It will be more for little children, more colorful, interactive, with less text in every page and with possibility to listen it recorded by actor voice. Furthermore, children will be able to learn words, animal names (animals always react to touches). As we remember many tales in childhood we can proudly say that this is one of the most interesting story for little children, keeping them concentrating on every page. “Wolf‘s documents” tells about nice friendship of wolf, dog, cat and mice and how it funnily became opposite looking at nowadays.

And this time it will be not only for iPad but for iPhone too!

Today we want share some of our book development stages and technology that we used.

Let’s talk about animations.

Usually frame-by-frame is used for animation. It is more commonly known as stop-motion animation. It is achieved by manipulating a physical object and making it appear to move on its own by shooting one frame, manipulating the object, then shooting another frame, and so on. In the end you will have a bunch of frames, which needs to change according time.

In some places we used this kind of animation:

But to make a really smooth animation this is not enough (or you’ll need a hundreds of frames, which is not very comfortable).

That’s why we give a try for skeletal animation. This technique is used by constructing a series of ‘bones,’ sometimes referred to as rigging (or skeleton). Each bone in the skeleton is associated with some portion of the character’s visual representation. Skinning is the process of creating this association.

Exploded Doroti’s parts for skeletal animation

Rigging and skinning process

An animation consists just of several frames (poses). Each frame potentially updating the transformation of all the joints in the skeleton. Final step is to interpolate transformations between frames.

Skeletal animation gives us more smoothness and saves a lot of space for our app.

Here is a more complex character which uses skeletal animation:

Spider’s bones hierarchy

OzBook has scenes which requires advanced graphics to be fully impressive. We needed to use “water refraction” or “heat haze (shimmer)” effect in “Lion meets flame ball” and “Witch in water” scenes. It’s quit easy to do this in shaders (glsl). But originally our engine was designed to support older devices as well (for instance – iPhone 3G). So to avoid making two different render mechanisms – we created this effect without using shaders. This can be done in two rendering passes. First one – simple static image, the second one consist of two texture layers which both are applied on the grid with vertex deformation. First layer is the same static texture and the second one is the mask texture which is scrolled up. That’s it!

For more clear view of this effect, here is a video:

Critics found „OzBook“ benefits comparing with other popular interactive books: source.

„OzBook“ is in 4 different languages: English, Lithuanian, German and Russian. There are 60 moving illustrations featuring beautiful scenes, music, sounds and animation.

More information: http://slypot.com/e-books/ozbook/

Slypot Game Studio is a new development team of video games and other interactive content on mobile platforms.
Our mission is to inspire and entertain people all over the world by creating unforgettable games, interactive novels and other media.
Currently, Slypot Game Studios develops for iPad / iPhone / iPod Touch.

Stay tuned for some more info soon.