An original IP: a fist-sized living lump of dough who lives in a bakery where nobody knows he is alive. No dialogue, two minutes an episode, readable by young children, with a quiet laugh for the adults.
Three rules that never break: he is never hurt, only surprised; he cannot change shape himself, only be changed; every episode ends with him bouncing back to his original form. The design with the strongest silhouette won, and the twist of dough on his head became the emotion antenna: up when happy, sprung when surprised, drooping when deflated. The deformation sheet is locked before any generation, otherwise AI never quite brings him back.
Episode one was finished and rejected in-house. The story relied on sound to pay off, which a dialogue-free film cannot do; the transformation was not his own doing; the ending returned to the start. It was scrapped and rewritten rather than delivered.
After that, story and storyboard checks became code that runs before generation, instead of something a person has to remember.
An IP character delivered as one package: design, turnaround, expression sheet, deformation sheet, so every episode afterwards grows the same character. Judging what cannot be used is faster than generating it, and nothing that does not hold up gets delivered.
