Andy’s Dino Island: Dinosaur Explorer

Time travel with Andy to the age of the dinosaurs! Help Andy on his missions around Dino Island in this exciting online game for children.

Commissioned by BBC Children’s & Education for CBeebies, Andy’s Dino Island: Dinosaur Explorer is an interactive dinosaur experience for children aged 3-5, combining an explorable overworld with a collection of bite-sized games and activities.

Whitepot is part of the BBC’s Games & Interactive Experiences roster, working with the BBC on the design, development and delivery of digital games and interactive experiences.

For Andy’s Dino Island, we took the project from concept and game design through art, animation and development, creating an explorable Dino Island for the CBeebies website and Playtime Island app.

Exploring Dino Island

Dino Island itself acts as the game’s overworld. Children can pan across the illustrated island and choose between dinosaur encounters at each location, visiting the lakes, forest, badlands and volcano, and meeting everything from Velociraptors to a T. Rex.

Built with BBC IVOR

Andy’s Dino Island was built using BBC IVOR, the interaction engine used across BBC children’s games and interactive experiences. Whitepot wrote the in-game script and dialogue, with Andy Day recording the voiceover for the finished game.

We used a range of IVOR interaction types as the mechanical foundation for the activities, including paint reveal, dress-up, target hitting, catching and selection-based interactions. Each encounter was then designed around its dinosaur and environment.

BBC supplied us with a large library of production artwork, spritesheets and animation assets created by Doghouse Post Production for the television series, which we adapted and integrated into the interactive experience alongside bespoke game artwork, animation, audio, interface elements and content created for the project.

Working from broadcast production assets meant balancing the visual language of the existing show with the practical requirements of an interactive game: preparing material for real-time use, combining it with IVOR mechanics, and building each encounter so it felt like a natural extension of the Dino Island world.

Designed for preschool players

Designing for children aged 3-5 shaped every part of the experience. The finished experience gives young players a simple way to explore a prehistoric world, meet different dinosaurs and discover a varied collection of playful interactions at their own pace.

Navigation is visual and direct, instructions are kept to a minimum, and new mechanics are introduced at the point they’re needed. Animation, audio and immediate visual feedback help show what can be touched, moved or selected, allowing them to learn through interaction rather than lengthy explanation.

We designed and developed the experience for mobile, tablet and desktop, accounting for different screen sizes, input methods and the wide range of devices used by the CBeebies audience.