The Next Adventure

The host turns round to look at you and follows your pointer with his eyes. No film is playing: there are pictures of him looking left, centre and right, with short transitions in between, and the site always shows the picture that matches your movement. When Ralph saw the first versions on his large screen he wrote: “Everything still a bit blurry.” So every scene was made again in high resolution; phones get the lighter version, large monitors the sharp one.

Why like this: people react to faces and gazes before they have read a sentence. A character who notices the visitor holds him in exactly the first seconds in which he would otherwise already be gone — and a blurry face would have thrown that moment away.

Ralph found an early scene “just ok”: a leaf floated forward for no reason. What he wanted was for the visitor to set off something by accident that happens to the character. That became a vine with a wooden sign saying “Don't pull”. Pull it anyway and you yank the host up by his foot — and that very click leads into the next station.

It went on like that. In the dark your pointer becomes a torch, and somewhere a camouflaged chameleon is sitting; there are nine hiding places like that on the site. In the flight, scrolling is flying, giant stone letters wobble when you tap them, and shortly before the end the site tells where the idea comes from: the world turns rough like a game from 1996, and stroke by stroke a pencil drawing becomes the host of today.

Why like this: what you have discovered yourself, you remember. Whoever has clicked, searched and flown through twelve stations hasn't read a site, he has experienced something — and still knows that evening whose site it was.

Every generated recording is read back before it goes on the site; that is how we noticed a voice speaking the stage directions along with the lines. What reading back doesn't find is the sound: on first listen Ralph found the parrot's voice “awful” and the German lines clumsy.

That became a fixed rule: listen first, then build in. All lines sit side by side on a listening page, several versions per line. Nine voices auditioned, Ralph chose one, and it now speaks German and English — chosen only after we had checked that it may be used commercially. When he finally wrote “The sounds don't always fit, though”, each of the 74 sounds was held against the frame in which it plays; the footsteps at the end land exactly where the feet touch the ground.

Why like this: a voice that doesn't fit turns a character with personality into an advertising mascot, and a sound that comes a blink too early feels cheap, even if nobody can say why. For you that means: nothing goes live that you haven't heard first, and the rights to it are cleared.

Ralph's brief was clear: the site should work on a phone without being built a second time. The first version loaded every film at once and held on to them; a phone would have choked on that. Today it loads there only what the current station needs and lets it go again afterwards. The giant word is wider than the screen, so it glides slowly and can be pushed with a finger, and where Ralph didn't see on his phone that it carries on sideways, there is now an arrow button.

Why like this: most visitors come on a phone. An experience that only holds up on a large screen loses exactly those who see it first — and a way you can only find by swiping is no way at all for many people.

After every change a test program runs through the whole site the way a visitor would: on a large and a normal computer, at the size of an iPhone and an Android phone, forwards and back, with and without sound, in German and English. Only when everything passes does a version count. And because numbers alone aren't enough, we look at a recording of the whole site for every version; once it showed what the test had missed — a hint was lying on the host's shoes.

Before launch came the test on the real address: the site makes not a single request to third-party servers; even the fonts come from its own.

Why like this: a mistake your customer finds costs more than any we find. And whoever visits your site leaves no data with third parties — one worry less, for you and for him.