Casual 2D Character Art for a Nexters Mobile Battler

The brief was a roster expansion for an existing mobile battler: heroes the player would invest in long-term, supports that read as a different class at a glance, and rival characters that telegraph encounter difficulty without text labels. Each design had to slot into Nexters existing character sheet without breaking the established visual language.

Our scope ran from initial silhouette exploration through final colour, prop dressing and presentation pose. Deliverables included full-body reference, expression sheets where needed, and a clean cutout that drops into in-game rosters and menus alike.

Each character started from a small silhouette panel benchmarked against the existing roster, so the new piece would read as different at thumbnail size. Approved silhouettes moved into clean line art, base colours, and a polish pass with rim light and material accents tuned for mobile compression.

We delivered layered files for marketing teams to recompose for paid social and store-page use, plus a flat in-game version optimized for the mobile UI overlay. The same workflow lives inside our broader 2D game art services for casual mobile titles.

Casual mobile audiences read characters by silhouette and palette before they read faces. We pushed clear shape contrast between hero, support and rival roles: rounded heroic poses, leaner support builds, broader and angular rival forms. Palette choices reinforce the same hierarchy without relying on outline colour or saturation tricks alone.

Final readability checks compared each new character side by side with shipped Nexters roster art at 96 px and 256 px thumbnail sizes. Anything that lost identity at small sizes got a silhouette pass: bigger props, sharper edges, or a colour-block adjustment until the character read distinctly without copy.