Big Bugs - the backstory of how we made it.
The story of Big Bugs begins with my first management position. Three years prior, I was pursuing my bachelor degree at UCSD while serving as a student intern at GTE Interactive Media. The phone company now known as Verizon funded the company. Our charter was to develop new media, investigate the future of TV and build games made possible with the convergence telecommunications, entertainment and software industries.
Upon graduating from UCSD, I was promoted to the Manager of Software Engineering and took charge of a team of 7 developers. My team worked side by side with production artists, visual designers, animators, writers and producers. The whole gang was dubbed the Interactive Toys Group (ITG). We designed, engineered and conceived entertainment and educational products for 5-12 year old children.
Calling our products “Titles”, we borrowed our development and thinking models from Hollywood studios. Our titles were engaging, fun, and highly interactive; pushing the boundaries of user experiences known at the time. We won a few awards; and with each new project; we built upon our core technical capabilities adding new tools and techniques to our repertoire.
My engineering team worked fast, efficiently, and were prolific. In our first 2 years we developed and shipped 10 different titles. We focused on tools and reusable libraries for data-driven application engines.
Within Interactive Toys Group we fostered a collaborative environment where the lines between engineering and design were blurred. We encouraged a creative culture, hired great engineers and recruited artists from top design schools. I was given the freedom to pitch and prototype new concepts. It was at this time when I started working on my own pet project called “Big Bugs”.
The Inspiration for Big Bugs
As a child I was fascinated with discovering the natural world. This fascination went beyond just discovering new animals, plants and insects; also included a desire to know how they worked. I remember writing a science report based on my observations of an ant colony. I spent many days observing their behaviors, eating habits, and following lines of ants to food sources, etc.
I thought of them as tiny alien life forms. We are socialized to shoo them away, see them as a nuisance or dangerous carrier of disease. But when you take the time to look closely, with a magnifying glass, you enter a whole new world.
As I thought about our audience of 5 to 12 year olds, I reached back to my childhood and tapped into my personal experiences. For children everything is a new experience and every day yields new discoveries. Whenever I looked down and found a new insect I would immediately have lots of questions "What is this thing?", "Have scientists seen this before?", "Is this thing dangerous, will it bite or sting me?", "Should I be afraid?" Questions a child could not answer without consulting an adult. Strangely most adults didn't have answers to the questions I was asking. This created frustration and I imagined having some kind of little book with me all the time with all answers. Maybe today this frustration could be solved for the next generation of kids with future version of the digital agents like Siri or Alexa.
Combining my frustration as a child with wanting immediate access to knowledge already known and latest advancements in digital camera technology, I conceived of an experience that would allow kids to visually zoom into the world of bugs. Initially it was just based on the idea of discovery. You play and learn about the bugs around you at your own pace. But working collaboratively as a team my vision evolved to become our vision with each member making great contributions to the end product.
Turning Inspiration into a product.
Using all the tools, tricks, and programming techniques we'd built to that date as a development group, I set off designing and prototyping the basic mechanics of Big Bugs as a new experience of self directed discovery for kids.
The core element was using 3D object viewer to analyze bugs up close. The BugSpinner allowed the user to examine an Insect from any orientation and magnify or zoom in for a hi-resolution detailed view. I had seen the early Apple demonstration of the concept for 3D object viewer for real world items. I borrowed the idea and added the magnification aspect as I designed and prototyped my own version of this technology.
With my 3D BugSpinner prototype in place and a vision to create an experience of discovery for kids, I got the green light to formally start the Big Bugs project.
The Development of Big Bugs
I took on the dual role of project director and lead engineer. We then added a visual designer, a character animator and a writer/producer to the project. Son, Michelle, Tim & myself began the task of designing and building Big Bugs.
We partnered with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles and their entomology department, which had a collection of 50,000 pinned insects from around the world. We digitally captured a series of high-resolution photos from each insect specimen, rotating it in 30-degree increments to the camera with a blue screen as a backdrop. Using Photoshop we cleaned up the captured images by laboriously painting out the pin holding the insect to the background one image at a time. This resulted in a file with complete sequence of clean, cropped high-resolution images of each bug from any orientation in 360 degrees. I then wrote a user interface that took mouse-drag gestures to index into the file allowing the user to virtually rotate the insect in 3D space. Additionally we then allowed the user to zoom in on any image and pan around the hi-resolution views for detailed investigation. It was really cool, easy to use, with no fear of stings or bites, but realistic enough to give you the creepy crawlies if you didn’t like bugs.
