The many characters of WaHa

By komicer, 26 Jan 2019

Collateral Damage Studios is known as an anime art studio that does character design. And right at the forefront, we have WaHa. Usually attributed as our resident character designer, he is the creative brain behind some of our most beloved anime characters.

He might be best known for Aizawa Inori for Internet Explorer, but did you know that he was also behind many other anime mascot characters?

Here’s a quick run-down of his character designs! You might notice that there are some on the banner not included below. We’ll get around to them at some point of time!

Miorine

Miorine is an old character mascot designed for Hobby Frontier, an online anime hobby store. You should check out the 404 page on their site. :3 She was designed way back before CDS was incorporated! I dare say that she’s quite cute and maybe one day, Hobby Frontier can engage us to update her!

Squeaks and Mews

Squeaks and Mews is a change from the usual anime design WaHa does. Designed for Playing Grounded Puzzles, the character is supposed to be featured on a number of other merchandises. Now, it is up to Playing Grounded Puzzles to decide how they want to further develop the character. We have also done some variant designs for them!

Aizawa Inori

Probably our most well-known character design (for better or worse). The idea for Aizawa Inori was conceived over a silly discussion while we were on a train ride home. ‘Aizawa Inori’ was our original name for the character since the first syllabus of her name is supposed to be a pun.

Our final decision was for Aizawa Inori or 藍澤 祈（藍澤 いのり). ‘Aizawa’ because she comes from the same Microsoft mascot family as Silverlight and ‘Inori’ because given what she represents, she could definitely use a prayer.
Overall, when you read only the first syllabus of each part of her name, you get… Ai Ii.
IE-tan.

When Microsoft made her status official, they reversed it to Inori Aizawa, because Americans.

It was a pity that Microsoft discontinued the marketing campaign with the character since we had so many ideas for her. However, on hindsight, given that five years later, we still cannot seem to escape her shadow. That might be for the best.

Princess of Orchid

Joaquim Lee is an interesting but short-lived entry to the list. For a brief moment of time, Garena (now SEA) licensed the game My Princess is the Cutest. CDS was selected to design an original princess character to represent Singapore.

The theme given was ‘orchid’, and there you have it. While the game didn’t last as long as we would have liked, the character was popular enough that years later, we actually receive a fan’s emails asking us if we could give him the original artworks of the character.

(After rejecting him again and again, we relented and told him that we will give him the files if Garena gives the go-ahead. He was able to produce an email from Garena granting him permission to have the files.)

Seika-chan

Just off the heady success of Aizawa Inori, we approached SOZO to ask if they to try something similar. They were interested and Seika Project was born. We did a variety of designs but finally, the plug suit variant was used for 2014.

For her case, we actually got to do a follow up in 2015. This time, with idol animes all the rage, we went with an idol theme. Subsequently, Seika was handed over to a native Japanese artist, Nob-C. If chance allows, we would love to have another go at the character.

Anico

Anico is the mascot for Anime Coin! Embrace the future of Web 3.0 with cryptocurrency and blockchain! Designing her was quite a long process for us since this project had to go through a number of online polls.

Nutaku-tan

We got to know the guys behind Nutaku through an introduction from Lewd Gamer. It was quite an interesting experience designing the mascot for one of the most popular sites online.

They have now taken the character to new levels of popularity and we are somewhat shyly proud of that.

Winged Sakura Games: Endless Dream

The work we did for WSG: Endless Dream took longer than we expected due to the sheer amount of time required (and with other important commissioned works in between). While most of the other characters already existed in WSG’s previous games, we got to design two new characters for this game, Lulu and Mimi.

It’s not just character design that went into the game. We had to do up their moveset and in-game sprites too!

Rise of Third Power

WaHa was responsible for the character designs of all the main characters here. The Japanese-inspired pixel RPG by Stegosoft Games is almost completed at the moment and they had a really successful Kickstarter!

Chief Puzzle Officer

WaHa must have designed most of the characters within Chief Puzzle Officer. The game in itself was fun but unfortunately, short-lived. There was actually a number of designs that was never unveiled. However, most of the designs were already made public. Including WaHa’s design of the main ‘mascot’, Jenny and villain, Chantel.

We did character designs for a number of other games not mentioned here. Hopefully, one day we can unveil them publicly. WaHa is obviously not our only character designer but he is certainly the one with the most experience and track record. You can follow his weekly sketches under the hashtag #wahawednesday on Facebook and Twitter.

Want to have a glimpse of WaHa’s design process? We’ve actually done a tutorial for ImagineFX before!

If you would like WaHa to do some character designs for you, just drop us an email at ohayo@collateralds.com. We’ll be happy to discuss what we can do for you there.