The original

Bunny Turtle: the one that started it all

In 2020, we started venturing and exploring the world of Twitch extensions. But we didn't start out with Pando. We made 3 different extensions, and learned a lot, but thought we should try to focus on supporting the entertainment side. That's when we started Pando.

Today, our stream pet is still active, and since the first day, the little Bunny Turtle has waddled across thousands of channels.

It started reacting to chat, bounced around, and made people smile before anyone said a word. The inspiration was a Tamagotchi-like character that viewers helped to maintain. But we soon found out we were wrong on a key element.

The origin story

When we launched our first version, the application was called Tamagucci, and Pando was just the name for our fantasy pet (bunny turtle). We thought, let's make this little pet have a recognizable experience, and so we did. Viewers helped maintain the pet, and when they didn't, it went to uhm, a special place. It died. Yep. The first streams were essentially a bunny turtle slowly suffering from food deprivation. We were wrong; viewers complained that they felt forced to spend bits to stop the sadness. The experience changed, and we learned that people care deeply about the pet's condition. Lessons learned. But why did we start with a hybrid-fantasy pet?

How it was designed & selected

When you make a stream pet extension, everyone has a certain favor for their own favorite animal. So that immediately made it hard to decide. But since we have never received any investment, and therefore our budget was limited, our options were clear. We could only make one pet, and we needed a brand identity, so let's create something that fits both. Because if this stream pet idea worked, we could always add more.

The original brief was to have a pet suitable for all the Twitch interactions with chat. Like waving, eating, playing, and being petted. It should have adorable, big eyes that can show different emotional expressions. Being a pixel art design, every single pixel matters. The more pixels, the higher the costs. So the next step was, how much detail do we have? Here were the three options.

Meet the Bunny Turtle

From the first iteration, you can see a glimpse of the final pet. We needed to make some big decisions because every pet that followed would require a similar experience/expectation, or we would have to start over.

After a final rework, we had our Bunny Turtle.