. I think the quick chat feature is worth it just because you can play around with some unique actions. At the same time, I think we are still limited in expressing ourselves on Club Penguin Island.

Why not add an “actions” tab to the chat interface?

Sometimes, actions don’t need chat bubbles to assist them; the actions are already well-portrayed enough! One of the best parts of having access to raw penguin animations is being able to create funny and interesting screenshots. It would add a lot more character to each penguin because some of us don’t want to say “Very nice!” when applauding someone else; it could be a sarcastic thing. That’s just one reason.