Empire City key art, Spine unit and building upgrade animation for Red Brix Wall

The video at the top of this page is our newest piece of work on Empire City, the ancient-world city builder by Red Brix Wall: one location animated in Spine through every level of its upgrade path. It opens on a bare salt crater cut into coastal rock, with wooden walkways, stacked salt blocks and a handful of carts. It closes on a working industry - terraced evaporation ponds filled with brine, boiling houses with fires lit under their domes, a waterwheel turning on the channel, docks, drying tables and a market row along the cliff. The crater in the middle never moves, so every upgrade reads as the same place growing richer instead of a new building dropped onto the map.

Sunstrike Studios produced nine key art scenes for Empire City, the ancient-world city-builder by Red Brix Wall. The set reimagines famous wonders - the Colosseum, the Pyramids and Sphinx, the Tower of Babel, the Hanging Gardens, the Trojan Horse, a naval battle and more - in the game's own isometric look, sized for store listings and user-acquisition creatives.

Each scene doubles as a store screenshot and an ad frame, so the Red Brix Wall team can drop it straight into the storefront or a campaign without commissioning separate art. We ran it as a game marketing art engagement inside the Empire City content cycle.

The two reels above cover the next stage: Spine animation for the game units. Legionaries, spearmen and archers, light and heavy cavalry, war elephants - one with a rider, one carrying battle drums - siege engines like a catapult and a ballista, and non-human units such as a fire and an ice elemental, plus mages and priests. Every unit is shown on the same arena podium with an idle loop and an ability animation, with weapon trails, lightning and spell effects, so the team can compare them side by side and slot a new one into the roster later. This part ran as 2D character work with skeletal animation on top.