We wanted something that was fun and could reused all the lovely characters, backgrounds, and music we already had. We came up with Fairytale Play Theatre.

Kids could create scenes, add characters and props, choose music, and then record themselves puppeteering their cast and doing all the voices and sound effects.

Scenes could be added, rearranged, and the whole performance could be exported as a movie to be shared.

This project was the second one we'd done in Unity. A bold, and not always easy step. But...It did mean 3 of us were able to do the engineering. Great fun, and reminded me of why this industry is so cool; you can draw, build, animate, problem solve, engineer. There's nothing else that let's you do that.

Above are a sequence of screen shots for use on the App Store. In the end we used something a little different, but these are still fun.

initial sketches and ideas.

An early sketch of how I thought the menu interface might work.

A bit further on in development, from inside the app, but still very much a WIP.

Here are 3 short video diaries that I did to show how the app was progressing. I think we did a pitch to the RSC about including some Shakespearean content. One big bonus of using Unity was how quickly we got lots of the functionality into the app.

The background and characters from the original fairytale apps where adapted so they could be used inside Unity. Mostly, this involved removing hit volumes and pathing locators, and the like. Also the combining of meshes to make sure that we could have lots of puppets on stage. Great fun using Unity as it allowed me to flex my coding muscles a little. Nothing beats problem solving on a project like this.