A key theme of our ongoing play tests was that making stories fun requires lots of animations and interactions. None of the kids we worked with were interested in a static story. After all, these are touch screens. The first thing each kid did when they began a story was tap the characters and elements to see what they did. If they didn’t receive immediate visual and audio feedback from that interaction, they quickly became disinterested, and did not enjoy the app.

This meant that we not only had to have great animations with rich sound, but we needed to have a lot of them on every scene. This presented a huge technical hurdle: how do we quickly create lots of animations and interactions, without slowing the devices to a crawl, or filling up the memory on a device. Oven Bits created several new methods to enable over-the-air downloads of new stories, and a simple scripting technology to enable anyone to create great animations.

Once we solved the challenge of keeping stories engaging and interesting, it was time to begin the process of building out dozens of stories across multiple languages with rich animations and interactions. Our team of animators brought the illustrations to life using cutting-edge tools for character animation. Using a simplified workflow, we were able to produce engaging and rich animations that demanded a fraction of the resources normally required for a project of this size.

The Oven Bits team of designers, animators, developers across multiple platforms and client teams all worked tirelessly to develop the initial launch of the apps across 3 app stores and hundreds of devices on day one. In addition to our internal team, we coordinated and worked with an even larger group of third-party illustrators, storytellers and of course, kids, to get the project completed on time and on budget. And, with over 2 million downloads in the first 30 days, we achieved the project’s goals.