The Magical Pantry

Users are first invited to pick one of 40 available recipes and 4 stories within which to make them. Most exciting of all, children can fully customise their fable’s main character. With an emphasis on empowerment, diversity and inclusivity (the characters aren’t gendered), there are endless personalisation combinations: hair, eye, mouth, nose and even eyebrow colours are all fully customisable.

With the idea being to ostensibly create a children’s book, we teamed up with illustrator Dan Gartmann. This was a new and challenging approach for us. Rather than the 3D modelling we’re more used to, we were thrilled to bring our WebGL expertise to instead animate Gartmann’s beautiful 2D hand crafted illustrations creating a living, breathing children’s book.

The experience starts in earnest by entering The Magical Pantry, inviting kids into a fantastical world of endless possibilities, full of talking animals and adventures. We created four story types based on traditional children's book narratives where despite the initial obstacles, everything works out in the end thanks to the recipes the children learn to cook with their “friends”.

The learning is facilitated with micro interactions peppered throughout the stories. Kids learn real cooking techniques such as blending, mixing, serving up etc by physically replicating the gestures on their parents’ device. Along with gorgeous illustrations, sound design further immerses users into the stories with SFX on each of the cooking micro interactions. For those children who don’t yet know how to read, an audiobook option is available.