Dart

Character design & illustration: Mascot character for a casual free-to-play mobile game from Tether Studios.

Dart is a time-traveling rabbit who served as a welcoming character for a since-cancelled mobile game called ‘Bubble World.’ In this game, bubbles of time had become destabilized and Dart guided you to various locations and time periods to fix things.
My initial direction for the character design was to design a time-traveling rabbit who might be a cross between Dr. Emmett Brown and Alice in Wonderland‘s White Rabbit. As we iterated on the character, he became a she and there was a bit more Judy Hopps influence than White Rabbit. Once a general direction was locked in, I moved onto many options for clothing and uniforms.
Dart ended up showing up throughout the game to introduce the scenario, instruct you on how to play the game, on the game’s title screen, and on the game’s app icon. Rather than use the same image of her over and over, I redrew here many times to fit the various uses.

Dart floating in space-time from the game’s Title Screen. Here’ she’s reaching for a gold coin, the game’s currency.

Early character sketches combining the vibes of Dr. Emmett Brown (from ‘Back to the Future’) with the White Rabbit (from Disney’s version of ‘Alice in Wonderland.’)

The character started to become more agile and fit and less schlumpy, and after these sketches, we decided to make the character female.

Exploration for the costuming of the character. Would she be more of an explorer, scientist, thief or military cadet?

We landed on her working for a StarFleet-like organization helping to protect Time - note that this was a couple of years before Marvel's 'Loki' series and its Time Variance Authority - and I explored different uniforms she might wear in this role.

There was a lot of blue in the game’s UI so the final design incorporated a nice contrasting orange. Here are a few polished renders of Dart used for explaining gameplay or conveying story in-game.

Here are some of the contexts that players would see Dart in within the game.

Some iteration on using Dart in the game’s app icon and the final icon image.

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