Challenges In Creating A Book App

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Cary Snowden

I can’t say things have gone completely smooth while building The Day I Became A Pirate; but it has been exciting and I will have to admit it is hard to concentrate on much else in my spare hours.

It has been a year in the making, and a few major issues have held me up for a better part of the time. The biggest being: how to handle the text.

In a book app format, my goal has been to add as many interactions as I possibly can on each page. I also want to really showcase the wonderful illustrations that Zach Clough is creating for the book. With animations and lots of color, there is little room for a big block of text.

Compounding my problem is the fact that The Day I Became A Pirate is a fairly long children’s story. At 24 pages and with as many as 6 lines of copy on many of the pages, I just couldn’t fit it all in. This led to many months of brooding about the problem. In fact, it was such an issue that I literally left the book on the back burner for months at a time, not touching it over the frustration of having to wedge so much into such a tiny space.

Finally, a breakthrough; I decided to add an additional 22 pages to the book, each new page holding only the text, and alternating with the animated illustration pages. This worked for a while but seemed clumsy and forced a separation of the experience between the written story and the engaging interactions.

It was like having two books meshed together. I didn’t like it, but at least it got me going forward again.

A few days ago I was talking with Jason Izatt, who is a good friend and proprietor of TaleSpring Publishing, the publisher of The Day I Became A Pirate. In walking through a few questions with him he made a suggestion that I could animate the text onto each page and include them as part of the interaction. Brilliant!

It took some figuring out, but I finally came up with a series of animations that do the trick. Nicely. So, happily, the book is back down to 24 pages (or so) and now has a very unique and integrated reading solution.

Each page opens with a pirate scroll, where upon is written the story for each page. With a click, the page shrinks down into a button at the bottom of the screen. The text scroll can be called up at any time, and you can even hear me read the story while the scroll is open, or when it is tucked away. This solution really makes the book feel like a fully interactive tale and solves the problem like I have never seen before.

I can’t wait to show you!

The Pirates Movie

Posted on March 7, 2012 by Cary Snowden

My children and I have been watching and waiting for the new animated film called ‘The Pirates!, Band of Misfits‘. It is done by the same folks who did Chicken Run, so it looks to be quite clever and a good lot of fun. Aye!

We love all things piratey, mates! (And how can you go wrong with the Ramones on backup?)

Here’s a clip if you haven’t yet seen this one. Check it out:

The Boy

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Cary Snowden

We are still sailing strong on the book and getting excited to be in the home stretch. As things will start to pick up more and more I wanted to take some time to introduce a few of our characters and give some behind-the-scenes insight into the inspiration for the characters and their part in the story.

I originally came up with this story while walking along the beach with my two sons. I have written a story for each of my four children and each has a prominent role in their own story.

This one I later designated for my youngest boy, Kaiyan, who to that point was the only of my four who did not have his own story.

The Boy in this story is a representation of Kaiyan as drawn by Zach Clough and based on some photos I sent his way for inspiration.

The character in the story, too, is much like Kaiyan; curious, brave, and always willing to try things others are not. Kaiyan is always looking for adventure, too, and was so engaged with this story when I told it the first time that it made us all laugh.

The Boy in our story is unnamed, and although he was inspired by my own son, I hope you can find a little of yourself in his character here.

Illustration by Zach Clough