Nick Jr. Presents: Music

An educational, musical playground for pre-schoolers

About

Nick Jr. Music is a musical sandbox toy designed to teach preschoolers about sound and music in a novel and intuitive way. Using touch screen controls, players could drag various musical or brand objects onto the landscape. Musical objects would play individual pieces of music in harmony with one another; having more placed in the scene together would play a more complete song. Players could interact directly with musical objects by tapping or swiping on them to add their own notes. They could even record and playback songs they’d made. The game had a number of other features, such as moving the sun / moon to affect tempo, and special Nick Jr. “character” objects from players’ favorite shows.

Nick Jr. Music was the first project I was assigned to when joining Nickelodeon Games. The team already had a working prototype which had just been green-lit for production. I worked with my fellow engineers as well as our designers, producers, and QA to expand the game’s feature set through rapid prototyping and constant user testing with our target audience.

My Contributions

• Implemented models, textures, animations, and particle effects sent from arthouse for game objects

• Programmed object behavior for placeable brand objects • Programmed manipulation tools for instrument objects (size change, color change, movement,

removal) • Refactored and optimized game, implementing event management system, object pooling,

collision matrix, and scriptable objects • Designed and built performance-optimized dynamic nav-mesh system so that characters could path-find on moving platforms, normally not possible within Unity at that time

• Prototyped new features on request