I worked at Nickelodeon USA in the late '90s, with Brown Johnson and Chris Gifford, to write and produce the first 'interactive' TV show where characters communicated with and waited for a response from the viewers. 

The process ultimately led to the development of Blue's Clues and Dora the Explorer, for which we received a credit.

Continuing my interest in interactive edutainment, I went on to develop a fun game-based educational CD-ROM for school children and with the arrival of Flash, several interactive web 'experiences'.

Finally I secured funding to develop my dream project: an ambitious interactive edutainment game world for kids that played like an interactive cartoon but encouraged and managed them through a carefully devised educational phonics-based reading program.

Over many years I developed an original game engine dubbed the Nexus Engine to drive the unique but simple style of interactive edutainment I visualised.

Story driven adventures guided by a talking 'friend' who can observe, remember and react to what the player does achieved with an event-based timeline, quest system, server-side recording and modular character AI.

The ability to Virtual Play which is a translation of how a child 'plays' imaginary games with his toys, achieved by creating sequences using real-world logic and a sophisticated item engine.

A Lesson Engine and Learning Director that monitors how well a child is doing and feeds them carefully chosen lessons based on this information to make sure the child is learning and retaining the information.

A unified language that allows us to easily translate new stories and sequences into the game and without having to constantly develop new gameplay mechanisms for each.

Easily moddable, loading-on-demand assets including environment art, character puppets, speech, sound and visual FX controlled by a Director script means the engine is very scalable and able to quickly add new content.

Gloop Me, a daily play edutainment game for 3 to 8 year olds, has both the potential to be an exciting social game world for kids and an educational learning tool to be utilised by parents and teachers.

Following the subscription and micro-payment model, Gloop Me could be given away free to homes and schools but some content would only be available if purchased.

Gloop Me revolves around child-character interaction with a little blue alien called Fuzzy. Fuzzy has travelled from his home planet to Earth where he is now enjoying a 'camping out' existence in a tree by a river.

Gloop Me would aim to mix sci-fi elements of space travel and advanced alien technologies with a romanticised 'living in the woods' experience. Storyline arcs could include why Fuzzy has come to Earth, meeting his family, interacting with other characters and competition with a rival alien who mysteriously roams the galaxy.

Gloop Me, along with Fuzzy and the green gloop, is the property I had used while developing this concept and is a demonstration of the capability of the engine.

There is an obvious argument for pursuing the use of a 3rd party, established, pre-school TV show property. Recognition and desire by children to interact in their favourite make-believe world on a level previous unavailable would be a huge draw.

Alternatively using Gloop Me or another new or non-tv based property, with this story and character driven style, would have a much more built-in capability to translate into a TV show and it is not hard to visualise how easily the two could integrate with one another.