Dubit

Kids Digital Entertainment Since 1999

Dubit

Digital Studio

• Kid centered design of apps, games, and worlds.

• UI design, character design, and branding.

• Launch planning and business modeling.

• Game and app marketing.

• Game design and gamification design.

• Building a customer’s in-house team. !

Youth Research

• Kids research, play testing, and ideation.

• Validating designs and testing MVP hypothesis.

• Monetization strategies.

• Market analysis.

• Parent testing.

About Dubit Dubit research, design and develop kids entertainment, including apps, mini games, and worlds, for kids brands. Founded in 1999, Dubit has offices in the UK, Los Angeles, and Melbourne. We employ a team of 50 designers, developers, artists, and producers. Dubit’s in-house research team involves children throughout the creation of our products.

Dubit

Dubit Technology Platform Dubit have created a technology platform that reduces the cost to create games and worlds. The platform has a library of common game features, including customizable avatars, leaderboards, shops, virtual currencies, multiplayer game engines, chat, quest engines, and more.

Our technology allows games to run on mobile devices and computers. Games developed on Dubit's platform can be published as HTML5 games, iOS apps, Flash games, Android Apps, Windows Phone apps, Kindle Apps, and more. Players can share scores and their game points across their different devices.

Dubit

Dubit Design Process Dubit involve children throughout the design and development of our digital projects. Typically projects run through four stages: design, build, iterate, and launch. Dubit's in-house research team have created over 40 research techniques for testing the gameplay, story, and character design across the four stages. We also use our own Dubit Method Cards to de-risk the design & production.

Dubit

Projects

Dubit

Cartoon Network Virtual World Dubit developed Cartoon Network’s first virtual world, Mini Match. The game ran for two years until the launch of the Fusion Fall MMO.

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!Mini Match had over 12,000 players online in the world at the same time, and secured over 5,000,000 registrations in the first week.

Players earned points in multiplayer games: those points could be spent on upgrades, and ‘attacks’ in the virtual world. Attacks included fart clouds, shrinking the other player, freezing in a block of ice, and electric shocks!

Dino Builders Game Dino Builders is a time travel adventure game. The player begins in a museum and sees children take on the exciting role of an Agent of Epoch - an organization tasked with protecting time!

As an agent the players help Max, Ellie and Dr Alby as they battle with Dr X, his robotic dinosaur Bleep and his army of Robo Dinos who are out to steal dinosaur bones from the past!

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The game uses Dubit's HTML5 technology platform and runs across iOS and Android devices. Dubit have designed the game and created the artwork.

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Wandoo Planet App Wandoo Planet helps children find new books to read, games to play, and things do. Dubit developed a cutting edge recommendation engine that matches books and content to children's interests.

Children play the interest exploring game that teaches the engine what they most like. The engine then recommends books, films, apps, and games they can add to their interest tree. The app is not a game. It is a playful experience

that uses gamification techniques to jumpstart a child's passion for reading.

All artwork and characters have been created by Dubit. The recommendation engine technology and app have also been developed by Dubit.

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Distroller World Mexican toy manufacturer, Distroller, is working with Dubit to develop a range of plush toys that integrate with an iPhone game, iPad game, and online world. The toys are sold through the Distroller stores and boutiques across Mexico.

Dubit have created an in store shopping experience that links the plush toy to the game. The in-store nurse takes the children through an adoption process. The nurse weighs the physical toy and checks its health. She then

shows the child how to look after their new ‘baby’ in the online world.

The game has been developed on Dubit’s technology platform and runs as an app on iOS devices and through Flash on web browsers.

Legends of Oz In mid-2014 Summertime Entertainment are to release a 3D animated movie based on the books written prior to the original Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

The producers want to get children involved with the story before the film’s release and keep them engaged with the brand, characters, and IP after the movie leaves theatres. It was critical that the virtual world told a new story but one that compliment the narrative in the film.

Dubit created the artwork in Maya and developed the world in Flash. Native iOS apps extend the experience across tablets and phones.

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The Time Tribe App Dubit developed episodic point-and-click a d v e n t u re g a m e T h e T i m e Tr i b e f o r Thundersnow Media out of New York.

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The Time Tribe is an episodic game for kids aged 8-13, the perfect melding of point-and-click adventure game and virtual world. It's a time travel adventure with an epic story rooted in real history and archaeology, and designed to

foster cross-cultural understanding, historical knowledge, empathy, and global citizenship.

Dubit created all artwork and developed the game to run on browsers and iPads.

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Dubit Research

Moshi Monsters Research Mind Candy engaged Dubit’s Research Team to uncover the differences between their UK and US players and how to modify the game for American audiences. We found that while

E n g l i s h a n d A m e r i c a n c h i l d r e n a r e similar,  American parents and English parent’s attitudes to online games are not! Indeed, American parents greatly prefer their children to play games with educational content. 

Mind Candy have since added more emphasis on their educational content for the US audiences and engaged Dubit on multiple other projects.  

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Club Penguin Research Disney were looking to launch their popular US and UK world across Europe - in particular into Spain and France. Dubit were engaged to review the barriers to entry into these markets, and to

understand how to turn players into payers. Online focus groups - using our Clickroom - provided qualitative insight across Europe, and this was reinforced with online quantitative surveys of both parents and kids. The findings

enabled Disney to change their marketing strategy by country, according to the parents’ perception of digital media and payment preferences, which contributed to the success of Club Penguin in Europe.

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Toonix Gameplay Research Cartoon Network had just designed a new integrated online-offline IP called Toonix, where the online virtual world would generate an audience and market for the merchandise and

other products. Key to this would be a fun, engaging game - and Dubit’s expertise in market sizing and testing for both usability and playability was a key factor in the game’s success.

Cartoon Network have used the game to secure merchandising around the world - including McDonald’s Happy Meals.

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Dubit Process

Method Cards: Understand In order to ensure we are developing the right product for our target audience, we place primary research at the heart of our process. Clearly, there are many methodologies available to explore how our audience may relate to our

original direction, so at Dubit we use our own proprietary Method Cards to prompt and expose the different options, and - with the client - choose among them. From this, we can generate a solid foundation for our product design.

Understanding the audience does not stop at the design phase, but continues throughout the process we have outlined - so we use these cards to validate at every possible point.

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Method Cards: Design Designing an entertainment product for kids and youth requires a deep dive into how they will engage - or prefer to engage - with an IP. This can often result in a dissection of the IP to find the key touch points with the kids.

!At an initial design summit, we also like to explore all the possibilities, and sketch out the route to market, taking into account how we acquire, retain and convert the audience, and designing virality into the product.

!Design requires kids research to validate our assumptions, and test the design before we invest in the actual production.

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Method Cards: Create Our resultant design document for the product still requires validation as we enter the production phase. We don’t test the “whole”, but we separate out the key elements that will make the product sink or swim, and test them

independently, such as the Golden Mechanic - to see if that is sticky enough and creates a compelling return path for the kids. Dubit use agile teams in production to allow for iterative testing of elements as they are produced - if something is not working as expected, we need

to be able to pivot quickly, at little cost to clients. Kids don’t always react the way you expect, so testing usability and playability are key specialisms of Dubit - services that Moshi, Jagex, Disney and Cartoon Network have used for their own games.

Dubit

Dubit

Kids Digital Entertainment Since 1999