Were Paperball's character designs a success? It's a hard question to answer for me.

I remember waking up early one morning and finding a message on my phone. "Vinny is playing Paperball", a friend told me. "Holy crap", I replied. I rushed onto my computer to check Twitch and there it was, Vinny from Vinesauce was in fact playing Paperball, the game that I had been helping my best friend DJ Coco develop for the past year or so.

It was a surreal moment to say the least, seeing a streamer I loved so much play a game I've been involved with, but even weirder was all the attention we suddenly got. Cliax Games never really had a huge audience, so this was new for us. We got a bunch of fan art, some of it affectionate and some of it tongue in cheek, but more important was all the feedback we received. "It looks low budget", yeah, I mean, it was. "It's a bit slow", that's fair, something to consider for next time? "Where's the pants", "why doesn't she wear pants", "why is the cat wearing FMB boots", "no pants"...

Looks like I made a mistake.

Back in late 2018, DJ Coco showed me a screenshot of the game he was working on. He called it Paperball, and he said it was inspired by the Super Monkey Ball games, which he is a big fan of. He explained that, as the series hadn't seen a mainline game in years, he wanted to make his own successor with some additional mechanics from games like Trackmania. It was probably gonna be a small game, 50 levels at most, but it should be a fun little side-project. "Cool", I said. I was either distracted or unimpressed at the time. Probably both.

The more he showed me of Paperball, however, the more I realized something. Monkey Ball was considered dead at the time, another sad relic of Sega's better days among franchises like Jet Set Radio and Crazy Taxi. There were other marble rollers on the market like Marble Blast Ultra, but all of them missed that arcade-like simplicity that made Monkey Ball such a fun game to pick up and play, and Rolled Out hadn't even launched its IndieGoGo campaign yet. That gave me an idea.

"I want to help you market the game", I told DJ Coco. "This is a game which could definitely fill a hole no other game on the market does right now, and if marketed in the right way, I can see it selling very well. Thousands of copies, with some luck. The first thing we need, though, is a mascot. You can't market a game with a paper ball for a mascot." "Yeah yeah, I know", he said, "'don't worry, I'll whip up something." He showed me his something a few weeks later.

A Coco that never was, thankfully.

I don't remember what I said, but I'm sure it had to involve insults of some kind because this design still haunts me. "What are you going for here?", I remember asking. "What are any of these elements supposed to communicate? Why is she even wearing a graduation cap?" "Because she's an art college student", DJ Coco explained. "But she hasn't graduated yet", I replied with some bafflement. "And why the gloves, or giant bell, or striped tail, or those socks?"

He couldn't really explain any of his creative decisions, which isn't a good sign. He was inspired by the design of the shopkeeper in Blinx: The Time Sweeper, he told me later, but failed to bring the design together in any way that would communicate anything about this character.

"Right", I said. "I'm redoing this stupid thing, because there's no way you will sell anything with a mascot that looks like this. This bright pink is dreadful, let's give her a blue shirt and hot pink pants instead. Let's give her a beret and scarf to show she's an art student, and get rid of the gloves and all the stripes because it just makes the design too busy. Just keep the tip white." I sent a picture of what I came up with to DJ Coco, and while he was happy with the result, he insisted on adding boots and a cat bell to the end of the scarf. "Sure, that's fine", I replied.

A Coco that sorta was.

It is entirely my fault that I never stressed the pants more, as I drew the shirt over the pants in my initial drawing and DJ Coco used that as a reference for the concept art that we would end up sending to the actual 2D artist. At the time, I figured it wasn't a big deal because she's a cartoon cat, and anthromorphic cartoons almost exclusively dress in halves anyway. I'm sure it's due to the game's 2D art looking more anime-inspired than I had envisioned that it became such a focal point, but by the time I realized this it was too late to object.

Some credit has to go to the 2D artist, though, for simplifying the design's face and giving her some eyebrows as it helped a lot with expressions. I don't know who made the suggestion to turn the bell red, but it ended up reminding everyone of Pokéballs so while it ties in well with the design of the playable ball itself, we probably should've kept the pink. Thankfully, Nintendo has never had any legal objections to our games so far, which I admit sorta surprises me.

The name was easier to figure out, defying industry conventions. "Let's call her Coco the Cat", I said. "It's short, it fits the character's slightly ditzy personality and it works with the Monkey Ball naming conventions. AiAi, Baby, Coco and so on." "Don't you think people would assume we just named her after me?", DJ Coco asked. "Eh, that's not a big deal. You created the game, and she created the Paperball art project in-game, it fits." And that was that.

The game released on March 27th 2020 and ended up surpassing our expectations quite a bit. Part of that is due to a lot of luck: I had contacted various YouTubers and streamers, ones I knew were big Monkey Ball fans, to ask if they wanted a copy. Some of them actually replied and ended up streaming the game, raising a lot of awareness, and as a result other YouTubers and streamers ended up actually contacting us to ask for a copy. That was a first.

In an alternate universe, Paperball sold well enough to get merchandise.

Of course, these days just releasing a game doesn't mean you're done with it, not by a long shot, so it didn't take long until plans for post-release content were made. The initial plan was to develop one new game mode and two new DLC packs, with their own art, gimmicks and environments, but just like with the main game - which launched with three times as many levels as planned - DJ Coco's scope got bigger and bigger, so I ended up having to design three new outfits for the DLC packs.

