You might have noticed while playing that sometimes you'll enter a word and a little doodle will magically scribble itself at the side of the game play board.  If you look carefully, you might even see that the doodle is connected to the word you entered!

In fact there are over 2000 separate doodles in the game, and each one is tagged with its own words it will happily match with. For instance a doodle of a bicycle might be tagged with 'bicycle, bike, wheel, ride, handlebar, pedal' and will also look out for the plural of these if you happen to use that.

Each one was hand drawn by one of our artists (the majority by Mike Hanson) onto paper, and scanned in as an image, like this one:

Then using a special app written for just this purpose, each line is traced over one by one until the whole picture has been represented by lines (short and long, thin and thick, straight or curved, darker or lighter). This took a really long time but it was worth it!

The sequence of points in the line is what is stored in the game, and these are 'replayed' over a few seconds in order to animate the picture being drawn step-by-step, just as the artist originally did!  We also tweaked some bits to go faster (where there's shading) and some to go slower (big bold lines) for a bit of added realism. 

They range from quite simple pictures (little scrolls and symbols and letters) through to very elaborate pictures - some of the most ornate are the ones which are on the title pages of each of the Award books!

Incredibly the doodles take up a tiny amount of storage as they are really lists of coordinates - even the most elaborate ones are only a few hundred bytes, and because they are 'vectors' it also means they can be drawn at any size on any screen and they'll still look just as good! 

If you like looking at the doodles drawing, take a look at the 'Big Book of Doodles' in the bookshelf and page through to watch each on draw... but be warned they can be quite absorbing to watch and time really does fly!