Hi friends! Bowserpuma, here!

So, I'm thinking of making a collection of dev logs where I walk through my character design process for ChoPro's characters.

The most reasonable place to start would be the first character I designed for this game, Darrell!

At the core of my character design process, I took a "group design" approach. I wanted to design a group of characters, each with a unique but vague archetype to ensure I had a variety. For a dating sim, this is quite important, in my opinion. You want to offer the audience some variety of personalities and body types to prevent romantic routes from feeling redundant.

For Darrell, I wanted to fulfill the big, fat, and strong "himbo" archetype. If you've seen Amicus from Adastra, or Chester from Extracurricular Activities, you'll see the similarities.

Now, I could have just made a big strong wolf with fat tits, but I wanted to be a little more clever than that. Since I knew the heart of the story was going to be heavily centered around musical themes, I wanted to take this "himbo" trope and put a metal-head twist on it. I envisioned a large lion with a massive mane, absolutely thrashing and tossing his hair everywhere while performing on stage. A few weeks later, I had the character designed, and that's how Darrell was conceived!

Another one of my character design philosophies I wanted to employ was creating characters who are visually unique. There are lots of fat and buff lion fursonas out there, and I wanted to make sure Darrell stood out from the rest.

I took some inspiration from a good friend of mine, Aster, who owns a lion-bear character with a very long mane and dyed hair tips. I wanted to take that core design and create an edgier version. Taking some inspiration from The Lion King, I wanted to incorporate some of Scar's color palette in his design.  All in all, I wanted an edgy look without him being too edgy.

The first sketch of Darrell came to life when I commissioned Atticus (whom I cannot find on Twitter anymore, he was @AtticusLion) worked on him. From there, I was able to hire more artists to draw Darrell.  With these illustrations, I developed a character portfolio for him for when it came time to hire artists for the project.

The other attached illustrations of Darrell were done by Alex and Cream.

I'll talk about his personality design as well, but please be aware there may be some minor spoilers mentioned. So if you'd like to avoid those, now's your chance to quit reading this post.

For his personality, I wanted to employ the common tropes of the "himbo" archetype, but I also wanted to add my own twists as well. I wanted him to be friendly, tough, and dense, but I wanted to implement these traits in a unique way. For example, Darrell's not a dumb character. He's adept at learning patterns quickly and can pick up skills rather fast. However, he struggles with tact and short-term memory recall. This can make him seem stupid at a first glance, but when you get to know the character deeper, you'll see that he's not a complete dunce!

This is a trait I certainly have. I made it through engineering school with a bachelor's degree, but sometimes I'll completely misunderstand basic instructions, or forget about events that just happened two minutes ago. I wanted to give all my characters little pieces of me, and Darrell got the ADHD (poor guy).

Aside from the ADHD, the other pieces of me that Darrell has includes:

• A deep love for rock and metal music
• Plays guitar left-handed
• A love for fitness
• Similar body type (but Darrell is MUCH more buff than me)

That all being said, I don't want to give you all the impression that dating Darrell will be like dating me. I didn't make a carbon copy of myself and turned him into a lion. However, Darrell certainly has the most pieces of me relative to other ChoPro characters.  He's the closest thing that I have to second fursona (side note: I consider Darrell and all other ChoPro characters to be "original characters" and not "fursonas").

I'm really excited for you all to get to know him better and explore his romantic route. I have a ton of things planned for him! 

That's all I have for now about Darrell. I'll touch on the other characters sometime later. Take care, y'all! 😸