John, while Ste was drawing the shop screen for "Ironsword", came up with an idea of a character with a hangman's hood; Ste doodled it in a small margin of the layout. the detachable limbs were also conceived in the sketch, as below the character was an arrow pointing to a pile of his parts. John then thought of a game where the player had to capture all jumping fleas in a land, which the two decided to have the hangman be the playable character. Plok's name was then spontaneously coined when John was placing letters from a cassette tape cover on his computer mouse; his full name was "Plok the Exploding Man" to describe his separable design. After more motivation from John, Ste moved to clear sheets of paper to do more sketches, where the character's colors, poses, size (32x40) and "extreme expressions" involving an opening mouth were conceived.