There are so many different approaches to creating kids’ games and the balance of gameplay vs narrative is always a careful pitch. When tackling one of the youngest skewing audiences on CBeebies, we were always going to go light on gameplay and heavier on story and  Twirlywoos Explore and Play has the feel of an interactive cartoon, where each animated segment is triggered by a very simple user interaction.

Made by Plug-in Media, the project was our first with industry leaders, Ragdoll Productions and MacKinnon and Saunders, and we were SO excited to be making something alongside such legendary production teams. Beautifully animated using stop motion and with a brilliant appreciation for comedic timing, recreating these characters in HTML5 was both a challenge and a delight!  We visited the MacKinnon and Saunders studio to photograph the real models before translating them into our interactive animation pipeline.

The project features 6 different mini games, taking place on the Twirlywoos boat and outside in the real world, following an identical format to the TV series that features live action segments in which the Twirlywoos enter the real world.  Fundamental to each game are the early years schema - helping children to grasp basic concepts like empty and full or up and down. This is achieved by encouraging children to experiment with on-screen objects and watch the impact of their interactions: touching the sea anemones on the beach makes them hide, tapping the paper turns it into a tunnel to pass through, and tapping the watering can helps the tomato plant to grow.

The game is available to play on the CBeebies website here.

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