A hidden, light-hearted message with Lilac and Carol can be found within the game's voice files where they acknowledged the game being downloaded off the Internet for free. Lilac and Carol aren't condemning those pirating the game, but they are asking them to consider donating money to the developers.
Stephen DiDuro initially began developing Freedom Planet as a fan game based from the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise.
Development for the Nintendo Wii U port faced several setbacks including one by a potentially damaging system bug. It was finally released in late 2015.
Freedom Planet is uniquely registered under Creative Commons instead of a standard copyright.
Early on, Lilac was designed as a hedgehog including in an early build that was shown off at SAGExpo in 2012.