Hello and welcome to this essay about why puffles are my favourite virtual pet design ever.
Club Penguin was a MMO game developed by New Horizon Interactive Studios released in 2005, in 2007 the game was bought by The Walt Disney Company. The gameplay was fairly simple, consisting of creating your own unique penguin character and roaming around the island, being able to play minigames and earning coins to buy new clothes and decorate your igloo, there was also a membership feature that allowed players to unlock extra features like more clothing and igloo options. Unfortunately Club Penguin was discontinued in 2017 so Disney could work on Club Penguin Island, a mobile and rebooted version of the original game (that was discontinued a year later, in 2018.).
Puffles are native creatures of the island and were first introduced to the game in late November 2005, the first puffle ever seen in the game was the pink one, located in the snow forts.
They became adoptable in 2006, and introduced care dynamics that consisted of stat bars that the player had to maintain. If the user was inactive for too long or didnât take proper care of the puffle, it would run away, leaving a postcard to its former owner.
There were 4 different puffles introduced when they first became adoptable, being the blue, pink, green and black, with future updates there were more puffles added to the game, adding up to 45 different puffles.
When I first started playing Club Penguin the puffles were probably my favourite thing and I made it my goal to obtain every puffle available in the game. Something about their cute colourful desings just really stuck with me, the fact that all of them had their own unique personality traits and favourite items and foods also made them feel like a real pet â specially with the care dynamics every virtual pet has. This task I imposed on myself made my love for those creatures rise and the grind for every puffle ever became a serious thing for 7 year old me. I would be dreadful when I lost exclusive puffles events and would spend all my little kid brain on cool names for my favourite colours and puffles I identified with. Before the game shut down I ended up really close up with my objective, only missing the Blue Crystal and Alien puffle (I wasnât playing the game that much when they came out, so I lost their events.).
âThe Journeyâ started in 2012 and was the era where Club Penguin went through design changes and between those changes, the iconic puffle design was revamped.
Honestly I didnât play Club Penguin much before The Journey happened as I was pretty young, but still it had some impact on me. I used to play the DS game (Hebertâs Revenge) and it was a big part of my childhood so the old graphics are very dear to my heart, I just really loved that simplistic style so much, it had so much personality. When I started playing the usual Club Penguin the new look of it did catch me a bit of guard, still I do think that both the designs post and pre the changes in The Journey are key elements of my childhood and super nostalgic, I find it amazing that I have such fond memories with both art styles. Honestly I do think the puffle lost a bit of it's original magic after The Journey, I just feel like some of their whimsy got lost somewhere among all the shading and curved lines, but I really enjoy some of the puffle related things the journey added such as the rainbow and gold puffle as well as the puffle hotel.
Alongside The Journey, the puffle creatures were introduced to the game in 2012, they were basically the same thing as regular puffles, but most were based on animals or fantasy beings. The puffle creatures played a HUGE role in my puffle obsession, specifically the dinosaurs puffles from the Prehistoric Party from 2014. This whole event changed my perception of life (I wish I was joking), Prehistoric Party 2014 is the literal reason why i'm so obsessed with world building, something about the way the event ocurred made me fall in love with telling a story also with an environment, and yes i do know that Prehistoric Party has an almost identical dinamic to every other Club Penguin party, I was just really into dinossaurs when this event came up and it was the best vibe ever. I really do love puffle creatures, and their addition to game is definetly one of the highest points of The Journey.
Puffles were definitely my favourite pet I had in all of the video games I used to play, and this love for them really changed my view as an artist. Nowadays I really look forward to designing my characters for people to see them the same way I saw puffles back in 2013, simple yet extremely captivating and interesting. Puffles unironically were one of the things I over analyzed while trying to find my art style because I wanted to understand why they had such an impact on me for so long, and while looking back at events, designs, colour palletes I realized that you can have a simple design stick if you have a coherent world building. Club Penguin is a kids game that does not have a lot of lore or even a linear story, but still every single defined character feels like they belong to that world, even the little fuzzy creatures that puffles are â and that's exactly why I love them so much, puffles taught me that less is more if it's done right.
The shutting down of the Club Penguin servers destroyed me so much, I wasnât even an active player anymore but I still enjoyed logging in my account and waddling around the island. The waddle on party was actually one of the most heartbreaking events I participated in all my years of playing Club Penguin and I still cry nowadays seeing footage of the last few minutes in the official game server. In the present day there are a bunch of CPPS out there and I really like that the game legacy is still alive and I myself play on a few private servers. My favourite thing about CPPS is how many of them have their own take on puffles, i've seen all kinds of different original designs circulating among CPPS but what I love most abput those custom puffles are that most of them follow the original puffle formula, they have their own personality, their favourite food and item, and are still dependent of the virtual pet care gimmick, all of this things make the fan made puffles really feel like something that could've been apart of the original game. The effort the people behind private servers put towards keeping Club Penguin alive is honestly very heart warming, specially because every single fan made thing added into them feels so thoughful.
I really still love Club Penguin. Waddle on!
