Topsy and Tim Busy Day

Topsy and Tim Busy Day is the latest addition to the CBeebies playtime app. A hugely popular product aimed at the preschool market and free to download and play. Topsy and Tim is a live action show based upon the successful book series. Topsy and Tim’s Busy Day allow the user to help Topsy and Tim complete a series of fun activities and tasks selected randomly from a large pool of options. This ensures that the child enjoys a different experience each time they play.]

There are three simple narratives for the children to prepare for: going to a party, looking after the dog, or going camping. The child also gets to navigate a vehicle (the family car, the van or the bus) around a cute 3D version of the Topsy and Tim neighbourhood as they travel from destination to destination.

All the time their parents are their to encourage and support what they need to do and correct them if they are wrong.

We designed and constructed the characters using a mixture of photographic and illustrated styles and then animated them using Spine. This allows for super smooth and blended animations between character states, but also enabled us to swap clothing, so if you happen to choose their outfit in the morning, that outfit will continue throughout the other tasks where you see the characters.

Compared to many of the Playtime apps, Topsy and Tim’s Busy Day is a very feature rich offering, with a huge variety of visuals and play mechanics so it was a technical challenge to satisfy the brief and to compress everything into a limited data slot on the parent app, especially given the variety of voice over built in as well for all the different scenarios.