Play as Macchiato or Jelly Bean, who are desperately in love with Poppy (or something like that). Battle each other to score goals, avoid bombs, eat fish, gain hearts, and learn the secrets of the universe. If you win, you will earn Poppy's affection forever. But if you lose, press start and try again!



Each player gets 9 lives (hah! get it?). When you lose all 9 lives, the other player wins the match, and gets a star. Whoever gets 3 stars first, wins the game.



The controls are fairly simple:


Up/Down - move your paw up and down to block your goal
A/B/C - start your attack (note, these might not work exactly right in this version)

When blocking your goal, hold down:

A - basic attack
B - slow attack
C - fast attack
If you don't hold down a button, you will still block your goal


When the round is over, whoever wins gets a star. Press "B" to start the next round.
When the battle for Poppy's affection is over, press Start to reset the game.
press ABC+Start at any time to reset the game.
Start when the game is running pauses the game.
Pixel Poppy Pong supports 2 players with standard controllers. If a controller isn't present, the AI will automatically take over - so you can play P1 vs AI, AI vs P2, or AI vs AI (to be clear, calling this AI is a stretch, lol).



Several items can appear on the field. The main 3 are hearts, bombs, and fish. Whoever touched Poppy last, gets the item. The other items, you will have to play to find out - one is super rare 


Hearts give you an extra heart.
Bombs take away a heart.
Fish can give you either 3 extra hearts, or bonus points, depending on Poppy's mood. She's a cat, after all.
The other ones? You'll have to find out..
Poppy has 12 different moods which affect scoring and what the items do to the player who touched Poppy last. Currently, the scoring system doesn't affect the end result of the game - and I probably won't have time to implement that by the contest deadline. But I plan to incporporate it in the future.



This version is "playable" enough although not completely finished. I still plan on using as much time before the deadline to fix/add stuff.



It's definitely most fun played with a second person - the AI is probably too hard.



It's frantic and goofy with 2 humans though! I play tested with my son, it was actually pretty hilarious. I still need to tweak the goal hitboxes a bit and make some of the initial kickoffs less aggressive. But it was still fun enough.



Currently, there is no sound or music. I hope to get at least some sound effects into the game by the deadline. I intend to use Ponesound, although I'm not clever enough to add a cool logo on the game startup sequence yet!



I really want to add a title screen, but I probably don't have time to draw anything. At least I added a loading screen!