When adapting one of the world's most beloved animated series into an interactive experience, matching the visual style is only part of the challenge. Capturing the heart of the show and translating its sense of imaginative play into compelling gameplay is often the far more difficult task.

For Bluey's Quest for the Gold Pen, Halfbrick Studios approached that challenge by looking beyond simply recreating the television series frame for frame. Instead, the team leaned into one of Bluey's most memorable artistic departures: the hand-drawn fantasy worlds featured in the Dragon and Escape episodes.

We spoke with the team at Halfbrick to learn all about how the pieces came together to form this fresh take on the IP with a little help from its creators.

Bluey has one of the most recognizable visual styles in modern animation. What were the biggest challenges in translating that look and feel into an interactive game experience?

Laura McCabe, Game Lead at Halfbrick: The meticulous love and care put into the TV series set an incredibly high bar to work from. Learning the nuances of the animation style took real time—Ludo worked closely with our animation team throughout storyboarding, animation block-outs, and polish phases, giving invaluable feedback and insight at every stage.

The other big challenge was adapting the 2D style into a 3D game world. Don't get me started on how difficult the outline rendering was on the environments!

Brad Robinson, Artist and Animator at Halfbrick: Well, the short answer is that we didn't!

While the game does feature the highly recognizable animation style in the cinematics, the gameplay sections all take place in the realm of the kids' imagination. This hand-scribbled art style from the kids was only featured in a couple of episodes—"Dragon" and "Escape". This came with a lot of challenges of its own, though, with the obvious one being that there was not much reference material to draw from. The biggest challenges with the gameplay came from the camera being at an almost top-down perspective, while the characters in the show are almost always drawn from a completely horizontal perspective.

Brad Robinson: The way we managed to get the player motion and actions feeling right, despite using 2D characters in a 3D world, was by changing their facing direction based on the input. Eventually, we decided each animation needed to be done in six different directions: front-right, directly front-facing, front-left, back-left, directly back-facing, and back-right. The game features many different player mechanics, each having a main action animation alongside various transition animations. As you can imagine, multiplying each animation by six different directions was a nightmare! The front and back animations were definitely the hardest to get looking right in all cases, particularly due to the limited reference material.

Several mechanics also required the use of 3D elements in order to get the game feel right, and each one required some kind of clever solution to function correctly. One such example was the bicycle. The handlebars needed to be able to properly rotate in 3D space to provide a better sense of the direction you are moving, and we wanted Bluey to be able to do trick jumps and spins while airborne. It proved pretty difficult to get this completely flat 2D character to look right in that context. What we did in the end was, while the player was mounted on the bicycle, the 2D character's arms were turned off. Instead, we had a couple of line renderers anchor from the arm bone position and connect to IK points on the handlebars.

From a production standpoint, how closely did the team work with the original show creators to ensure the game felt authentic to the world of Bluey?

Laura McCabe: We worked very closely with all parties (Joe, Ludo, and the BBC) throughout the entire development process. Letting Joe lead the story direction was one of the most critical elements in giving the game its authentic feel. It also gave us permission to take the game into the hand-drawn style seen in the "Dragon" and "Escape" episodes (two episodes that depart from the regular style). I don't think we would have been brave enough to take that leap without Joe's encouragement.

The series succeeds largely because of its grounded family interactions and imaginative play. How did you approach designing gameplay systems that capture that same energy?

Laura McCabe: Joe had pitched it as a game of D&D with the whole family playing together, so we wanted everyone at the table to have a role. Bluey was the player. Bingo became a Navi-inspired companion who could give the player hints. Dad was the main antagonist driving the adventure forward—we wanted him to feel present in the world through his character creations, the Bandit's Bandits, who would give the player quests and form the final boss at the end of each level.

We originally tried enemy designs that looked drawn by Dad, but ended up cutting them as they didn't suit the experience we were trying to craft. Mum felt present through her creation of the world itself—the environments felt drawn by her, and she created the friendly gnome NPCs the player meets along the way. We didn't want the world to feel like a lonely place.

Halfbrick is known for highly polished, accessible gameplay experiences. How did the studio’s previous experience influence the design philosophy behind The Quest for the Gold Pen?

Alex Richardson, Designer at Halfbrick: We usually create a lot of prototypes and experiments. On Bluey's Quest, there was a significant amount of prototyping across different mechanics and gameplay genres to find the elements that felt right and could work together.

We focused on reducing dependencies between all the mechanics, objects, and systems, tying them together through the goose food progression system. If a mechanic or system didn't work out or wasn't up to quality, it could be dropped without breaking other systems that may have relied on it.

We also doubled down on the mechanics and game objects that provided the best gameplay opportunities and utility, which led to them spreading through more of the game. Because they were used more frequently, they received more attention, resulting in extra polish and testing that ultimately raised the quality across the entire game.

From a technical perspective, what engine and core tools are powering the game, and what made them the right fit for recreating the show's visual identity?

Laura McCabe: Spine by Esoteric Software powers the visuals. It allowed us to build complex animation rigs without ballooning the game file size, which would have been a serious issue on our mobile SKUs. The alternative of animating in an external program and embedding video files would have been far too costly on that front.

Animation is a huge part of what makes Bluey feel alive. How did the team approach character animation and movement to preserve the charm and expressiveness of the show?

Laura McCabe: We watched the TV series closely, leaning heavily on the "Dragon" and "Escape" episodes for reference. That actually worked in our favor—the sketchier versions of the characters in those episodes lent themselves to an exaggerated, caricatured style, which suited the smaller scale at which the characters appear on screen in our game.

Since Bingo isn't able to speak in her Goose form, we were also able to pour a lot of personality into her exaggerated HONKs!

Many licensed games struggle to balance fan service with gameplay depth. How did you ensure the game appealed both to longtime Bluey fans and to younger players experiencing games more casually?

Laura McCabe: We went with an open-world format and built in a variety of challenge levels, so players could pick and choose what obstacles worked best for them. We were also careful to avoid hard-locking progression behind difficult skill challenges that might be too tough for less experienced gamers. We wanted everyone to be able to get to the end of the game regardless of skill level.

Looking back at development, what were the biggest lessons learned from adapting such a beloved animated property into a game?

Laura McCabe: Staying truthful to the show was the biggest one. For example, Bluey often has parental supervision and doesn’t do dangerous activities that a child might imitate. But going down the imagination-inspired route allowed us to adapt the heart of Bluey in a way that suited our design philosophy at Halfbrick.

Halfbrick, Game Developer