An avatar created on Lunaii

The lovely collection of doll makers on Lunaii was created by a single artist. There are several cute flash games, a super detailed pixel doll avatar you can create (with tons and tons of options), and a selection of colouring pages. The artwork is really cute and cleanly done. These dolls would be appealing to most fans of dress up games, and I really enjoyed my time playing with the avatar maker. The site does have quite a few ads, but they are not particularly annoying and these sites have to make money somehow, lol

Also… I haven’t forgotten about the promised Doll Divine review. I just wanted to make sure I had enough time to do it justice as there are several games on that site that I would like to go over

To get things going again, I have decided to do a few reviews of the “Game Portal” style sites. This type of site generally hosts games by various artists, but they don’t normally require memberships or anything like that. In that way they are rather like directories, except for the fact they have brought the content to one place instead of sending you elsewhere.

SmallDressUp.com falls into this category of sites. It does have ads that play before each game, but so far they don’t seem too bad. There are also ads around the content, but far less of them than can be found on some sites of this type. Advertisement wise, the biggest downside to this directory is a pop up add that seems to come up. My browser blocks pop ups, so I’m not sure what it is. But I always find them fairly irritating.

The navigation on this site is very straight forward and simple. Categories are listed down the left and seem fairly well-organized. The dolls are mostly the simple “drag & drop” or “click to change” style without many interesting features, but there are lots of them. So if you are looking for variety, this is a good choice. The artists they allow seem to all have clean appealing art styles.

Overall the site seems fairly good considering what it is. I enjoyed the content I tried out, and as long as you are fine with pop up ads (or have a good blocker) it should be a decent little portal to visit.

We finally did our big site overhaul at Emerald Activities!

We gave the whole site a shiny new look, we made a twitter account and we build a Facebook page. The following lists some of our new features.

As part of that update we would like to introduce you to three of our new mascot characters. Emerald, the dragon, will be your general guide around the site. Feldspar, the gryphon, has tips and information over on our games pages. Finally, Amber, the phoenix, is helping out in the crafts section. At any time you can click these mascots to go to our help page.

Each registered member now has an improved personal gallery, a treasure hoard and access to a basic, restricted private messaging system. The treasure hoard holds loot members unlock by completing various tasks. Each item in their hoard is an actual piece that can be used in all Magic Makers.

We have introduced a new currency called “Emeralds”. Our members can spend these emeralds in the Market on hundreds of new pieces that can be used in either classic or modern Magic Makers. Emeralds can be earned by building and submitting images to the galleries, participating in contests and challenges and unlocking certain treasures. If you would like to help support our site, Emeralds can also be purchased through PayPal in our Market.

Our Magic Makers have been upgraded and now award Emeralds. The modern and classic makers have new tools that allow free skewing, scaling and rotation. The modern makers also have secondary colour and pattern support.

Users under 13 years of age can now make restricted accounts, this will allow them to have personal galleries but only restricted use of the forum. For full site access they will need parental permission.

We  will be updating the colouring books and adding easter colouring some time in the next week or two. I also plan to do another review, this one of Doll Divine, so stay tuned!

Clockwork Couture

Clockwork Couture (Steampunk):
http://www.anniestegg.com/clockworkcouture.php?PHPSESSID=279643a9ff67e598c50561e1e98dc75e

Polkadot Pirate

Polkadot Pirate:
http://www.anniestegg.com/polkadotpirate.php?PHPSESSID=279643a9ff67e598c50561e1e98dc75e

While you on her site, I also recommend glancing through her gallery. There is some really wonderful work in there

Rock Chick Maker

The Rock Chick Maker Game: A click to mix and match style doll builder game, but it has and entertaining style and lots of pieces to choose from. The little round buttons on the bottom let you choose the catagory of piece you want. Click a piece on your doll to remove it. There are a few little accessories that you can drag and drop as you please, and you can mix and match some background elements to get a fun stage for your rocker. Once you are done, you can hide the other pieces (hit the “show” button) and even print your doll if you want I really like this doll.

http://pixelledanddead.deviantart.com/art/The-Rock-Chick-Maker-Game-136032264 (Click the download icon on the left side to play, or use the second link.)
http://fc00.deviantart.com/fs25/f/2009/248/7/f/The_Rock_Chick_Maker_Game_by_pixelledanddead.swf

Face Maker

Face Maker: This one is a little more confusing to use than some, but its kinda fun to play with anyway anyway. It was created to help the programmer build faces more easily for RPG games. (He is not the origonal artist for the pieces.) Click the rounded tab things down the right side to go through different features. Select options in the other list to change the colours of your pieces. The circle with arrows in it allows you to adjust the position of some features.

