On the eve of the New Year 2012, we wanted to release a short interactive book on the motives of the poem “12 Cooks” by Daniil Kharms. A month remained, the general concept was developed, the main graphic materials are ready. According to our calculations, we just had time to release the application in Russian on the 30th of December (on the assumption that Apple will consider our application for 7 days).
How the interactive book evolved into coloring
We started to develop the first pages. We looked at the result: it turned out bright, colorful, but something was missing. We tried to change the colors of the characters: someone liked one option, someone else, then we realized that there were no companions to taste and color, and decided to make a coloring.
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Why selective coloring?
Studying the subject area, we noticed that users are criticizing most of the colorings of the following plan:
“Even for an adult it’s impossible to color well.”
It’s impossible to drive a finger across the tablet screen, just like a marker on paper is impossible, in many colorings there is also no cancellation of the last step, even increasing the image area does not help. And, it turns out: he painted, painted the picture for half an hour, and then once made a mistake and that was all, it turned out to be a daub, no aesthetic and moral satisfaction, one disappointment.
Therefore, for tablets, it is optimal to make the coloring selective: I chose a color, “poked” with my finger into a part of the object, and it immediately all was painted in the desired color. They gave to test both options (option "felt-tip pen" and selective) to children of acquaintances. They liked the selective coloring more, especially because they were younger.
How our coloring works
The object should be divided into parts - areas in which you can “poke” with your finger and which will then be painted in the selected color, you also need to select the outline. Further, the selected areas must be made white, because in the end they “paint” in the color of Open GL. It looks like this:
All objects must be placed in the desired order of the z-index, and circle the convex polygons (some of them are several polygons).
It turns out that one character consists of 15-40 objects, depending on its complexity.
Thus, the book has two modes:
1) Coloring mode
2) Interactive book mode
Results
The development of the coloring took a little longer than we expected, so the book came out after the New Year. But the application has become much more interesting.
On the next video you can briefly get acquainted with what we have.