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          Meet the minds behind the Fall Guys costumes

          The Fall Guys costumes are based on anything from foods to people and animals, and players can mix and match a T-Rex top with pigeon legs if they so choose. Sketch by Daniel Hoang/Provided by Mediatonic
          • Arda Ocal, ESPN Staff WriterAug 28, 2020, 01:11 PM ET

          Fall Guys has become an international sensation, capturing the minds and hearts of gamers across the globe. One major reason it has stuck so well is the aesthetic of the game -- a fun and challenging game show set in a delicious candyland full of vibrant, happy colors. At the heart of that is the customizable, bean-shaped character itself, with its jubilant noises and cute customizations.

          More: Roundtable: Breaking down the Fall Guys phenomenon | How TimTheTatMan finally got a Fall Guys win | A strong ending and look forward at the Call of Duty League

          Fall Guys lead designer Joe Walsh and lead artist Rob Jackson helped lead the team that built the beans -- even if they never thought about the Fall Guy that way. Here's more on that and other essential info on the titular Fall Guy.

          Let's start with the character itself. How did the look of the Fall Guy come about?

          Joe Walsh: We had some touch points that we knew we wanted the characters to do. The most important one is that they should look funny and should be entertaining to watch. We looked at lots of video clips of people falling over to figure out what it was that made them funny and how we could exaggerate it. We settled on little legs because they trip over and have a fairly high center of gravity. (Also) big arms, so they can be expressive when they fall over because they can sort of flail and send them flying up in the air. We wanted the characters to be bouncy in some way because it would make for funnier ragdoll impacts.

          Rob Jackson: They're designed in a way that they can be customized easily and be very flexible. A lot of the original design influences were based on vinyl toys and that kind of stuff, which a lot of our artists like, and so they're designed in a way that they can have big prints on them and they can wear silly mascot suits, and it just builds up their stupidity more than anything else.

          So are they jelly beans or not?

          Walsh: Everyone's taken to calling them beans. We've never ever called them beans or jelly beans internally, they've always just been "Fall Guys," you know? If you play the game, it says "Customize your Fall Guy," "You've got a new costume for your Fall Guy," and everybody just calls them jelly beans or beans online, which has been quite interesting to watch unfold. We're sort of losing control of our own characters at this point.

          Jackson: The thing I always find funny is that it's a costume on top of a costume. Like, whenever you think of the Fall Guy, he is always wearing a costume no matter what's happening, because he has that funny vinyl padding.

          Walsh: It's like the ongoing debate: Is there a Fall Guy inside a Fall Guy? There are lots of fan theories going on at the moment about where the Fall Guy ends and the costume begins which are pretty bizarre. I'm not gonna give a definitive (answer).

          What does the Fall Guy within the Fall Guy look like?

          Jackson: Can't tell you yet. We might find out one day, you never know. We already have costumes which reveal that his body is hollow. It could be a hologram, though, for all I know.

          How did you land on the default bubblegum pink color?

          Jackson: Our original graphic design was very based on neons and pinks and blues and yellows. That's kind of seen its way through the whole game. We kind of always knew that we wanted our main Fall Guys to have a kind of a pink or blue kind of feeling.

          Most of the colors came from foods and sweets. So while I was doing lots of research in the beginning, I spent most of my time on Instagram looking at foodies, looking at the fanciest ice cream and the weirdest sweets and just grabbing all these color combinations, all these weird things. All my internal names for the color schemes were all like mint choc chip and banana smoothie and all this kind of stuff.

          Everyone has picked up on the idea that they might be a bit like jelly beans and that was like, from my perspective, totally intentional. I just wanted it to feel like you would look at it and you have this feeling of enjoyment just from the colors.

          How many costumes are in the game right now?

          Walsh: There are over 300 different individual items in the game currently that you can unlock.There are about 50 different costumes, 50 different colors, 50 different patterns, etc. Some of them are designed as a set.

          Jackson: Yeah, and you can have any combination of four, because you can customize your face, your colors and patterns, your top and your bottom. So as soon as you start mixing those up, you're getting into the thousands very easily.

          Walsh: Sometimes someone just has a really good idea for like a stupid cut pattern that just makes us laugh. That just goes in the game because we think it's funny. That's been like, I would say, the driving force in any of the costume stuff is made: Does it make us laugh enough to want to put in the game?

          What have you made of all the costume concepts and art you've seen on social media?

          Jackson: The thing about the Fall Guys is that they are so easy to customize because they're so plain. I think the first ones we saw were a lot of people's wish lists, like what they want to see in the game.

          Like we have a lot of our own. I think a lot of fans have done the same: "What if God of War was in Fall Guys? What if this was in Fall Guys?" Those are the ones I remember seeing first of all; those are the ones that kind of excited me like, oh yeah, it would be cool.

