You can imagine anything Pokemon-like will have a litany of unused designs for its monsters. It's inherent to the concept, and Palworld is no exception, with an enormous amount of Pals that have been cast aside for various reasons. But by contrast, there was one that the devs knew was going to do well.
Speaking to Gaming World Interviews at Gamescom 2026, John 'Bucky' Buckley, the head of publishing and communications at Palworld developer Pocketpair, breaks down the process for designing pals. "We have a lot of 2D concept artists, and all they do all day is just make 2D sketches of Pal ideas, and we vote internally," he explains.
"We got a special channel in our Slack, and they'll post the concept art, and we'll put [one through five] ranking, everyone in the company will vote," he continues. "That process takes a long time, someone's then got to make a 3D art version, then sometimes 2D to 3D you're like, 'Oh this doesn't work,' and then you make the model, and there are so many cases where you make the model, and you go, 'You know what, it doesn't [work].'"
He mentions that Pals will sometimes be Frankensteined together from parts they like from other, unused creatures. There's an internal "graveyard," that contains "hundreds" of "rough Pals," and to be honest, that's what I'd expect from a game that's been updated as much as Palworld has been.
The democratic conceptualization process sounds pretty smooth and well-organized too. I'm sure there are bumps and wrinkles along the way, but it seems like there's a lot of trust across Pocketpair to make sure everyone stands behind every monster.
On the flipside, some of them get such a rousing reception internally, they're railroaded through into the game. "I think the fastest Pal to go from concept to design to modelling to rigging, was Sekhmet," Buckley says. "You've never seen reactions on a Slack move that much."
I'd have expected Chillet or Jetragon, given their standing in fan rankings, but Sekhmet works too. We'll have to check in a year to see if anything else has stood out across Pocketpair's voting, and to see how much bigger the pile of failed concepts is.
