I was just chatting with Andy Hull after this interview, and he said, “Every design decision matters more when there aren’t many to be made.” He’s in a position to know, because his game, What is Bothering Carl? targets young children. It makes his game the odd duck in a pool of ten odd ducks, but Andy’s insight is all the more interesting for being on the outside looking in. Read the full interview for how complicated it is to keep things simple, what it’s like to be stuck outside the mainstream, and a few ins and outs of running a one-man operation.

Pixelsocks: Can you describe your game?

Andy: It’s called What is Bothering Carl?, and it’s an interactive storybook for kids three to six years old. Every page has a voiceover and highlights the text as it’s read. Kids can click on all the nouns on each page for a close-up of the object and to hear the word. All the scenes have animated elements that kids can play with. It also comes with two music videos, and a memory game that the kids can play.

Pixelsocks: Accessibility is a hot topic, but nobody talks about it in the context of kids games. Do you encounter challenges mainstream developers might not even consider?

Andy: The biggest thing is that everything has to be super simple. A lot of the interactivity had to be cut back, because kids didn’t understand what they were doing.

Another thing is that a lot of content for kids is over the web, but we did a downloadable game so it could take over the desktop. That way, when the parent boots it up, the kid is locked into the program. So they can’t miss-click and get into Windows where they’ll have no idea what to do.

Pixelsocks: Or worse yet, just enough.

Andy: Right. The navigation is literally two or three places to click on any one screen so the kids can’t get too lost. We also had to blow up the mouse cursor, and there’s a lot of verbal instruction for what to click on next. It’s the sort of thing that would be really annoying in adult game.

We also only use one mouse button because the kids can’t really handle more than that. We tested it with a lot of kids and families, and the parents said, “my kid can move a mouse, and they like watching the cursor move around. They can click one button, but they don’t really understand anything past that.” You have to make it foolproof. You can’t click on anything by accident, and that lets kids play with it like it’s a toy.

Pixelsocks: Do you think there are any lessons from your product that should inform more mainstream developers?

Andy: I think so. As I get older, the games I play are shorter web games. That’s because you sit down and you’re experiencing the game right away. It doesn’t have to hold your hand, but it’s immediately obvious how you can interact with the game.

There’s also cutting down to the bare essentials. Say you’re in a platform game and you have to hit a button to enter a door. You always want to go through the door, so why doesn’t it just open automatically? Obviously the controls still have to be more complicated than the ones for [What is Bothering Carl?], but just adding a button for an idea might not necessarily mesh with the rest of the gameplay.

Pixelsocks: Do you plan to keep this game on the PC, or have you thought about porting it elsewhere?

Andy: We’re looking at a Mac port right now, because that’s something we can handle on our own. We’d also love to be on the Wii–it’s kids software, it’s pointer-based–so I think it’d make sense as WiiWare. In fact, I think it would make sense for Nintendo to do more, like having an interactive books section for kids. I’ve been trying to get in contact with Nintendo about it.

There’s also Xbox Live, but there you’re talking about a more complicated controller, and three-year olds might have trouble interfacing with it. The other thing we’re thinking about is the iPhone/iPod. However, the problem there is that the screen is really small. Also parents have to ask themselves if they’ll hand their three-year old a $300 device. Now, if Apple came out with a bigger touch tablet, it’d be picture-book sized and kids could interact with it.

Nothing is really the perfect fit. Kids technology like the LeapFrog, is just so behind. You can’t really run games that look like What is Bothering Carl? Because it’s essentially Super Nintendo hardware. I was shooting for something on the level of DVD menu quality.

Pixelsocks: I’d say this game outstrips any DVD menu I’ve seen.

Andy: Well, I wanted everything to look like it had been painted and you could buy it in a bookstore. I especially wanted to stay away from that Flash/Saturday morning cartoon look. It’s very easy to animate that style, but it looks a little cheap.

Another issue was that, as one guy, the number of frames I could draw was very limited.

Pixelsocks: How much of the game did you personally build?

Andy: Pretty much everything. I did all the programming, the art, and I wrote all the music. I did the narration and the singing. The only thing I bought was the sound effects, though it was a package deal, and I ended up filling some of the holes. It was pretty much just me in my basement.

