Club Penguin: Early Concept Art - Part 2 (Characters)

On October 3, I launched my first blog post in a new short series that I announced was starting on Cheats with Dino, named: Club Penguin: Early Concept Art. In this series I talked about how I was going to feature and discuss pieces of early concept art from the very depths of Club Penguin's archives. The first post was a success, garnering lots of interest from the Club Penguin community.

Today, 12 days later, I am releasing the second part of the series! In part 1, I focused on rooms and the designing of rooms from the very fist sketch, to the final product. Today will be quite different, because—as you can guess from the title—we will be looking at characters. Everything from mascots to puffles will be highlighted in this episode. So, without further ado, let's dive straight in.

Let's start quite far back, how does 2005 sound? Good? Good. Firstly, I'd like to give a little bit of a backstory. In November of 2005 in Club Penguin, many sightings were being reported of various coloured balls of fluff popping up around the island. Unbeknownst to the users of the time, these would grow into one of Club Penguin's most iconic symbols: puffles!

Club Penguin: Early Concept Art - Part 1 (Rooms)

Let's talk about something new today. Let's talk: concept art. Since Club Penguin is a flash game, and has been that way since 2005, (read this article to learn more about how flash runs the game) this means when the Club Penguin team wants to add a new item, they have to draw it in Adobe Flash before it's allowed to be hosted on their media servers.

However, most times, before working on the final draft, they sketch out some concept art on paper, or sometimes they make an early prototype digitally. Over the years, most of this concept art has been stored and collected, as it is used as a basis for the final model.

This makes for some crazy art that us regular players never get to see. Until today. I have with me some concept art that I've collected over the years. These released images have been posted around the web, primarily on the social media accounts of old art designers, or the official Club Penguin blog.