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For Grown-Ups

Welcome to our design letter

Before I started working here at the studio, if someone mentioned Toca Boca to me, Toca Hair Salon 2 was the first app I thought of. The smooth flowy feeling of the hair and the huge variety of tools made it a unique and iconic app. It’s been four years since Toca Hair Salon 2 launched, so we’re really excited to open the salon doors once again with Toca Hair Salon 3!

We have taken everything that was great about Toca Hair Salon 2 and made it even better. Toca Hair Salon 3 is bursting with content. The highlight is of course the hair — it truly is a joy to play with. The straight hair is silky smooth and flows under your finger as you move it. The curly hair is bouncy and full of volume. It’s fun experimenting with the different hair types, seeing how they react to the tools and what styles you can make with them. We are also happy to now include kinky hair in Toca Hair Salon 3. The addition of this super-curly hair type means you can create even more awesome hairstyles.

You can also grow beards on any character at the new Beard Station. The new Clothing Station lets you pick an outfit to match your new hairstyle. Braiding and more hair colors were two highly requested features we were happy to include. We didn’t hold back with the amount of awesome accessories we added — there should be enough hats, glasses, badges and stickers to satisfy every stylist!

Happy styling!

Colin Lane, Play Designer

How to play

Select the tool you want to use from the table at the bottom of the screen. You can swipe the table sideways to move to another section of the salon, where there is another set of tools to choose from. There are 10 stations to play with.

  • Most of the tools can be used either by tapping for precision, or swiping to affect more hair at the same time.
  • The braiding tool creates a braid when you touch down on a hair strand; you can then drag that braid into the position you want it. Tap more hair strands to make more braids. There are two sizes of braid tools to create big or small braids.
  • The spray colors can now have a wider variety of colors and gradients. We even have a rainbow spray! Try growing the hair out for best results.
  • Don’t forget that you can apply grow lotion to grow hair back out again.
  • You can now grow beards on everyone. Go to the beard station and use the grow lotion on the face!
  • The accessories can be both rotated and resized by using two-finger pinch gestures on the screen.
  • Change the backdrop of the photo booth and snap a photo with the camera. The image will be saved in your device’s camera roll.
  • On the character select screen you can randomize the characters’ looks and hairstyles by tapping the shuffle button.

Play inspiration

The Toca Hair Salon apps have always been about open-ended play with a focus on creativity. There are many ways to play with this digital toy; perhaps you can recreate a friend, family member or celebrity’s hairstyle. Every time you visit the character select screen you will see a new collection of characters — perhaps these characters are customers coming to be trimmed by the new stylist in town.

What sort of different styles can you make with the different hair types? Have you tried growing a beard on your character?

We also love to see people using the accessories in new and inventive ways — maybe a hat can be resized and positioned as a mouth with shapes used as teeth! We have provided lots of different shapes and objects to play with. Experiment away!

Settings
In the Settings panel on your Apple device, there is an icon for Toca Hair Salon 3. If you open it, you can toggle snapshots to “off” and no photos will be saved in your camera roll. There are also options for the “Toca News” and “For Grown-Ups” buttons on the start screen. Toggling these to “off” will remove the buttons. You can turn the music for the game off here as well.

A SPECIAL THANKS TO

Red Pipe, Sound FX
Håkan Lidbo, Music/Sound
Roy Yasasindhu, Lead QA
Will Jordan, Freelance Programmer
Typhaine Uro, Intern Artist

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Toca Life series is made possible through a dedicated game team but also by using various open source plugins, other open source software and sometimes we work with friends or others companies that we like to acknowledge.