Behind the scenes: Integrating Baby and Toddler Interactions👶

Hi, Richard here. Today, I will show you the progress on babies' and toddlers' interactions. Alice and Lina have showcased the animations in these previous posts:
Animation Showcase: More Toddler Interactions!
Animation Showcase: Hackweek and More Baby Interactions!

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Characters can now be restricted to an item

For both toddlers and babies, we needed a new system to restrict them to an item, as they shouldn’t be able to get out by themselves and require an adult to pick them up.

Can’t go dancing until you finish your meal! 

Some interactions involve other characters, such as “pick up”, where the adult looks for the item the toddler is sitting on to determine the proper location to walk to pick them up correctly. 

The toddler is being picked up when the adult gets in front of the high chair.

Washing toddlers in the bath

We also worked on animations involving 2 characters and an item. There are many little details to take into account, such as ensuring the characters don’t clip into an object (have some of their body parts go through).

Example issue of the arm going through the bath. Note that any pink and or blue cones on characters in GIFs are just there to help us internally and won’t be present in the game.

On the topic of baths, Alejandro and Choé have worked on making the water rise properly.

Before: the water level was too high for the toddler, and it was a white square that stuck outside of the bathtub.

After: the water fills to the right level, and it looks like water. Note that the water is only this low because we are bathing a toddler, but may be higher or lower in other cases. Also note that toddlers obviously won’t wear their onesies in the bath.

Taking care of baby’s Hunger need

For all adult needs, there are interactions that you can do yourself to fill your own needs. While babies can be controlled directly by the player, they can only get fed by an adult via breastfeeding or bottle feeding. We now have interactions for those.

Bottle feeding a baby.

Locomotion on stairs

As seen in Animation Showcase: More Toddler Interactions!, we have a different animation for walking up and down the stairs for toddlers. We had to change a little bit of code to make it so that toddlers turn around and go down the stairs backwards, since for adults, they go down the stairs the same way they are facing.

Gotta do the little turn dance to get down the stairs! We will work on cleaning up the transition animation sometime down the line.

The most important feature: the educative toy wheel’s animation

With Alejandro's system to animate objects, we have animated the wheels of the educative toy. A small detail that is cute to watch in action. :)

My most important work of the year: animating the educational toy.

🐛 Bugs and various funny GIFs

Here are some of my best bug GIFs for this feature.

Sometimes, you input the wrong angles, and it doesn’t do the right thing. Also, I don’t remember why I needed a toilet in my test scene. Yes, the baby is just getting dragged, I’m working on this :).

Trying to figure out the timing and values to animate the ‘’pick up’’ interaction correctly.

My baby’s rattle toy, that’s how you make those gains :).

Who is character 1, and who is character 2? Well, I mixed them up, and now it’s Miki who is going into the crib.

The baby is talking to Miki. This might not be the exact way we want it to look 😅.

Who put oil in the highchair? It’s too slippery!

Enjoy your weekend and eat your vegetables :).

Richard