When designing the eight playable characters, the developers decided to base them off of the seven deadly sins, while the game show host Van Tastic represented "pure evil". Lead programmer Michael Saladino recalled that they intended to turn the game into a franchise with licensable characters and were designing them as such, but they soon fell into a creative rut:


They found that the leeway they gave to the character designers came at the expense of other departments, in particular the texture artists who had to pull all-nighters to finish their work as the designs were not delivered soon enough. Before deciding on Eugene, other early design concepts for the envy character included a "green-eyed monster" (in reference to an idiom for envy), an elderly lady with a talkative internal voice, and a short basketball player with robotic limbs.