Tale of developing interactive books



    In this article we want to share our experience and experience in developing two interactive books for children: “The Story of Miss Moppet” and “The Tale of Kitten Tom”.

    To begin with, we note that the most important thing in the book is the text. That is why translation is very important for books, and with regard to applications on the App Store: for book applications, high-quality localization is very important.

    When reading an application book, children and parents pay the most attention to interactivity, animation, colorful and vivid pictures, and, last but not least, letters. However, unlike English-speaking children, for which developers around the world are trying, Russian children are not so spoiled for having interactive books in Russian with voice acting on the App Store, that is, books for the smallest, where the readable text is highlighted, and you can listen to each word individually , or even a single letter in a word! Such books help learn languages.

    We decided to make interactive books in Russian with voice acting.

    Book search


    Our goal was to create the best-quality interactive book with voice acting, a book in which absolutely all objects respond to clicking, so we called the series of our books immersive. We repeat: the main concept of our books was that in them all objects must be active and somehow react. A week went in search of a suitable book.

    Since we wanted to make our books for children, the text in such books should be simple and small. Pictures should be bright and interesting. It was these books that Beatrix Potter wrote at the beginning of the last century. In English, there is even the term picture book, to the determination of which Beatrix Potter made an important contribution. From the entire list of books written by a wonderful writer, the children's story “The Story of Miss Moppet”, a charming story from the life of a cat and a mouse, was selected for the first test. We like the result, but not for us to judge, but for our readers.

    Now we have released a prequel to the story told in our first book - “The Tale of Kitten Tom”. The book was released in September 1907, and has since been a classic of English children's literature. A wonderful and kind tale tells about manners and how children behave. We tried, using in the second book, all the old developments, to do even more efficiently, and interestingly. The new application turned out, in our opinion, even better, and we will continue the series.

    Preparation of graphic material


    All illustrations for books were taken from the first publications of the beginning of the last century, they are painted by Beatrix Potter herself. By this, of course, we saved a little time and effort on working out the characters, working out the scenes, and drawing illustrations. Our task was only to process and finish the pictures created at the beginning of the last century. To do this, they had to be divided into objects and draw the background and missing parts.

    We came across several interactive books that used old pictures. Most often in them not all objects respond to pressing, or the objects are not cut out from the background, it looks, frankly, ugly. We decided to cut the pictures so that the entire background will be finished. For each picture, it was necessary to spend a lot of painstaking work on cutting and painting the missing parts.


    Programming


    Our team includes professional programmers, but no one had experience developing for the iPhone, and that was a big minus.

    It makes no sense to describe the study of Objective-C and Xcode, we just note that it was quite interesting. Initially, after C ++, the syntax of Objective-C is very unusual. But in fact, there’s nothing wrong with him, he doesn’t offer any new patterns, which, not surprisingly, given that the language itself was developed in the 80s, and still has not undergone major changes.

    An important issue is the correct choice of the framework on which the application is being developed.
    Cocos2d was chosen as the Framework, it is very popular, and many applications in the top are made on it. Cocos2d has excellent documentation and is open source, which is highly commented out and extremely transparent.

    When choosing the C ++: Box2D or C: Chipmunk physical engine , the choice was made in favor of C ++.
    When programming books, we ran into many problems related to the fact that the target platform is mobile and has limited resources, multithreading, and multitouching were also a big problem. However, we hope that we have achieved stability in our applications.


    Text layout


    Layout of the text is not an easy task, given that it must be stretched and must be composed dynamically in a software environment. But the vector font, even on the iPhone 3, is quite readable, despite the small scale.

    Writing a script that automatically stretches the text in width is not technically a difficult task, but it was not very simple for our programmers, because in order for the text to look beautiful, it is necessary to have a floating distance not only between words but also between letters. The stretched text looks as it should, and corresponds to the original most fully.


    From left to right: unstretched text; floating distance between words; floating distance between letters and words.

    Words must be divided among themselves in order to further use this when “acting out”, pressing and pronunciation. Note that the animation of playing the word itself was carefully selected from several options, and the most original in our opinion was chosen.

    Each word must be associated with a sound file and the time of the word.

    In general, to summarize, we can say that the text takes up to 30% of the development time. But on the other hand, we make books, and it’s even strange that the text takes no more than half the time.

    Voice acting


    If the item in the book does not respond to clicking sound, then this causes confusion and disappointment! Sound selection is of the utmost importance. All sounds should be in harmony with each other. They should be aligned in volume, should be without noise, crackling, pleasant to hear. Only after we added sounds did the books come to life.

    The text of the book itself should be read expressively. There were no problems with the Russian voice acting, but the English one was not immediately available. Only a native speaker can read without accent.

    The first attempt at dubbing The Stories of Miss Moppet turned out to be a failure, we were promised that the girl from Zambia has a British accent and is able to read expressively. In fact, it was not at all what was promised. We just wasted our time. I had to search again. The second attempt was successful, and the book was voiced by excellent British English.

    In order for the application to be able to use and enjoy, it is necessary to correctly level the sound of background music, reading text and sound effects. After trying to make a similar setting, we realized that it was just necessary for the user to give the opportunity to adjust the sound in the application. Thus, to achieve the desired sound in our books, you can adjust the volume of music and sound effects separately. The overall volume is controlled by the device button. The relative volume can be adjusted from 0% to 300%.

    Summary


    It took us about 3 months to develop a trial application. The second book, despite the fact that it is more complicated and larger, we did in just a month, despite the fact that constant work was carried out to improve the general basis of both applications, for example, we added ropes as in “Cut the Rope”.

    In the following videos, you can briefly see what happened.




    Links to the App Store:
    Story of Miss Moppet FULL version of the
    story of Miss Moppet Lite version of the

    tale of a kitten Tome FULL version of the
    tale of a kitten Tome Lite version

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