Hi again, friends! It's BowserPuma.

Today's a good day to talk about Pat. So, I'll give you my character design reflection for him!

One quick note, I'll be discussing some spoiler information here. If you haven't read Build 3, I'd recommend you stop reading here and come back once you're all caught up!

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Before I had a rigid idea of what kind of character Pat was going to be, I thought of him more as a concept character. My initial idea was to make him a bit of a "lynchpin" type character to hold the story together and make the whole narrative fall more neatly into place.

Initially, he was just going to be another employee at Chronicles and take on a side character role. I thought of making this character a cute straight boy and tease the player a bit with his existence. The other idea was to make him a woman and fuse together the roles of Pat and April.

However, that idea changed dramatically after my friend Karcy passed away. I had never lost a close friend like that. It shattered my heart and I'm still picking up the pieces over two years later.

I tend channel raw emotions in my writing, grief included. The days following his passing were horrible and very emotional. All I desperately wanted was to find any way to celebrate and honor his life. So, I decided to channel that grief into bringing a new character to life for ChoPro.

One thing I've stated many times (and I'll reiterate for the sake of making myself crystal clear) Pat Shamus is not an attempt to recreate my late friend. The overall concept was to design someone I knew would be Karcy's favorite.

Funnily enough, if I had tried to make Pat Shamus a recreation of my late friend, he'd be very different. He'd be a "tsundere" type character with a secret goofy side. If Darrell had a hard exterior, that would approximate his personality.

My working idea for Pat's character was to design a border collie who Karcy and I would have created together, had he been around. With that motivation in mind, a lot of pieces fell into place very easily. I made him a black and white border collie to honor Karcy's latest fursona, Jaeger. I made him a bass player since that was Karcy's favorite instrument. Rinzy (who's also Pat's VA) helped a lot with crafting his visual design.

I added my personal touches to the character as well. The crass, flirty, pest type character is a common trope in furry VN's, and I thought it would mesh well with the other characters I had already designed. It's a fun personality archetype to write. It leaves some great opportunities for funny character interactions and to build some tension and conflict in the story.

One of the tough decisions I had to make was whether or not to make Pat romanceable. Since he's a memorial character, I wrestled with the ethics of that decision. But as time went on, many signs pointed me towards the conclusion that I do want him to be romanceable. I have a great story in mind for his romance route, and I want to tell it.

Over the past couple years, I've learned to be able to separate the character from the person who inspired him. Ultimately, Pat Shamus is my creation, and I find myself more comfortable treating him as such.

One last thing I want to share about Pat was the inspiration for his drag persona, Becky. It's a funny story. I had some writer's block on what Pat's "thing" was going to be after I spent a lot of time building it up in the story. My original idea was to have his "thing" be his participation in a secret Ultimate Frisbee league. The reason it was a secret was because he's bashful about being a dog playing with  frisbees (awful stereotype u.u).

That idea didn't work well, so I went back to the drawing board and thought about it real hard. Then, I had an epiphany. I recalled a joke character me and my late friend had invented. She was a crossdressing Labrador named "Becky". She was a character I would become anytime I got "white girl" wasted and started acting like a fool to make him laugh and smile. It was perfect. Several thousand words practically wrote themselves after I made that epiphany.

Pat's become my favorite character to write for, lately. The most beautiful thing is that, whenever I'm stuck with his development, all I have to do is think about the good times with Karcy and let the light he left behind guide me.

I believe I have a guardian angel and he is a border collie. May his guiding light always bring me joy and protection.