Pixelsocks: Did you perform the music, then?

Andy: I actually bought little clips of instruments playing about three notes. I stitched a huge library of those together to make the music. I have a little bit of music background, but I’m not very good at playing any instruments. However, some music theory was enough to patch together the melodies. Come to think on it, the music was probably the biggest struggle on the project. By contrast, I majored in computer science in college, and my minor was in oil painting, so I’d done tons of that.

Pixelsocks: You know, those things sound really divergent before you see this game.

Andy: I wanted to do something that incorporated both. I also worked as a toy designer and learned a lot about child development. This was a neat way to pull everything together.

Pixelsocks: That all seems to dovetail, except for the music videos. How did you come to those?

Andy: Kids love music and singing along, and I thought it would be a catchy way to get kids hooked on the book. The computer is sort of the middle ground between what they see on TV and in books, so making this game was an exploration of what to include and what to avoid. For instance, I didn’t have the characters talking because I wanted to keep a separation between the narrative and the character like a book does. At the same time, the music videos seemed like a good way to bring the things kids see on the pages to life.

Making the videos was a huge struggle. I’d done some animation in Flash and some 3D modelling, but never anything on the scale of a video. It took ten hours of work for thirty seconds of video, and each song is about three minutes long. I reused some of the art form the book, but there were so many additional backgrounds and characters. Lip-synching was a total nightmare. Things like that just eat up unexpected amounts of time.

Pixelsocks: Do you have any recommendations for developers who are learning lip-synching?

Andy: What I did was learn After Effects for the animation. I bought the program and a book, did a lot of web tutorials, and I spent maybe three weeks just learning the program.

I would say just use the web. I looked up lip-synching, learned about the phonemes and their mouth positions, and came up with a simplified version. So instead of ten different positions, I’m using six with limited accuracy. I think that if you’re willing to put in the time to learn every little bit of development, it’s all out there.

I think I’m at an advantage, because I started making games when I was fourteen. So when I got to the point where I was making a commercial product, I only had a couple of things left to learn. I think you’ll have a huge uphill battle if you’re learning programming, and art, and videos, and everything all at once, because it’s too much. What you want to do is take what you do know and add one thing you don’t know, and on the next project you can add one more thing. People seem like they just pop out of nowhere, but it’s really hours of projects in your spare time.

Pixelsocks: Games media have done a terrible job of representing kids games. What kinds of problems have you encountered because that mainstream infrastructure isn’t there to support you?

Andy: To be honest, that has been really rough. Look at Steam; they’re not really set up to handle kids software. Our booth has been pretty empty here at PAX, because this game really isn’t targeted to the people here. There have been some kids coming by, and that’s been awesome, but they’re definitely the minority.

So the obvious thing to do is find the target audience, but the difficulty is that the audience hasn’t been brought together yet. I’ve been to book shows, kids shows, and there just isn’t a community or distribution built around children’s software. We contact parenting blogs, and they’re not even familiar with the concept of downloadable software. Letting a three-year old handle the computer is still sort of new, so it can be a challenge even getting people in front of the product.

I’ve met with Random House and other book publishers, and they’re not ready either. They do some digital stuff, but it’s all web-based. They love the game, but they don’t have the distribution network for software. Not having that sort of network to just plug into is just brutal. I’m hoping to help spur that on, but it’s hard as a small developer to make the kids version of Steam. It sounds like an awesome plan, but it’s a huge amount of work. Even if I made it, there’d be just my one product, because there aren’t tons of people doing this stuff.

Pixelsocks: With Penny Arcade being over 10 years old, a lot of the gamers who started reading at age 15 are probably starting to have kids by now. It seems like PAX might be the best venue you’ll find to reach gamer parents.

Andy: To be honest, I entered knowing that Mike and Jerry had kids. I thought that their kids might like the game, and it worked! Seriously though, that’s why I started the company. I’m a gamer and everybody my age is getting to the point where they’re having gamer kids. More traditional parents might have trouble letting a three-year old onto the computer, but my friends have their kids up there right away. So I’m hoping that everyone who reads this starts making babies to expand my consumer base. The power is in your hands!

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