Popup Dungeon is a 2020 Strategy RPG/Game Maker produced by Triple.B.Titles, creators of Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages. The game features robust, easy-to-use tools that allow anyone to easily create and share new characters, enemies, and even entire stories and game modes. For the less creatively inclined, the game also features a 16-level campaign called The Wizard's Tower, an arena mode, as well as two story campaigns; the fantasy-themed Sweetwater and the Sci-fi themed Run Home.
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General Tropes
- Competitive Balance: The game auto-balances custom characters and abilities.
- Expy:
- Thorian is a paladin who's looks and mannerisms are clearly based on The Mighty Thor.
- Maceson is basically Blade, except he hunts demons rather than vampires.
- Ricky is a parody of Captain Kirk, from Star Trek: The Original Series
- Level Scaling: The game automatically scales encounter difficulty relative to both your party's current power level, as well as the power of the charms you have equipped. Content creators can turn this off in their own games if they like, however.
- No Ontological Inertia: When a character dies, any effects that they were responsible for immediately expire.
- Macrogame: Playing through stories (both official and otherwise) gives you gold that you can spend to purchase charms from the vending machine, which you can use to buff your party with permanent boosts.
- Shout-Out: Loads of them, spread throughout enemies, allies and abilities.
- Stylistic Suck: Enemies are literally cardboard cut-outs with images pasted onto them, while dialogue portraits are cheap-looking popsicle-stick puppets.
Tropes Exclusive to The Wizard's Tower
- Big Bad: The Wizard. He intends to steal your creativity, and with it, doom the world. Though the ending reveals that he just wanted to guide you into playing more.
- Minion with an F in Evil: Ding Bat.
- He Was Right There All Along: So what does The Wizard look like, exactly? Turns out he was masquerading as the game's logo. According to him, he took that form because humans are attracted to emojis.
- Great Gazoo: The Wizard set up the entire game for his amusement.
- Reality Warper: The Wizard has the ability to bend the game world to his whim. He demonstrates this by being the only character who's dialogue portrait lacks a popsicle stick.
- One-Steve Limit: Subverted; there's a playable character named Orin the Wizard, but he's different from the NPC known as The Wizard.
- The Voiceless: Inverted; The Wizard is the only character in the game who has full voice acting.
Tropes Exclusive to Sweetwater
- Came Back Wrong: Gameplay-only example with the charm you get for completing Sweetwater. It revives your party members once per battle, but also confuses them.
- The Plague: Your goal is to find a cure to it.
- Red Herring: You set off to find the feathers of a T'owl, but you can cure the plague without them. It's even lampshaded in the ending.
- Infinity +1 Element: You're going to want to have plenty of spirit-users in your party, since demons end up being the primary antagonist.
- Rich Bastard: Von Imp. His family sells water from a magical spring that supposedly cures all ailments. The water really was magic, but he keeps selling it even though it became corrupted decades ago.
Tropes Exclusive to Run Home
- Permadeath: If Gooliette dies, she's gone for good.
- Optional Party Member: Gooliette.
- Promoted to Playable: An update gives you a download code for an official playable version of her, but only if she survives to the end.
- Slime Girl: Gooliette, a cube-shaped Squell who can join your party if you help pay off her debt. Downplayed in that her species is genderless despite her Tertiary Sexual Characteristics, though that doesn't stop her from falling in love with you if she survives to the end of the game.
- Shared Universe: The game takes place in the same universe as Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages.
