In my free time, I'm working on a retro cartoony style NBA Jam/Street type of game with a mix of today's players and historic players. I've been programming it in Unity. If anyone is interested in collaborating let me know. I used a character creator to create a base player which I am editing to make each player. Using Paint.net to blend in the player's faces to make them match the cartoony look. Then I try to match their skin tone as best I can. I've been using layers and the liquify tool to make the animations and I think with a little practice they could look amazing.
This is the base player I came up with. You can resize any body part and change the color of anything from this base.
This is a quick Lebron I did this morning in about 5 min with the blending technique. Could make it look amazing putting more time into it. You can resize/reshape any body part including things like ears/nose/mouth and it would be easy to add accessories like headbands and armbands. I've found some good shoe templates also.
Right now I'm programming the game as a single player on a court just shooting around until I can work out all the basic gameplay mechanics.
EDIT:
Here is a quick GIF showing how easy it would be to animate. This is just a simple IDLE animation that most games have. I did this using the liquify tool.