Hey all! After 3 years working at Netflix, we're back as an indie!

I will still be part of the amazing team at 🦊 @spryfox.bsky.social joining them on their next adventure, and I'll try sharing as much as I can about my journey and the work I do!

To look more "hand-drawn", interior hard edges may get a couple soft edges to break the line, so the line isn't solid and has moments to rest. This isn't dissimilar from line breaks in Cozy Grove (which *was* actually entirely hand drawn). It also helps reduce feeling visually noisy.

As promised: Faces! 😁 Here's a thread about some technical details for how stylized faces get made in Spirit Crossing. 🧵

The game is inspired by media like Ghibli and BotW, but our faces are unique. There was lots of early discussion about face style & we landed on dot-eyes early...

Noemi is one of our brilliant artists you might best know as the lead artist on Cozy Grove- she’s been bringing her bottomlessly imaginative and bountifully charming design sense over to Spirit Crossing!

"There are no games about friendship instead of violence"

I don't know, man. There's an entire organization called Digital Thriving that is all about this. Papers. Examples. Conferences. Talks. So many games. So many designers. Literally a career.
lostgarden.com/2025/03/22/w...

A huge part of Spirit Crossing's visual style is the cel-shading and outlines! Everything is modeled for the appearance of these shaders and how it renders in Unreal. That means using soft edges where you don't want an outline and hard edges where you do.🧵

we found that careening off cliffsides into the abyss was decidedly UN-cozy... so we introduced

☁️☁️༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ cloud-surfing ☁️☁️

oh yeah, the flying alpaca are called fluffalo

you uh. you throw cookies at their face to get them to land nearby so you and others can shear their gnarly butts for wool

Hi!👋I've been leading character art on Spirit Crossing with @spryfox.bsky.social for the last few years and, as I'm new to BlueSky, I thought I'd try sharing some of the work that's gone into making characters for an MMO over the next few months! Follow if you like characters and lil tech details 😊

at Spry Fox, we're interested in designing games that answer meaningful questions and inspire conversation.

..and sometimes that conversation is: what if there were little guys everywhere??

Spry Fox bosses slashed their salaries to buy out the studio and launch cozy MMO Spirit Crossing later this year

Something positive: Spry Fox is spinning out of Netflix. We are independent (once again!) and preparing to launch Spirit Crossing.

We wrote up a little blog post musing about this wild adventure. Worth sharing the good news.
spryfox.com/a-16-year-ol...

A piece of Spirit Crossing "key moment" concept art from about a year and a half ago; trying to capture the cozy contrast of storms, which push players together around bonfires

One thing I've always been fond of is our windows.

Having contiguous exterior\interior spaces was important to us- but early on we realized interiors needed different ambient light from the exterior to feel properly cozy