Busytown Mysteries
Engaging young readers with interactive stories set in the world of Busytown
Engaging young readers with interactive stories set in the world of Busytown
Toontales is an interactive storybook platform housing episodic stories from different IPs, such as Busytown Mysteries and Caillou. The Busytown episodes were the first set of episodes to be released as a part of Toontales. Busytown makes use of a variety of playful interactions and minigames that are integrated into the story itself.
Busytown episodes use a familiar story pattern for new readers to follow along with by solving a particular mystery and learning about the clues that Huckle & his friends discover
Speech bubbles communicate the dialog to readers, and is accompanied by spoken narration that can be disabled if a reader wants to read the story on their own to practice their reading skills
The matching game at the end of an episode helps recap the clues discovered in the story to strengthen the reader's deductive reasoning abilities
The Busytown episodes were built by a small team of designers and developers, which resulted in a lot of overlap in roles. Although I was primarily a developer on the project, I also worked on a number of design-oriented tasks. We were given a multitude of tasks ranging from animating dynamic transitions between screens to developing tools and entire minigames.
Transitions between pages in the story make for a more dynamic experience for the end user - instead of watching a generic animation repeat over and over, the animations were designed to help progress the story forward. Often, entire backgrounds and assets had to be redrawn or modified for the page to be developed.
We built the episodes so that every foreground element could jiggle and bounce. We made use of the jiggle and bounce technology to implement more complex, nested jiggle animations. While nested jiggles were challenging to configure without crashing the app, they brought out the toy-like nature of the characters.
The card matching game at the end of Busytown episodes was developed in close collaboration with designers to ensure the game experience integrated sensibly into the story. Providing the player with both visual and audio feedback were key in ensuring the experience communicated effectively to users.
DHX Media; Loud Crow Interactive
Scripting; Implementation; Animation; Prototyping
Roger Lee; Zelita Rankin; Jayson Kirby; Tracy Tsui; Bill Chung; Roman Magbanua; Adam Cristobal; Justin Eddy; Fayaz Ashraf; Ian Sutton; Andrew Wong
Flash; Photoshop; Xcode