What is it?

This was going to be an iPhone app for kids. I started it after I’d made some progress on my “PuppetGraphics” inverse kinematics library for iOS after a friend suggested my drawing style might be suitable for a kids’ book.

Here are some videos that show the asset preparation process so you can get more of an idea of how much technology went into achieving this innocuous little app.

Making something like this doesn’t just involve a lot of programming the app itself - it needed additional tools to be programmed to get the graphics into a usable format.

Analogue phase:

Digital phase:

What happened?

This was challenging on a technical and artistic level and I just never really found the time to solve the issues. I had some maths to work out for the animation engine, and the whole thing was built using low-level OpenGL apis rather than nice friendly UIView / CALayer apis (which I now regret). And then I failed to find time to finish all the artwork. I need backgrounds you see.

Has anything changed since then?

I’ve written a lot more iOS apps so I have a much deeper understanding of all the performance tradeoffs of using different APIs.

My father (Richard Forrest of plesiosaur.com) showed me the beautiful paleo-art of John Conway which puts my illustrations to shame.

Can it be revived?

There’s no reason why I couldn’t spend a few days finishing this off. It’s just a matter of priorities.