In a recent blog post, Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe explained how he assembled a team of enthusiasts and amateurs to make one of the most popular games to release on PC. More importantly, they seem to have come out and said that their 100+ pals were not AI generated.

The original blog post is in Japanese but you can find an English translation courtesy of Google here.

In their blogpost, one of the bigger claims Pocketpair made is that their 100+ Pals were not AI generated. AI generation has been a frequent accusation made at Palworld by critics due to the creator’s less than outraged response to the burgeoning technology. Many critics have chosen to take Mizobe’s previous statements out of context to diminish the game.

I noticed this after I started making it.

It took a month to make one Pal … just the 3D model …

Mizobe’s journey into game development is startling to say the least as he recounts a story of how he thought it would take 2000 days to animate all the Pals in Palworld; it turns out that at the time Mizobe didn’t even know what a rig was for animation and was just doing everything manually.

One day, I received a call from a human resources company and they had found a person named Adachi-san.

He is a veteran motion designer with a lot of experience, and apparently he became interested after seeing how Craftopia was made.

Then, everything changed when I was hired as a contract worker.

Mr. Adachi was also taken aback at first.

“Did you create the motion in this state…?”

“What about the rig?”

Simply put, a rig is a useful auxiliary mechanism when adding motion.
For example, human joints have a fixed direction of bending. It won’t bend the other way. However, if you don’t have a rig, you’ll have to manually modify the motion each time you create it.

Although Pocket Pair was aware of the existence of the rig, it had not adopted it. (Also, I didn’t even know the word rig.)

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