Pokémon are the nostalgic love of many who grew up playing the original games on GameBoys and Nintendo DSes. The sheer number of the cute, lovable, furry creatures – almost 900 of them – really makes you wonder how so many different unique designs were thought up. This article gives an intriguing look into the studio behind these designs, and my favorite fact from it is that Pokémon designs rarely get “cancelled”. If something doesn’t seem to fit into the Pokémon universe, the creators merely modify the idea until it does. I think this design philosophy is amazing, and though there is a lot more that goes into designing a Pokémon than that, it goes to show that if something doesn’t work, you should keep trying your hand at it until it does – if Game Freak, the developers of the Pokémon games, does it that way, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t.
This is another curious look into the world of unfinished Pokémon and the design process/sketches behind some of them, and it’s quite interesting how some of the ideas evolved and some fizzed out. It makes me wonder, what goes into good character design for video games?
