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Behind the scenes: Integrating Baby and Toddler Interactions👶
🕑 Added 2025-06-27 13:05:03 +0000 UTCHi, Richard here. Today, I will show you the progress on babies' and toddlers' interactions. Alice and Lina have showcased the animations in these previous posts:
Animation Showcase: More Toddler Interactions!
Animation Showcase: Hackweek and More Baby Interactions!
🤫 This post is for Patrons only. Please don’t share it, thank you.
Characters can now be restricted to an item
For both toddlers and babies, we needed a new system to restrict them to an item, as they shouldn’t be able to get out by themselves and require an adult to pick them up.
Can’t go dancing until you finish your meal!
Some interactions involve other characters, such as “pick up”, where the adult looks for the item the toddler is sitting on to determine the proper location to walk to pick them up correctly.
The toddler is being picked up when the adult gets in front of the high chair.
Washing toddlers in the bath
We also worked on animations involving 2 characters and an item. There are many little details to take into account, such as ensuring the characters don’t clip into an object (have some of their body parts go through).
Example issue of the arm going through the bath. Note that any pink and or blue cones on characters in GIFs are just there to help us internally and won’t be present in the game.
On the topic of baths, Alejandro and Choé have worked on making the water rise properly.
Before: the water level was too high for the toddler, and it was a white square that stuck outside of the bathtub.
After: the water fills to the right level, and it looks like water. Note that the water is only this low because we are bathing a toddler, but may be higher or lower in other cases. Also note that toddlers obviously won’t wear their onesies in the bath.
Taking care of baby’s Hunger need
For all adult needs, there are interactions that you can do yourself to fill your own needs. While babies can be controlled directly by the player, they can only get fed by an adult via breastfeeding or bottle feeding. We now have interactions for those.
Bottle feeding a baby.
Locomotion on stairs
As seen in Animation Showcase: More Toddler Interactions!, we have a different animation for walking up and down the stairs for toddlers. We had to change a little bit of code to make it so that toddlers turn around and go down the stairs backwards, since for adults, they go down the stairs the same way they are facing.
Gotta do the little turn dance to get down the stairs! We will work on cleaning up the transition animation sometime down the line.
The most important feature: the educative toy wheel’s animation
With Alejandro's system to animate objects, we have animated the wheels of the educative toy. A small detail that is cute to watch in action. :)
My most important work of the year: animating the educational toy.
🐛 Bugs and various funny GIFs
Here are some of my best bug GIFs for this feature.
Sometimes, you input the wrong angles, and it doesn’t do the right thing. Also, I don’t remember why I needed a toilet in my test scene. Yes, the baby is just getting dragged, I’m working on this :).
Trying to figure out the timing and values to animate the ‘’pick up’’ interaction correctly.
My baby’s rattle toy, that’s how you make those gains :).
Who is character 1, and who is character 2? Well, I mixed them up, and now it’s Miki who is going into the crib.
The baby is talking to Miki. This might not be the exact way we want it to look 😅.
Who put oil in the highchair? It’s too slippery!
Enjoy your weekend and eat your vegetables :).
Richard
Comments
Kayleigh
I love the animation of the toddler going down the stairs backwards!
AureRed
For toddler to go down stairway could be and slide on bum xD as variation maybe for playful para toddler ;) i did this even when i was kid xD was safest way
Hagfish
cool i didn't know that before. that also sounds easier from a dev/rendering perspective bc its less water to model and its shallower so its easier to avoid having the water go outside the tub
Maya
I would love it if we could someday have an animation of a toddler going down the stairs facing down and on his butt ! I used to do that a lot when I was smoll and I remember it being so fun and way less scary than going down normally ! Maybe it could be later down the road when the toddler actually starts to learn how to walk... I dunno
L
A note on toddler/children bathing safety in case this is something you wish to incorporate in the life sim. (As a nurse and former nanny, I always appreciate portrayal of basic and practical safety in media that can help indirectly educate players of all ages and backgrounds, in this case supporting child safety). Recommendations are generally to keep bathwater less than 5" deep or no higher than the waist for toddlers (1-3y) and young children. Otherwise, the process looks perfect from a safety standpoint (filling tub before placing child in water). As always, love the behind the scenes look at development!
NHFoodie
“Who put oil in the high chair?” omg lol 🤣💀
Cece
I’m late to this post but aaaaa so cute! The bugs are all so silly and the temporary toddler turning animation has me cracking up too. I also love the little wheels on the toy and the fact they spin in the right directions! Toddlers are gonna be adorably insufferable to play with <3 Keep up the good work team!
Cece
I think things like fingers and pot bellies are less of a standard to keep to. me and all my siblings had narrow fingers from very young and some of us no pot bellies,, so that could perhaps be decided by the fat slider
Sophie Goodman-Merel
Some child proportion critiques from a preschool teacher: babies legs are shorter than they would be on an adult, then young kids are all legs with big heads. Most toddlers have some form of "pot belly" though some have more obvious ones than others and their heads are still big. Fingers should be chubby, not lean. I know child proportions was a concern from fans. No one is comfortable seeing children as sized down adults. These don't look too bad, just wanted to mention it!
Venus
that last GIF made me laugh so hard 😂😂😂 the slippery high chair.. i can’t
Liesel Strick
I loved the bugs so much and of course I am so happy to see all the progress which you made. I have a question and a wish: Do you know flip stools? Or maybe you call them montessori flip chair? The are children's furniture and grow with their age since you can use them in three different ways for sitting (and you can of course build a stove, a car, a train, a teddy bed and whatever. Beside that adults can sit on these chairs as well and In my imagination the parents sit on one of these (tiny) stools and play with their children. Maybe it would be too difficult to program (especially the multi use) but that's what I see the children doing in my kindergarten group and it's just so adorable and simple.
Josephin01
In response to another question, you answered that teenagers can't get pregnant but can care for babies and toddlers. Can teenagers live alone with a baby? (If the adult has died, for example) And I just noticed that there's a book about sign language on the table. Can paras learn sign language? Will there be animations for it at some point? Can you also learn other languages as a skill? I'm just so excited about everything I see, find, and learn. I can't wait for December. 🙈😅❤️
Common Chameleon
Looks great! I hope that goofy hatsune miku hair will be in the game 😆
