Early Ted Sketches

Every Pokemon Snap-like needs its Professor Oak-type for grading photos, so let's take a look at some of the early work to find CryptidCam's answer: Dr. Ted Krupp. There's also some Wandersong doodles here, since that's what I was playing at the time.

I could've sworn I went through more iterations for his design, but this was the first page of sketches I found for him, and it looks like I landed on something pretty close to his final design right away. I played with having him be more obviously nonhuman, but at the end of the day I think I still wanted to maintain some plausible deniability that he might just be a normal guy. I'll admit I'm still a little tickled by idea of the second set of eyes occasionally peeking out, implying that he's actually multiple creatures stacked under the trenchcoat, though. You can see on this page that I also workshopped a couple other possible names for him that were all meant to be cryptid puns. I felt like most of them were too obvious, and I liked that "Ted Krup" didn't really clock unless you wrote it out citation style (ie "Krup, Ted") since it felt appropriate for a researcher. I think what I landed on is probably too subtle though; in my experience players haven't really picked up on the pun.

Most people who play Pokemon Snap already know Professor Oak, so not a lot of time is wasted in that game trying to endear players to him. I knew by contrast that if I wanted my players to care about Ted (which I do, badly) I'd need to give him a lot of personality and allow players to build a sense of connection with him. I wanted Ted to be a very expressive and eccentric character, so I had a lot of fun playing around with different faces he might make and flavor text he might say to the player. I hope when the game comes out players take the time to talk to Ted, even when they don't have to.

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