Turbo Pudding

PitterplopDev diary

How Gilby and Pitterplop got their names

· The Turbo Pudding team · 4 min read

Gilby, a little honey-colored axolotl with a round head, feathery gold gills and a small blue raindrop on his forehead, bobs up at the surface of the pond on Puddle Path with a happy smile, his leaf scarf and tail just behind him and his paws showing faintly under the clear blue water, in front of a hedge, green hills with round trees and red-roofed houses, pale mountains, big cream clouds and a pale sun

When work on Pitterplop began, the hero didn’t have a real name yet. In the code he was just Axo, and the trouble he was up against was called the Grump. This Wednesday, a page from our notes on how those two turned into Gilby and a cloud of grumbles, and how the game ended up called Pitterplop.

The picture at the top is Gilby bobbing up in the pond on Puddle Path.

A hero called Churro, briefly

The first real name on the list was Churro. Our notes describe him as a golden axolotl, the only one in the valley who loves rain, and Churro sounded bouncy in every language we tried. Then we checked what else it means. In Spain, a churro can also be a botched job. In Mexico, where wild axolotls come from, it has a slang meaning we’d rather not explain at bedtime. So Churro was out.

The backups were Bimble, an old British word for wandering about with no hurry, and Gilby. Bimble already belonged to a cartoon character on British TV. Gilby comes from gills, the feathery fronds an axolotl wears on both sides of its head, and our checks found no other character using it. That settled it.

Gilby, a little honey-colored axolotl with a round head, feathery gold gills, a small blue raindrop on his forehead and a green leaf scarf trailing behind him, leaps high over Dewdrop Meadow with his tail curled under him and a big smile, against a blue sky with soft cream clouds and a pale sun, above a strip of grass and brown earth, with round green trees and tiny red-roofed houses on the hills far behind
Typed “axolotl jump game.” He almost jumped in as Churro.

Honey, not pink

Next came the colors, and we skipped pastel pink on purpose. Gilby has a honey body, coral gills tipped with gold, a cream belly and orange freckles on his cheeks. The note in his drawing code gives the reason: warmer and bolder, and easy to read on a tiny icon. Golden axolotls are real, by the way. Wild ones are usually dark and speckled, but golden ones turn up in captivity.

He also has a small mark on his forehead, a flat blue raindrop, the sign of an axolotl who loves rain. It’s on the app icon too. We drew it in the middle of his head, flat and with no shine, so it reads as a marking and not as a nervous drop of sweat. Round his neck he wears a green leaf scarf that flutters when he runs.

Gilby stands on the grass in the Hedgerow Hush woods, facing right with a wide smile, rosy freckled cheeks, three feathery gold gills on each side of his round head and a small flat blue raindrop on his forehead, his leaf scarf and his long honey tail behind him, among tall green tree trunks under a thick roof of leaves, with sunbeams slanting down, little falling leaves, small blue, yellow and white flowers in the grass and rows of fir trees in the misty distance
Search history: “orange axolotl,” “why does he have a raindrop.”

A hundred names for a splash

Naming the game started with a list of exactly 100 candidates, sorted into piles: names built from the hero’s, words about gills and frills, the sounds of drops and splashes, puddles and ponds, rain and weather, and bouncy made-up words. Each one had to be short, about ten letters at most, easy to say in English, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, German and French, and free of awkward meanings in all of them.

That cut the list fast. Pudl looked too much like the German word for poodle. Petrichor, the lovely word for the smell of rain, is a mouthful for kids. Anything ending in -doo went, for reasons every parent of a toddler knows. And nearly every short splashy word, like plip, plink, bloop and drippity, already had an owner.

Pitterplop was the one that stuck: the pitter of rain and the plop into a puddle, the whole game in one word, ten letters exactly. Our checks turned up just one other meaning. In the Cologne dialect of German, Pitter is a name for Peter. We decided Peter wouldn’t mind. The runners-up were Plippity and Pitter Pond.

From the Grump to a grumble cloud

The Grump didn’t keep its name either. In the game, the trouble arrives as a cloud of grumbles: “One grey morning a cloud of grumbles rolled over the meadow, and everyone it touched turned cross and crabby.” A grumpy critter wears a small dark puff over its head. In Sunflower Swing, the grumble cloud itself drifts across the sky with a scowl, and wherever its shadow falls, the sunflowers droop their heads. The sign in that level gives the trick away: hop on, and “ride up when the sun comes back!”

In Sunflower Swing, Gilby rides a big sunflower whose head has drooped low under a gray grumble cloud with a scowling face and a faint drizzle; the sunflower has closed its eyes and holds him on its brown seed face, while a grumpy green frog with a dark puff over its head sits by a wooden question mark sign at the bottom left, a grumpy snail with a dark puff waits on top of a tall earth cliff at the right beside two blue raindrops, and green hills, trees and small houses spread under a blue sky and a pale sun
People also ask: why are the sunflowers sad? Look up.

A logo that won’t sit still

Last, the name needed a look. On the title screen, each letter of Pitterplop is its own little piece. The letters take turns in four colors, honey like Gilby, coral like his gills, leaf green and rain blue, and each one bobs and tilts a little out of step with its neighbor. If your device asks for less motion, they hold still. Under them sits the line “A little hero of the Whispering Pond.”

The first two levels of Pitterplop are free to play in your browser at pitterplop.com. The full game is $4.99, paid once. More about the game is on its Pitterplop page.

More about Pitterplop