Trigger wasn't in the plans until halfway through Ep 1 development when we had to switch some lines around due to miscellaneous voiceover actor troubles, and Tempest (our casting guy) offered to voice a new character. He came up with Trigger, me and Quarto merely gave it our okay (I believe the actual quote is in Tempest's signature here on the forums
).
We really had to juggle A LOT of character development and dialogue and fiction due to missing voiceover actors, missing lines, corrupted files only noticed during the last month of testing, etc. than you can tell from playing the finished episodes. There's this one conversation that we had to cut from Ep 4 due to a missing actor which really bothered me, but apart from that we managed to (re-)write our way around most of these issues.
A lot of our important characters came to be because of these problems (which were more frequent in Ep 1, when we had nothing playable to show for our work and so it was more common for people to simply not care about helping us anymore)... Trigger, Popsicle, and Saxman come to mind.
Saxman was the only one who was already planned, but he was supposed to be merely a musically-themed generic (ie: no fiction or cutscenes) Firekka pilot, a kind of tribute to WC2's Jazz and WC1-2's "themed" in-flight comms (and because the voiceovers were done by our music guy, Michael Mahadeen).
When we had to upgrade him to be an old friend of Bradshaw's, we came up with Popsicle so that we could split the load between Mike and Pierre, and have two "Firekka veterans" onboard.