Creation Station

Make a Masterpiece!

Wield rainbow brushes, glitter pens, countless stickers and balls of living paint to get creative and generally make a huge mess with our fully featured Creation Station platform, developed for CBBC!

Brief

CBBC were looking to replace their hugely popular ‘Make a picture’ experience with something more powerful and ambitious, that would double down on addressing the creative curiosity of their audience. As well as delivering an excellent art-making tool, they were keen to see ideas for something extra, that would run alongside the core experience and offer players new ways to get creative.

Our Response

We were keen to offer something different to compliment our core art-making tool proposal. As our speciality is designing and building games, we thought we’d come up with creative play experiences that add a game-like twist to the process of art-making and provide fun new ways for players to create a unique masterpiece.

We also addressed the myriad interface design concerns, outlining how our approach would be able to offer something simple and intuitive for the younger audience whilst also offering more advanced and powerful tools for the older users.

A steady flow of fresh content is crucial for keeping an experience like this exciting and relevant, so we set out how we will ensure the process of adding content is easy and pain-free for the CBBC teams that would be administering this experience.

The Challenges

Creating a look for the tool that was both bold and characterful, but that would not overpower or clash with the broad range of CBBC brands that would need to sit within it.

Designing an interface that would empower users at both ends of the broad 6-12yrs old age bracket to confidently create at their own level, without getting lost in sub-menus.

Coming up with 3 novel and unique ‘creative play experiences’ that would offer a dose of game-like fun whilst providing ways to output unique creative content.

Building a content saving flow that would save user artwork to their device smoothly and consistently, no matter what the platform/operating system was being used.

The Results

The main drawing tool sits at the heart of the action and features a range of brush styles, 5 step undo, text tool, tonnes of stickers, multiple layers and a zoom feature for fine detail. We worked hard to develop a responsive drawing system that delivers smooth strokes and paint-like textures even during fast scribbling using webGL.

Users can jump straight into a blank canvas or choose one of many CBBC challenges or templates to colour in a favourite character from a CBBC show or drop stickers and draw ontop of a preloaded background scene.

The Creation Station also offers three creative play experiences that each provide a totally different way to create. ‘Pixel Painter’ encourages the mindful and relaxing pursuit of ‘popping-pixels’ to build up an 8-bit style pixellated image. ‘Spin Art’ takes the main drawing experience for a spin by quite literally spinning the canvas for spirograph-style results. ‘Painty Ball’ sees the user controlling an animated ball of paint as they roll around a 3D arena, collecting crazy power-ups and leaving a colourful trails of paint and huge splats in their wake!

No matter which way they play, users can save their masterpiece with a simple, streamlined process that downloads and stores a jpg image file to their device, which they can then share with their friends or upload to the CBBC gallery.

To keep things fresh, the sticker roster, challenges, colouring in templates and pixel paintings can all be swapped out, themed and updated by CBBC staff at any time. All of the activities are tracked by an incremental milestone reward system and players progress is saved across browser sessions.

The CBBC Creation Station represents a robust suite of creative tools that kids can dive into, make something they’re proud of and share it with the CBBC community. We can’t wait to see what the CBBC audience comes up with once they get their hands on it!

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