Zala and the Treasure Cave

Zala and the Treasure Cave

“Zala and the Treasure Cave” tells the adventure of an African girl, Zala, and her two friends Kisha and Bobo. Kisha has discovered a treasure cave and wants to share it with her friends. But this can only be done with the help of the player. This is the start of an exciting journey with the three friends across the African savanna.
This charming story combines 3D animated film with balanced interactive elements and is suitable for children ages 4–6.

I wanted to write a story about a friendship between totally different kids who care little about each other’s ethnic origin or gender. So what would be the best vehicle to present an emotional tale? The answer was clear – with film: and we were looking for a fresh approach that would make viewers participate in the story not just watch it.

The app is fully story-driven and uses film drama techniques to convey the response. The riddles are not separate mini-games, but integrated into the storyline itself : that means the story only progresses with the help of the player and because of this the app becomes a mini-adventure for young children.
We have planned the interactive elements of our apps to be in complete harmony with the narrative so the puzzles are integrated into the plot to ensure it is both thrilling and fun.

We believe in the importance of being family-friendly and of respecting privacy so Mum, Dad and all the kids can relax and lose themselves in the app since there are :

-no in-app sales
-no ads
-no tracking of user data
-no requests for personal information
-no links to the web or social networks

But one thing we do guarantee – it is real fun!

Promo Codes:
AEENT69T4PRT
HXWA93E9HPWH
9H4PNM63HK6E
7JF3HKHWH3W9
9W3WJ6NL4KF4

Are you interested in a making-of? Please give us a vote LIKE on our Facebook page „Logitales“.

How did Kwik help?

Without Kwik I could never have realized Zala because we are a duo without any experience in coding. We are filmmakers and my personal experience is in 3D animation. So I worked on the story, created all the 3D assets and coded everything. My husband dealt with the visuals, motion capture, sounds and music.

When I started Zala, I had no experience in coding until I began to learn how to in March 2013. The tutorials on Corona and Kwiksher website were very helpful. Kwik is very easy to learn and I had a good time – even ‘developer newbies’ like myself can learn to produce a professional E-book or a game quite quickly.

The draft was finished in 10 days. Then I started to test and optimize everything: fades -in and -out, sounds, timing, etc., fixing bugs, rewriting the scenario, then optimizing again. We call this our „chaos workflow“, which we formulated in many previous movie projects. The first version (in German) was completed and ready for upload to the App Store on 18th July, the same day the Apple developer area was hacked. You can imagine the look on my face when I tried to upload the app and the whole developer area crashed!

Alex Souza was a really great help. When I got stuck, I wrote on the Kwiksher forum and his friendly reply came quickly and rich in detail (very good for me, the developer newbie !) and even supplied me with code examples. Thanks Alex!

What are your favorite features?

Kwik is highly intuitive which helped to develop a first variant of your app without much delay. With the possibility to add external code, to merge, split and re-order pages, plus to define shared assets between all pages, it is possible to achieve a fully functional version very easily (compared to other development tools).

My favorite tool is video replacement. We wanted to use video because only film can really communicate emotion to an audience. I have even created a scene where four videos and seven audios can be triggered simultaneously and this works really well, even on iPad1. In addition I had no problems in the Apple App Store review process.

Any tips and tricks to share?

We used desktop motion capture, 3D-animation, compositing, color timing, matte painting, virtual musical-instruments and last, but not least, Kwik: all on a shoestring budget with two people in a relatively short time.
…and we would like to show you how this is all possible without a psychiatrist…

Alex’s Review

Taking the risk of sounding “cliche”, I must say this is currently my favorite app made with Kwik. There are several reasons to that: I love 3D animations (when professionally done) and I am a big fan of “Stella and Sam” storybook series, which mixes video with interactions, something I think Kwik would never excel at, due limitations of Corona platform. For my surprise, the LogiTales team developed a cool story, beautiful characters, with top 3D motion graphics, mixed with transparent transitions to interactions never done before with the plugin. Did I say they are just a two people team? In a word: unbelievable!