Another year-and-a-bit, another successful client project! As of a few weeks ago, Polk Street Press shipped a brand-new storybook, Spatter and Spark. It’s a genuinely endearing tale of two best friends solving problems together in a way that five-year-olds will find endlessly entertaining. We do too. The story is engaging, the character design and illustration is phenomenal, and there’s just a ton of incidental interactivity to keep the experience fresh and engaging read after read. There are also IAP games and activities designed to teach a preschool skill set – they happen to be pretty fun, too. In a very cool innovation, the activities, and some in-story data, are optionally parsed on PSP’s backend to give parents an auto-updating report on their child’s educational progress.
Most importantly from the perspective of this blog, Spaceman Labs is responsible for all the code in the iOS app. We built on all the work we’d done for Goodnight Safari, and were able to make use of a lot of clever stuff we’d done, like cancelable blocks, audio-synced text highlighting, and animated character encapsulation. But we also developed the animation framework significantly. As it’s now Polk Street Press’s IP we can’t tell you too much about it, but we can say it delivers greatly improved fidelity, performance, and memory utilization (yes, more than just fixing leaks), all of which enables much more detailed, expressive, and long-running animations in the same app size and on the same hardware. We also did a lot of work on moving animation specifications out of code and into artist-maintainable XML, which allowed for rapid iteration without our involvement.
We’re really proud of this project. We love the work we’ve done, and we love the finished product. So far reviews on iTunes seem to agree. Check it out (on the App Store and at Polk Street Press’s website) and let us know what you think.
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