All good gaming experiences need a setting. After capturing 100s of insects of all different types, we hired a background designer from Warner Brothers Animation to design a large colorful-cartoon backdrop. The backdrop contained many different sub-scenes, water, sky, jungle, desert, and flower fields. I scanned in the hand painted backdrop and programmed a pan and zoom user interface for navigating to the different sub-scenes.
Initially we planned to just place the insects into the backdrop and create hotspots for user to click and pickup an insect for examination in the BugSpinner. But I started playing with the insect images and discovered I could create animated crawling and flying effects using 2 off-setting images. This discovery lead to building a crawling, swimming or flying animation library for each insect, which we inserted over the backdrop as sprites, with different bugs displaying corresponding to selected sub-scene.
Enter stage left the Bug Buddy
Thus far we managed to create an experience that allowed users to find bugs in their habitat, catch them with their mouse and examine them up close with the BugSpinner. Yet these are all things a kid could do in the real world. Where was the value proposition of making this into a digital experience other than no fear of being stung? What about all those questions I had like, "What is this thing", "Is it dangerous, etc". As a team we brainstormed on a character that kids could relate to as their trusted friend to share our Bug filled world. Our animator Michelle distilled our ideations and came up with a little bookworm wearing big glasses. We dubbed him the Bug Buddy, and he turned into a magical character upstaging everything we had done up until then.
Tim the project manager / producer was a part-time writer and budding voice over talent / comedian. He took the Bug Buddy’s persona and invented a complete character; building a huge library of recorded comedic 1-liners and insect facts for each of our insects.
Using a tool we developed for lip-sync automation; taking pre-drawn animated characters and phonemically tagged audio as inputs, we could easily export animations synced to voice-overs. This gave Tim the opportunity to freely write, record and animate 100s of short clips of our Bug Buddy. To further endear our users to the Bug Buddy, Tim slightly speed up the audio on his voice-overs to give Bug Buddy a high-pitch fast speaking tone. It was very funny and everyone fell in love with Tim and Michelle's character.
I developed the game engine to queue up Bug Buddy clips anytime the user stopped actively interacting with the screen. Whenever there was idle time detected a random Bug Buddy video would pop on to the screen to entertain the viewer. This moved our project into a new experience realm, something I like to call a passive learning experience.
Bringing it all together, the Bug Box User Experience.
As we got closer to perfecting our product, I became convinced that the user interface needed to look and feel like a real physical object. As a student of cognitive science I was influenced by skeuomorphism school of thought, I believe the best user interfaces are those with mappings back to the physical world.
I hired Son to be our graphic designer on the project team. We recruited him out of ArtCenter College of Design’s Industrial Design Department. My decision to hire Son was based on the combination of his training in industrial design and how he immediately understood our design culture during the interviews. We put him to work on sketching ideas for the primary user interface we called the Bug Box; it would become the center of the user experience for Big Bugs.
Our initial influence for the Bug Box was the “My First Sony” line of audio and video products. Sony had just released these red and yellow with black trim plastic gadgets for kids, boom boxes, audio recorder and clock radios. They had big buttons with obvious interactions; soft curved shapes with a rugged plastic casing; ready for anything a kid could throw at it. I asked Son to design a “Swiss Army Knife” like contraption to house the bug spinner, a video player, home for the Bug Buddy (who was a worm), and all the interface elements of our experience.
Using his industrial design background, Son did a great job building a 3D model of our Bug Box bringing the entire user experience together. It was school bus yellow, with levelers, buttons, drawers and arms that telescoped out from its surface.
Leadership for Design starts with Trust, Autonomy, Ownership & Openness.
Based upon my experiences with many projects including Big Bugs, I have developed the following leadership principles. When working with creative people, it’s important to develop an environment that attracts motivated professionals who stay engaged with their work.
As a manager it’s my responsibility to provide a strongly defined goal, purpose and vision for the work. By guiding the team towards the vision without micro-managing their every decision, I give them space and a sense of autonomy to do their work and make decisions for themselves.
Trust is a two way street; I trust my team to take ownership of their deliverables, and they should trust me as a leader to provide feedback on their work without fear of making mistakes.
Finally the most important principle to me as a leader is to remain open. By allowing my initial vision to be steered through the contributions of others, I’ve found the end product is better than anything I could have conceptualized individually.