According to former artist Chris Hendricks, when he rendered the design of the penguin avatars into 3D, he did so with rendering shadows turned on because he thought it gave them more depth and weight. However, this came with the problem of every graphic on the model casting a shadow and needing to be individually tweaked to remove unwanted shadows. Hendricks got fed up with the tedious process and did not want to do this for every clothing item in the game, so he decided that only the penguins would cast shadows, while the clothing items would not. He claimed that in all of his time looking at fan feedback while working as a moderator for the game, nobody complained about or pointed out this design choice.