What's in a name?

Having decided upon our game mechanic, we were finally free to start having a bit of fun with the creative design. For the sake of simplicity, we came up with a character name based on the gameplay - so second name Moreorless, first name... Marvin. I'm not quite sure where Marvin came from, but actually it's one of my favourite names. Of course, as it turns out, there are other Marvins around in what would prove to be similar territory - this guy, for instance!

We then invited artists to pitch visuals for Marvin Moreorless, and the winning pitch came from Nick Stoney, an amazing digital artist and animator who had previously worked with our collaborators Made in Me on their BAFTA-nominated story-telling app The Land of Me.

This is what Nick's initial version of Marvin looked like:

What we absolutely loved about this character design was the sense that Marvin was a scout, exploring what we decided would be planets on the outer reaches of the known universe. A couple of small tweaks later, and Marvin had evolved into this:

Check out his super-cool red sneakers - which one of our Young Coaches on the Play Sandbox decided made him look like a hipster. An alien adventurer-scout on the outer reaches of the unknown universe - hipster at that!

But although we loved the comedy of Marvin, the slight goofiness of his teeth, and you could really imagine him prat-falling off obstacles, something still didn't quite feel right. So we made two further changes. The first was to turn his mouth upside down, so that instead of a slight grimace, it becomes the wide-open smile of someone who loves what they do! We thought this would be more appealing to our young players with Down's Syndrome.

Oh, and the second minor change? 

Marvin became MILLIE!

So why did we decide to create a female character called Millie Moreorless? Well, why not? We were a bit worried at one point that we might put off young male players - but why should that be the case? Other than that 90% of game characters are currently male? (Yes, I guessed that stat!)

Millie is female because that's the way she was born. At least I think she was born. She's an alien, so who really knows how she came about?!