About our new artistic direction

Hi everyone,

There’s been a lot of changes since the release of episode 1. Our first visual artist, Florian Ponty, decided not go on with the project, and we had 4 more episodes to ship. We asked an old friend, Nicolas Fouqué, to take over for the next episodes. He did a lot of research to match the darker tone of Echoes, and we’re very pleased by the results.

We’ve kept Florian’s work on the background scenes, but all the characters have been redesigned.

A word from the artist:

First of all, we had to update the characters in Episode 1 in order to maintain the cohesion between the different episodes. On one hand, we had planned an evolution of the art style from one episode to the next from the start, but on the other hand we wanted each character to be easily recognizable.
As a player, you will experience a lot of interactions with them and depending on your choices, they may become either friends or foes in the future episodes.

Florian's did a great work on the first episode but I felt that I had to imprint my own style on characters because it would look better than clumsily copying another artist style. I started to work on the second episode but consequently we had to update every character on Episode One. We called this update "episode 1.5" because it will smoothly connect the first two installments of Echoes.

So, I restarted the whole process from scratch. Florian's work was of course my main reference during the studies and I tried to stick as much as possible with his first intentions. Here's an exemple of study about a new character:



Some characters had been totally redesigned though: Oskar and Pedro. I saw an opportunity to match them better with the texts and storyline. Oskar will look more like the "timeless dandy" he's described and Pedro... well, see by yourself. 

Oskar, the dandy / Pedro, the simple-minded mechanic.

The update 1.5 is a new start for the Echoes series. It's a strong basis for the next episodes to build upon. I'm quite sure that you will be surprised, both by the storyline and the artistic evolutions. I really hope you'll enjoy it!

Nicolas Fouqué
nfouque.com

Episode 1.5 will be a free update for Echoes and it will be available as the same time as Episode 2, around the end of July.