In the last quarter of 2009, we were contacted at theRedSpace that Nickelodeon USA wanted to implement the Cartoon Creator that had been built the year previous. What they also wanted to do was improve the fish builder, so that we would have some new features, the most radical was the inclusion of an avatar builder, where kids could visit the Spongebob site and create their own “Fish Person”, similar to the generic characters you could see on the SpongeBob television show. These “fish people” would then be loaded into the Cartoon Creator so that users could create their own cartoons with their own character inside it.
The fish people would be customizable by gender, name, color, head, as well as items that the fish people could wear, including hair, clothing, shoes, hand held items, etc.
I worked mainly on the backend of this project, as I had had experience with it in the past working on the original Cartoon Creator. My team developed the Fish Builder while I sorted out the PHP functions, the Flex administration tool and the server tweaks. I concentrated mainly on getting the new “Fish Person” assets to be customizable from the administration tool.
I also spent some time making small modifications to the Cartoon Creator and Cartoon Player flash applications that were mainly just to make a few things easier for user’s when using the application (showing the name of the current cartoon being worked on, showing the number of saved cartoons and more).
