From Sketch to Spin: Building a Slot Character

A character that looks incredible in a portfolio can still fail at 96 pixels. Here is how we design for the reel first.

The first test any of our characters faces is the squint test at symbol size. If you cannot tell two symbols apart from across the room, the design fails, regardless of how good the render looks.

So we sketch in silhouette. Twenty shapes, no detail, no colour. The best three get faces. Only one gets a full colour pass.

Colour comes next, and it is a hierarchy decision rather than a taste decision. Premium symbols get the warmest, most saturated values in the palette. Everything else steps back.

By the time the character reaches animation, it has already been rebuilt for the rig: separated limbs, clean overlaps and expressions designed to be readable in twelve frames or fewer.