Between Christmas and the 12 days of CreativeJS we didn’t get a chance to post this when it was first published, but it’s still very much worth a read. Over on HTML5 Rocks, Marcin Wichary — Sr. User Experience Designer at Google who’s had a part in many Google doodles — posted an in-depth case study on the Stanisław Lem Google doodle from last year.
We learn a lot from each interactive doodle, and the recent Stanisław Lem mini-game was no exception, with its 17,000 lines of JavaScript code trying many things for the first time in doodle history.
17,000 lines! The source code for the doodle has been posted as well if you’d like to count for yourself. I’m just going to take his word for it.
Marcin gets into a lot of the details that the team contends with on any google doodle, as well as plenty of specifics on the Stanisław Lem doodle itself. You’ll have a new appreciation for the amount of work that goes into some of these interactive doodles after reading it.
… months of work, weeks of testing, 48 hours of baking it in, all for something that people play for five minutes. Every one of those thousands of JavaScript lines is hoping that those 5 minutes will be time well spent. Enjoy.
Check out the full case study on HTML5 Rocks.