Realm of Echoes: 2D Character Art & Animation

The studio had strong concept art but no production pipeline and a firm 4-month launch window. Their previous vendor had delivered inconsistent style across characters and environments: different proportions, incompatible palettes, mismatched line weights. They needed a single team to own the visual language from concept to handoff and integrate directly with their Unity build.

Nine Pixels embedded a 6-artist team: 2 character artists, 2 environment artists, 1 animator, and 1 art director who owned visual consistency. Before a single production asset was drawn, we spent week 1 establishing a shared style guide: a 48-colour palette, silhouette rules for hero vs. enemy readability, and a line weight scale tied to asset size. Characters were built on a modular skeleton (head, torso, limbs) so animations reused rigs across the 24-character roster. Environment tiles were designed on a 64px grid with explicit corner, edge, and fill variants to make level building fast. All animation exports were authored in Spine 2D with pre-agreed bone naming conventions for developer handoff. We ran a fortnightly art review with the client's creative director and iterated on batches rather than individual assets, keeping feedback loops tight and production moving.