Description:
Maria Notte is a support character I designed for Freedom Planet 2. She is a megabat and she works as a news reporter.

Pixel art first, concept art follows
At first I only drew Maria’s pixel art – I designed FP2 characters directly as ingame pixel art to avoid impossible details. In this way I can also tweak them precisely according to my vision, probably also saved some work from the pixel artists. When Stephen posted her pixel art on GalaxyTrail’s twitter account, people seemed to like her, so I drew some supplemental concept art. Some of the new details developed in the concept art are later fed back to pixel art, and you will see a improved Maria that resembles this art set in the actual game.

Quality-of-life for bats in Freedom Planet 2
I ended up making this artwork set as the demonstration of how the FP2 bat race cope with their natural body characteristics. Inspired by Zootopia, I designed the bats in a more realistic way, retained their arm-wings instead of cheating with back-wings. Then question rose: how they live their modern life with ease? Bat wings make them clumsy doing all task except flying, so I designed some stock gadgets and specific gestures to help them improve quality-of-life.

If you like the bats in FP2, please thank Sabrina DiDuro for his openness to experimental ideas. :D