KIDS Process

2018

Exhibition space at the Museum of Digial Art, Zürich

The exhibition turned out to be a very elaborate public beta test for the game.

Scenes dynamically reacted to spectators entering or leaving the projection space. The more people were present, the more the characters would play out the scenes. We liked the effect this generated when a single person entered the projection. As one entered the space, the characters started to swarm in from all sides. After one would leave the space, the characters would leave with them.

The exhibition guide was projected onto a wall.

When we observed people playing the game and interacting with the other parts of the exhibition, we understood that some parts worked very well, while others were less engaging. Our conclusion based on the feedback was that we had a solid base, but there was something missing. For the rest of 2018 we returned exploring new ideas and prototyping in order to find these missing parts.

We worked on a dialogue system to try things out quickly. Mario developed a custom scripting language just for that. The language "TalkScript" was designed to make it easy to write multi-character multiple-choice dialogue in which different characters talk or carry out other actions concurrently. It also featured basic conditional logic, variables, control flow, and asynchronous actions. It was fun, even though we didn't use any of it in the final game.

Counting.

Let's play.

The dialogues can be previewed with text-to-speech voices right after being imported into Unity, including basic timing. For the voices, we used the children's voices by acapela group.

Force field.

Creating a stream.

Physics system at play.

Push towards the hole.

Diverting a stream.

Having no friends.

Making kids.

Mario created a custom animation system to calculate fitting frame-by-frame animation driven by forces. You can watch us explaining it in detail here.

1D Fluid simulation.

Channel setup as seen in the film.

Waterpark!

Finalizing sounds with our sound designer Masumi Takino.

We used VR to feel the right scaling for cinema.

Continue to 2019