Animator3000

Another relativily unknown project, that would not be released in the end. Well, there was some buzz, summer 2007, when weird animated stickers appeared on homepages of Finnish staff. People worked out it was being made as a future feature (make them yourself), then there was silence. Stickers like these:

Turns out main developer, and the one that persuaded the company to get it into production, of what was called ‘Animator3000’ was Jetro Lauha, that worked for Sulake 2005-2007 (nowadays hot developer at his own property, Secret Exit (notably also the place legend Drken aka Tuukka Savolainen works)).

Source of the images is indeed an experimental animation tool. Platform was J2ME, as such, in first place meant for mobile devices. Not necessarily exclusivily though, J2ME applications can be made to work on websites or anything (a planned version for Habbo website is very imaginable).

Animator3000 is fully scalable, and would have worked on a variety of mobile devices. Images and mucho technicalities on design in Jetro’s IMGUI slides (Immediate Mode Graphical User Interface). An impression on how the tool worked is on the right. At the end of 2007, though, Sulake put a halt on developing mobile products like this. Animator3000, while ready, didn’t get released. We can only guess, after Nokia not releasing Habbo Islands, released products like Arcade games, Habbo Dreams, Imager maybe not very profitable they stopped doing these kind of applications. Focus shifted not away from mobile phones though, they now wanted to see if virtual worlds in general could be transported to phones (Mini Friday/Bobba Bar).