(Fun fact: Blitz Mode - named after Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz, which infamously added a jump - and Flip Mode - where you try to control one ball with two players - were my ideas. I suggested them as jokes, and DJ Coco ended up implementing both. I should have known better as he had similarly added the Fallout Royale achievement, unlocked by getting 76.000 fallouts, based on a Fallout 76 joke I made before release. I don't make jokes around him anymore.)

In my defense, some people pay good money to dress up anthromorphic characters.

The new outfits were a cakewalk to design in comparison to Coco's original design. The toughest part was already done, so I just had to draw some new outfits. I originally wanted to go with a more 60's kitschy kind of look for the Secret Spy outfit, but it was too hard to draw and didn't really fit the environment of the pack so I ended up going with something more muted with a touch of pink. The mermaid and kimono outfits were even easier as they're admittedly not particularly inspired designs, although DJ Coco did have to "motivate" me to finish them on time by drawing intentionally bad art and threatening to send it to the 2D artist.

What was trickier to figure out were the poses - I didn't want each pack to just have the same art with a new costume slapped on top, so I had to think hard of some new ones that would still fit the character. My initial suggestion for the Deep Sea pack's game over pose was Coco getting jabbed in the back by a fishing hook, but DJ Coco didn't like how violent it looked even if depicted in a cartoony way, so it became more of a hook entrapment. I feel it's a weaker pose, but it was probably the right call.

It was during the summer of 2020, right during development of the DLC, that we were trying to bring Paperball to Nintendo Switch. We applied to Nintendo's developer program and got rejected, and with both us and the fans wanting to see the game appear on the platform, it seemed there was no real other way than to get a publisher. The company we had gotten in contact with had a good reputation and saw potential in the game, but they insisted on a five dollar price tag and a large cut of the profits (which according to my knowledge now was actually below average).

Between the publisher, the platform and taxes we would've seen maybe half a dollar per sale, and for how much work the game ended up being, that just didn't seem worth it. During the talks, we ended up applying to Nintendo again and somehow got approved this time. While their reasons for changing their mind are still beyond me, it was now official - Paperball was getting a Nintendo Switch release. But how do we incentivize people to double dip?

Of course! We add more furry cats! Cliax Games, you've done it again.

DJ Coco came up with a plan: we would release the new patch with extra content and DLC packs in September 2020, and then continue working on the Nintendo Switch port, hopefully being done around January 2021 with a release in March, one year after the original game. The idea was to release the port under the name Paperball Deluxe, including all the DLC and some timed console-exclusive content: a new pack of levels with new world themes, music, gimmicks and a new mascot character, which I volunteered to design.

After all the feedback we got on regular Paperball, I felt a bit more self-aware about designing something good for Paperball Deluxe. My first thought was to make a hippie character, as the new levels were going to be sunflower themed, so it seemed fitting enough. I ended up doing a lot more research - both into hippie fashion and character design - for the final character design, which ended up taking a lot of inspiration from various places: the sunflower headband and the beads were inspired by some photos I found, the yellow jacket was inspired by Athena Cykes from Ace Attorney, and the boots were something I threw in because I wanted some earthy colors in there.

I presented DJ Coco with the three designs you see above, and he chose the green palette for tying in well with the sunflower theme. I agreed, for both that reason and because the yellow and green contrasts well against Coco's pink and blue. The only touch-up I made after this was increasing the color contrast and giving her a brown belt as I felt something was missing, and it tied the boots in better with the rest of the design. DJ Coco named her Chrissy (get it? Chris and Coco?), and that was that. Paperball Deluxe ended up releasing March 25th 2021, using that exact design.

The loose hanging belt and shaggy hair also helped sell Chrissy as more of a slob than her sister. In a game where you don't have much time to show the character's personalities, every tiny bit counts.

I was a lot happier with Chrissy's design for many reasons, the biggest one being she's not pantsless. The second biggest reason is that her design simply is a lot stronger. Her design communicates her personality much better than Coco's, while still wearing an outfit that looks like something a real person would actually wear. The only big mistake I made was the peace necklace, which I forgot should have three lines near the bottom instead of two. Nobody except DJ Coco ever pointed this out, though, and it took him years to realize. My headcanon is that Chrissy bought it from some cheap vendor and was too dumb to notice. Man, how embarrassing would that be!

(On a side note, I was also very happy with Chrissy's voice work. Coco and Chrissy are both voiced by Aimee Smith, an absolute sweetheart of a woman who has done voicework for many notable games, and also Paperball. She nailed Coco's voice, which sounds appropiately bubbly, but we weren't sure if she could do the voice we had in mind for Chrissy. We gave her a few notes - Chrissy was a more laid-back old sister character with a whispery voice, and asked her if she thought she could do it. She ended up delivering the exact voice we wanted, much to our delight.)

So, to go back to my question at the beginning. Were the designs a success? My thoughts on the matter are complex, but I can't deny that, at the end of the day, the characters helped sell Paperball. I've seen people replying to fan art online expressing their interest in the game, and I've read reviews that admit they bought the game entirely because of the designs. That's what good designs should do, really, so the short answer is: yes, with a but.