http://foxrichards.deviantart.com/art/FaceMaker-52755515

Wolf Maker

Wolf Maker: This one is just nicley drawn fairly realistic wolf colour changer. It lets you recolour almost every patch of fur (though only with realistic colours). There are a few little drag and drop scars you can add under “Misc”. Make sure that you colour this wolf in order, so start with the “Base”, then the “Unders”, then the “legs”, etc…. When you choose a tab you have already used, it erases your other work!

http://kaylink.deviantart.com/art/Kaylink-s-Wolf-Maker-122966749

Stay tuned for the next post of Doll Builders on Deviant

Since the games are from all over, the art is varied, but most of it seems to be a nice quality. The occasional doll or game has animation as well. The dolls are sorted by theme rather than how they function, but they do have both drag n’ drop and click to change style dolls. They also have a lot of maker/builder type games where you can create pizzas, cakes, snowmen, and other fun stuff. For the sort of 6-9 year old crowd this is probably a pretty good choice. They don’t need to sign up to play, and there is enough variety to keep them entertained for quite a while.

As far as drag n’ drop directories go, this one isn’t bad. The have a huge variety of games, and their advertising isn’t too annoying. Many of theses sites have tons of pop-up ads and such, but this one manages to steer away from that. One last side note though, the site does seem to go down a fair bit (it is probably a bit busier than their servers can handle) so you might have to check back at another time of day if it seems to be acting funny

Todays pick is Cartoon Doll Emporium, another large social networking/dollmaker site.  They have a notice for parents, billing themselves as the “safest and most creative virtual world for girls”. I am not sure how accurate that statement is, but things are moderated in real time which is nice. The artwork is fun and colourful, lots of giant heads and big eyes, and the dolls are unique. The magority, of the newer ones at least, are “click to mix and match”. Some of their older content has changable colour as well or drag and drop pieces. (You have to hunt around for it a bit; when you go to dolls section type drag and drop into the search bar on the right hand side.) On the plus side, most of the dolls have some kind of animation and animated props or backgrounds which younger kids will love.

My avatar and alter avs on Cartoon Doll Emporium.

As with most of these sites, they have blogs, user profiles, forums, clubs, etc… They also have cartoon dollars which you can earn by surfing their site and participating in activities, and a fun little mini economy. They also have a neat little scavenger hung feature that gives you clues and sends you to find certain dolls. There are item prizes for each hunt. I found much more free content on this site than star doll, though its definatly for a bit younger users.

My personal space on Cartoon Doll Emporium.

Cartoon Dollars can be spent buy items that improve your “Doll Avatar” and the “Doll Room” featured in your profile. (Both the avatar and the room let you choose your pieces, but you can’t move anything around.)When you are bored of your old items, things like furniture and outfits) you can set them for sale in your personal store for other users to buy. You set the price on the items you sell, so are some interesting prices on “Rare” items and such. It also means that its possible to get some of the premium content without paying real money for it When you are on your profile page, on the bottom right is little box labled “Wish List”. Make sure you check that out; when you have items on there, even Premium princess ones, you can click on “Buy” and compare prices in the mall and various user stores.

My CDE store.

Cartoon Doll Emporium (CDE) has a tons of super fun features, unfortunetely a lot of them are very buggy. Their currency system doesn’t allways reward users, their auction feature was broken when I visited (it kept my cartoon dollars even though I didn’t win any bids). Some of the games, like the scavenger hunt, don’t update unless you hold shift down and refresh your page (it also sometimes fixes money display bugs). Another bug I noticed while on the scavenger hunt, was that their site ads often covered the clue. If that happends to you, go back to the main scavenger hunt page to read the clue, its on the left hand side of your profile page under Games > Scavenger hunt. I did send an e-mail mentioning a few of these problems, however they only responded to the auction problem and said that they where working on it.

All in all though, I do enjoy the amount of honestly free content on Cartoon Doll Emporium. The dolls are really appealing, and the little economy is fun. As long as you are not easily frustrated by bugs, I recomend the site And if you just want to browse around a little, you don’t need to be a member to play with the dolls.

A Bunny Genie

Genie Princess – http://www.hulabunny.com/genie_bunny.htm is a genie bunny with a simple floating animation really adds to her charm. You can change her clothing, jewelry, slippers, and lamp. Several of the clothing items have sparkly sequins which my daughter enjoyed

The Magic Feather – http://www.hulabunny.com/babybirds.htm is just a simple little baby bird that you can colour and decorate. Bright colours, big blinking eyes and lovely swirly feathers. Defiantly a good choice for younger children.

Magic Mare – http://www.hulabunny.com/magicmare.htm is a fairly limited maker as far as piece selection goes. But the main and tail are animated, the horn sparkles, and the graphics are (of course, lol) super lovely.

Princess Abella – http://www.hulabunny.com/abella.htm has wonderful period graphics organized by year. Again, there are not a ton of choices, but its fun to see what century the clothing is from, and the settling animation when you choose a dress if very nice.

