Team Size: 12
Timeframe: 5 months
Sprint Timeframe: 6 weeks
Role: Interactive Editor
Key Contributions: Page 05A, General
Learning Prompt: Understand what is needed for a hot air balloon to travel in the sky (encourages Curiosity + Science)
Date Sprint Completed: September 2023
Welcome to your new eBook! Marshall is about to take flight in a hot air balloon, so let’s follow along in his journey with him. You can choose to either let the narrator read the story to you, or have someone else read it with you.
As part of Noggin’s new “Noggin Knows Books” (NKB) eBook series, the experience is meant to showcase elements of interactive storytelling whilst encourage curiosity of different science-related topics.
The draw of this series is that you get to choose. If you have the narrator read the story to you, each interaction with the narrator comes with built-in logic that allows you to replay the interaction if you click on the narration (itself built into the source video), which requires the given components to disable and then re-enable.
As part of this project, I worked over the course of our six-week sprint timeframe in September 2023. At this point, the project’s core interactive editor, Peter Klinkon, already had the main master logic of the NKB series templated, and the project’s other interactive editor, Cristian Duran, had already prototyped out several of the project’s most complicated interactions.
However, I ended up designing page 05A (P05A), the balloon-wind interaction (above), from scratch, which required careful timing of the wind animations to turn on and off. Additionally, due to the sheer scope of logic in the pages of NKB102, there was still a lot of work to be done (a) getting many of the idle audios to play correctly, (b) incorporating updating highlight logic, (c) updating various interactions that needed large elements of polish, (d) balancing out the three different paths (below) you can take at the end of the experience when you choose whether to fix the envelope, the basket, or the burner.
For instance, the burner asset in page 01A (P01A) needed to be updated so it could be “pulled down” and “held” until the player passed the completion threshold in the given looping source video segment. Or the binoculars interaction (P12B) needed to be updated so that it would continue to appear flush along with the rest of the interactive book. Or many of the interactions that worked ok in “solo read” mode needed to be tweaked to be able to work ok in “co-read” mode (which held the logic of each page in one keyframe as opposed to the set timespan in the source video with the narration built in).
A replay of “co-Read” mode can be viewed below.
This turned out to be my final project at Noggin, as I was able to hand off the completed pass of polish logic to Peter before I ended up leaving the company.
Given how much I love interactive storytelling, I’m happy that my last contribution was in developing a project that encourages such in its players.
Matthew Floyd 