Niantic shows off early designs for Pokemon GO, including original design for trainer avatar
During a session at GDC this week, Niantic’s Dennis Hwang provided a look at how Pokemon GO changed throughout development. The company messed around with different versions of the overworld map, a variety of takes on the appearance of the battle screen, and even original plans for the trainer avatar.
As for the trainer, originally Niantic had an avatar more in line with the character from Pokemon Ruby / Sapphire. However, it was scrapped during early stages of development.
Hwang said during his talk:
“[In] the original IP, the trainers have a much younger look as the target audience tends to skew younger. But for us, the avatars, we wanted to kind of elevate them to an older generation slightly.”
“We didn’t want some super stylized big-headed, small-bodied characters running on the map when you’re the real game hero. We kind of wanted to match the virtual with the physical.”
