Working with an established IP raises the bar. Players already know the characters, humor, and visual language, and they notice quickly when something feels out of place.

When Devhouse built SpongeBob Party with Epic Games and Paramount, we needed to create a polished, mobile-first Fortnite experience that felt at home in the SpongeBob universe. That meant treating the IP as part of the design process from day one.

Start With the Source

We pulled visual reference directly from the show whenever possible. This gave our artists a clear target, reduced interpretation, and helped the vast majority of our artwork move through Paramount's review process without major revisions.

Strong reference saves time, but it does not eliminate every question. With an IP as expressive as SpongeBob, even the source material can offer several different answers.

Sometimes Off-Model Feels More Authentic

SpongeBob characters have been drawn with different proportions, sizes, and exaggerations throughout the show's history. Those inconsistencies are often part of its personality.

For some characters, we found several valid references that looked noticeably different from one another. We surfaced those options to Paramount so they could determine which version best fit the experience.

Sometimes the approved choice was not the cleanest or most standardized model. It was the version that simply felt more like SpongeBob.

That reinforced an important lesson for our team. Authenticity is not always about reproducing a model sheet perfectly. It is about understanding what makes the property recognizable to the audience.

Treat Approvals as Part of Production

Licensed development also brings outside dependencies. Certain creative decisions require approval from the IP owner, and those decisions can take longer than the production work surrounding them.

Our schedule needed to account for Paramount's review timelines from the beginning. Approval time is production time.

That means identifying ambiguous assets early, submitting decisions before they become blockers, and keeping other work moving while reviews are in progress. Planning around those dependencies helped us maintain a rapid production schedule without compromising the final experience.

Build the IP Into the Game

SpongeBob Party still had to work first and foremost as a game. We designed for mobile play with clear UX, smooth performance, short gameplay loops, and layered systems that remained easy to understand.

The IP could not simply sit on top of those systems. Characters, animation, environment, humor, interface, and gameplay all needed to feel like they belonged to the same world.

For SpongeBob Party, that meant knowing when to follow the official reference closely and when the stranger, more exaggerated version better captured the character players remembered.

The goal was never just to make SpongeBob recognizable. The goal was to make the game feel like SpongeBob.