THE FUTURE OF THE LIVING ROOM

The living room is a space to bring friends and families together and forge new social connections. 

The television has always played a pivotal role in this, and now Sky have taken this a step further with the launch of Sky Glass – it’s all-in-one TV system – and its companion Sky Live.

Sky Live is a small camera unit which sits on top of the Sky Glass, unlocking new ways to engage, connect, and enable audiences across a range of different areas such as wellbeing, exercise, chat, watch-along and of course gaming. 

PRELOADED were selected as a key R&D partner exploring the affordances of the platform, as well as the game development partner for one of Sky Live’s launch titles, ‘Beep Beep Bop’.

INTRODUCING 'BEEP BEEP BOP'

Alongside Scooby Doo, Pepper Pig, Paw Patrol and other popular IP, Sky wanted to create a unique IP for this platform, designed natively for the affordances of the device. 

Leveraging the power of Sky Live device and its camera, PRELOADED created ‘Beep Beep Bop’, a generative party game designed to get people off the couch and moving through a set of surreal, strange and rewarding mini games.

At the heart of the experience is ‘Beep Beep Bop’ themself, a vibrant and playfully irreverent host who curates your game sessions across 5 different mini-games, each pitting up to 8 different players against each other in turn-based competitive play.

The character design of Beep Beep Bop is based on a clean and dynamic three circle design ‘…’ denoting that there is always more to come, and with a unique sonic design reflective of the name.  The character is voiced by the amazing Jo Butler.

SOMETHING NEW, ALWAYS

Each Beep Beep Bop play session feels unique, due to a dynamic system which injects randomness into every aspect of play. 

Supported by the comedic mischief  and ‘randomness’ of the Beep Beep Bop host, each mini-game is generated from huge library object sets. Social and Meme inspired, the game objects include everything from ‘Junk food’ and ‘Half eaten stuff’ to ‘things with wings’ and ‘Live emojis’ – everything has a place in this surreal world!

Additionally, Beep Beep Bop uses a system to randomise the colour palettes of the environments, objects and characters in each game, creating millions of potential game combinations of objects and colours!

Every game you play feels different, and every experience you have is unique.

DESIGNED FOR EVERYONE

Beep Beep Bop is designed to bring Sky families and siblings together for meaningful shared family time. 

Our brief was to target millennial parents (with Gen Alpha children) and a secondary audience of Gen X parents (with Gen Z children up to 12), with the constraint of ONLY using your body to drive gameplay. Creating an experience for such a broad audience leant on PRELOADED’s principles of low threshold, high-ceilings and wide-walls design.

Low threshold design is a goal of any product, but when designing for a new hardware and input system, this becomes more important and more challenging. Through extensive design iteration and user-testing the product has solved fundamental UX challenges including everything from onboarding and orientation, to player set-up and ‘edge-case’ messaging. The end result is a playful and intuitive interface that is as simple to use and it is beautiful. 

To create games which are truly High-ceiling – those which enable everyone but reward those with greater ability – is one of the product’s greatest achievements. Beep Beep Bop delivers 5 simple-to-play mechanics, which allow everyone to compete whilst rewarding mastery through learned techniques and skills. This, combined with a 5-star scoring system creates a fair and competitive experience for all. 

Finally, Beep Beep Bop provides a ‘wide walls’ experience for players, recognising that different audiences want different things from games. From high-intensity gameplay to those that require accuracy and timing, Beep Beep Bop has it all covered.

LIVE NOW

Beep Beep Bop is a Sky Live experience, designed to scale with audiences and technology, through highly flexible game systems, content pipelines and infrastructure. It is available on Sky Live now.