Palworld devs reveal gun animations were done by a self-taught animator

Palworld devs reveal that their gun animations were done by a self-taught animator who was working a part-time convenience store job when the team found him. 

Palworld has become a runaway hit the likes of which shocked the devs, to the point it has broken player count records on Steam with millions of copies sold barely into its first week. 

And as players learn new things about the nicknamed ‘Pokemon with guns’ game, we are learning new things about what the development of Palworld was like for the small team of Pocketpair. 

Revealed in a dev blog by Pocketpair’s CEO Takuro Mizobe, the CEO confessed that the game’s gun animations were all thanks to a self-taught game dev whom he found on Twitter.

Pocketpair

The blog, released on January 16, just days before the game went live, discussed the history of what it was like developing Palworld. Particularly with such a small team and all the difficulties that came along with it. 

One such stumble was gun animations, as pointed out in the blog, the entire team and many other game developers in Japan has experience in RPGs, but when it came to gun games, dev experience in that realm was hard to come by.

“But there’s a big problem here. Due to the circumstances mentioned above, it is quite difficult to hire experienced people who have created gun games in Japan,” Mizobe wrote. 

However, he stumbled across a person on Twitter who was uploading videos of gun reload animations, and Mizobe decided to ask the creator personally, assuming they had experience in the industry. 

As it turns out, the unnamed dev was a self-taught hobbyist who was a part-time convenience store worker, making them because they enjoyed doing it.

Mizobe sent a video of Palworld’s early gun animation, in turn, they responded with a massive paragraph giving feedback on the video. 

Eventually, after some back and forth, Mizobe offered a full-time position at Pocketpair to the designer. As such, for the past two years of development, they had been responsible for everything gun related in Palworld, of which there’s a lot.