          The first time I saw an actual company do it, I realized this is actually quite an interesting thing. The one that stands out for some reason, and it might just be because it was bad, was the Walmart one. It was some kind of like a Walmart jacket and I thought, "No."

          Walsh: Yeah, they tried to get that out as quickly as they possibly could. Be first to the jump.

          Jackson: Not to call them out, but there were a few that did some really quick mockups. I love that people have tried, I love it all. So I'm not gonna discourage or disparage anyone that's done them. Taking away from the brand side of things, some of my favorite ones are the ones that kids do. We get so many images of costume designs that kids designed based on toast or ice cream or just whatever they find fun and exciting. I love those ones, seeing the imaginations that people come up with.

          Walsh: Kids tend to write backstories for they costume designs as well. It's not just a costume. It's like, "Toast Man used to be the world's most delicious piece of toast, and then he transformed magically!" ... They go further into the backstory behind them, which I think is really lovely.

          Toast Man needs to be a skin in Fall Guys now. How can users get their own costumes in the game?

          Jackson: We have a costume contest, like a community-based costume contest. Every month, we have costumes sent in by fans. Me and a few other people go through them and pick the winners, and then at least one per group gets turned into a real costume in the game. So that's always the easiest way of getting your design in: Design a really cool costume, and then we'll look at it, and if we think it's cool, it will go in. The only problem is, that was really cool before the game came out and we had a small amount of interest. I think since (release) I think we've had about 10,000 entries, which is making picking quite hard.

          Will users ever be able to create their own costumes in game?

          Walsh: Initially, we talked a lot about how customizable the character was going to be, but there is a certain point where, because we have to have 60 of these things on the screen at any given time, it gets very difficult for us to actually render that many complex characters in the game.

          A lot of the time with these creative character things that you see in (for example the) NBA games, there's only one of you on the screen, whereas we have to support 60. And so, at a certain point we have to draw that line between how much fidelity we give people and also making sure the game still runs at the end of the day. But I think we found a good middle ground, you know? You can really create a character with all sorts of personality even with the fairly simple amount of options that we give you.

          What about the frequency of new costumes? What can players look forward to?

          Walsh: I think that definitely when the big seasons drop, that's when people can expect a huge new influx of costumes. That's really going to be the point at which we give people lots of new exciting things to customize their character with because we're going to be theming those seasons in different ways.

          Part of picking those seasons is picking a theme that we think supports loads of new stupid costume ideas. But outside of that, we're definitely looking to drop surprise collaborations and things at various points. The dream is that every time you open the store, there's always something new and hilarious for you to customize your character with. Our current season is running until the end of October. We didn't expect the game to blow up like it's done, and that's really throwing all our plans out the window in terms of what we were expecting the Fall Guys world to look like, so I think things could change over the course of the coming months. Everything's really up in the air as we figure out what we're doing.

          What are some of your favorite ones from brands or ones you thought were clever?

          Jackson: There's a few that I don't necessarily like, but I like the effort that went into it. KFC put a lot of effort in, and they did kind of a cool design, but we'd never want to see it in game. But I was kind of impressed by it. There's been so many that tried to search through them.

          Oh, part of the contest we're doing, the one that's like a combination between Mr. Beast and AimBot, is really cool. It's kind of like a weird blue wolf with kind of pink lightning strikes. Although we kind of tend towards aiming for funny things, I also have a bit of a soft spot for cool ones as well. So I'm always trying to sneak in something that I think might be cool. And I thought that was a particularly cool one.

          How many collabs are in the game currently, and what's coming up?

          Walsh: I think we've done about six so far. Three with Valve (including P-Body from Portal 2 and Gordon Freeman from Half Life 2) and three with Devolver (including Bullet Kin from Enter the Gungeon), and we have a couple more that are lined up to take us to the end of season two as well.

          We've got a few more already in game and we're just waiting to queue up. But we're having conversations with a lot of people and get new emails every day that you can't quite believe. We wouldn't do branding for branding's sake, I think there has to be a reason behind it.

          What will the future of costume collaborations look like?

          Jackson: Can't really say. It's obviously going to come down to what's right for the game and for the community. We're going to be quite, quite picky. We're not going to make some weird collaborations with companies that we don't agree with, we don't like, when it comes to branding stuff.

          Walsh: One thing we talked about a lot with Fall Guys, is how it would sit within the esports world. We don't really feel like the game is super competitive, and it fits much closer to the sort of charity fund run thing that you might do. I think what really excites us is doing things for charity. That seems like a great way to do this in a more positive way than just throwing brands in the game. Hopefully raising as much money for charity as we're about to do with our first costume collaboration. Yeah.

          Last question: Has Tim "TimTheTatMan" Betar done enough to earn a costume in the game?

          Walsh: We've been talking actually about awarding him something special. We'll see what happens there. I think he's earned it.