Create your goddess – http://minigamelink.n169.com/flashfile/200610/goddess_game%5B1%5D.swf (this is a random link to the goddess maker that I found in a search engine, the one on the Hula Bunny site was broken when I wrote this). Build your goddess from a selection of pieces inspired by goddesses from around the world. When you make a piece choice, it tells you facts about the goddess the piece was inspired by. Really wonderful artwork and interesting little bits of trivia. The doll is nude though (no body detail, it looks like a barbie), so if you feel that that is inappropriate you might want to pass on this one.

I am really a fan of both this artist and her site, its well worth visiting.

Scottoons Chicken Monster

Monster Maker Monster Lab -  http://www.scottoons.com/interactive/monster-maker/use drawers full of strange pieces, and a jar of eyeballs to build your creation. The little box down in the bottom right lets you change layering, stretch and squash pieces, flip, rotate, remove outlines, and delete pieces. (There are a lot of buttons so its seems a bit confusing, but playing with it for a few minutes is enough to figure it all out.) Click on the knobs down the right to open the doors full of pieces. Clicking the tank thing with the gauge on it brings down a blank screen you can build on. The drawer in the bottom left has the colour palette. Click on a colour to change the colour of the last piece you had selected. When you are finished you can submit it to the gallery of images they have on flickr

Robot Factory Creation

Scottoons robot Factory – http://www.scottoons.com/interactive/robotfactory/works a little bit differently. Clicking a piece from the collection on the right, causes the piece to appear in the little manufacturing window on the left. You can drag the piece to the build area from that window. There are few buttons in this maker, but you can still mirror, scale, flip, layer, rotate, and duplicate you pieces. There is also a colour palette for the back drop, though not for the pieces. In the arms section is one super neat piece that I love, it looks like a stack of circles. Drag one out into the build area, then pull on one of the middle circles. It will cause the whole the to bend like a hose. Super fun idea.There is an e-mail that you can send your finished robot to if you would like to show it off

The intereactive area of the Scottoon site (http://www.scottoons.com/interactive/) lists both of these games as well as several other little time wasters that you might enjoy

Somewhere around a decade ago, my parents bought our first family computer (a long story for another time, lol). Within a few months we had the internet as well, and I stumbled onto a “get your own free website” type add from Geocities. I was thrilled, and shortly there after I was the proud owner of “The Emerald Empress’ Dungeon”. It wasn’t anything too exciting, just a collection of my artwork, craft ideas, free printable paper dolls, and clip art I had done.

Magic Maker Snowmen

A few years after that I found my first doll builder site. I loved it, and they had a function where you could submit a collection of .gifs and then they would add it to the site as another doll. I opened ms paint as fast as I could click, and built a snowman with clothing and appropriate props. Then I returned to the site only to find that their upload function didn’t work. Since I now had a doll, I had to find out how they did it so I searched around and after a few weeks I had a working java script drag and drop style doll. I fell in love with the whole idea and over the next few years added several more.

My site was still super small, I got maybe 500 visitors a year, but people would send me dolls they made or thank me for the crafts so I was pretty happy. I eventually bought a domain name and hosting for myself. Occasionally I would look for places to list or submit my site, which eventually brought me to http://dressupgames.com/. I submitted my site, and was absolutely shocked at the number of visitors it sent me. My family refreshed my page so they could watch the counter. Within a day or so I had exceeded my monthly bandwidth and had to go find better hosting.

Magic Maker Castle

Now with significantly more motivation, I continued my labour of love and added more dolls. I didn’t want to just do the same dolls as many of the sites did, I wanted content that I would like to play with. So I build dragons, cat people, castles, ladies and lords, etc… (The links just lead to the old makers.)

About three years ago now, I met a wonderful man online and he decided to win me over by building me a save button for my doll maker. It worked, but I think he got a bit more than he bargained for (and I got a free coder for life, lol). We gave my site a face lift, removed a lot of my old content and focused more on the dolls colouring books.  He helped me move all of the Magic Makers over to a new flash format. Now I draw them in vector form, and the pieces can be rotated, recoloured, re sized, and layered. We also added a forum, which has allowed our users to give us a lot of input over the past year or so.

Magic Maker Horse

Promoting our site, visiting sites our users recommended to me, and a love of creative games has led me to many other wonderful sites online. That is why I decided that I would start this blog as well, not that I really needed something else to maintain . I have spend as much time playing with our makers and the doll makers on other people’s sites as I have building new content, lol, and now I can share them with you

We have just started another site face lift and more massive improvements to the makers and games. We are really excited about it, and I will add updates here as we finish them. If there is anything you have ever really wanted to see in a doll maker or colouring book, then please let me know. You can leave a comment here, or stop by the forum, http://www.emeraldactivities.com/forum/, and post your ideas to “Activity Requests” or “Website Feedback”