“Roguelikes” are one of the most popular genres of video games over the last few years. Smash hit roguelikes such as Hades, which won countless awards in 2021, and Balatro, which won a variety of awards in 2025, show how popular and well-received the genre has become. Quick gameplay loops and seemingly endless replayability through randomness are hallmarks of the genre, as is having dozens of unique characters – usually enemies – to throw at the player in order to test their ability to think on their feet.

Artist and game developer Marlowe Dobbe is known for her work on award-winning roguelikes such as Dicey Dungeons, Floppy Knights, and the upcoming Slay the Spire 2. We love her dynamic, colorful, unique character designs, and were curious – what does it take to design unique characters for a roguelike game that needs so many different ones?

We reached out to her to see if she’d be interested in explaining her process – and as we just released the new Wacom Cintiq pen display line, we also wanted to see how a new Wacom Cintiq 16 could fit into her character design workflow. She created the video below to explore just that! Watch the video below to learn more, or read on for a summary.

Choosing reference images to design a variety of characters

Marlowe Dobbe has worked on a lot of roguelike games, and something they all have in common: “There’s a lot of enemies, a lot of characters, and they all need character designs,” she says. “So I have to come up with creative ways to keep coming up with character designs, and one way I do that is by creatively using reference images.”

She makes sure to pull from a variety of different sources, including sources outside of her art style. She pulled one illustration for its color palette, one as a source of fashion inspiration, and one because of its interesting shapes. “We’re going to take these three very different images,” she explains, “and make a cohesive character out of them.”

Marlowe’s process

She starts by sketching, with a focus on shapes, so that the shape “inspires the pose and the character’s design,” she says. “Generally, the way I work is I will do really rough sketches first, [then] looking at that really loose drawing that I did and trying to clean up a lot of the details.” Then she brings in the fashion image, but since the reference didn’t have shoes, she gives the character some pointy boots to match its pointy head.

“At this point I start doing flats,” she explains. Here’s where the color reference image comes in. This is one of the places where the Pro Pen 3 that comes with the Wacom Cintiq comes in handy: “One thing that’s cool about using the Cintiq pen is that you can like map the keys on it. There’s a couple little buttons on the pen and I always like to have [one] button mapped to color picking, so I can just, like, hover my pen over the image, click it, and I’m color picking … that really speeds up my process, because I don’t have to change tools all the time in Clip Studio Paint when I’m drawing.”

Then she starts cleaning things up, adding details, and adjusting colors – the reference image was a foundation, but she modifies everything to adjust to the vibe she’s going for and to keep things cohesive. She also grabs some colors from the fashion image as well. Then it’s time for her favorite phase: details and shading.

“I’ll go in and do some light shading, and also adding like some highlights in and stuff like that,” she says. “Giving it a little bit more depth and just a little bit more texture and variety … and then, I am such a sucker for rim lighting. I always have to add rim lighting to everything right at the end.”

The final product

“I’m really happy with how it turned out,” she says. “I think it’s cool how we can see the reference images we used and how those sort of inspired different parts of this, but that this is a really unique character that just didn’t exist before we started this process … you could take this kind of character and put it in any video game. Could be a player character, could be an NPC, could be an enemy, what have you. But point being, we were able to make something really cool and really quick by using three very different images and taking parts of them and kind of interpreting them in our own style.”

About the artist

Marlowe Dobbe is an award-winning illustrator and game developer with a love for games she’s fostered since childhood. Previous projects of Marlowe’s include Dicey Dungeons, Floppy Knights, and a variety of small personal projects on itch.io. She is currently working as an artist at Mega Crit Games.

She’s also an organizer for The Portland Indie Game Squad, a 501(c)3 organization dedicated to supporting the health and continued expansion of game developer and enthusiast communities in Portland, the Pacific Northwest, and online.

Check out her work at her website, her itch.io, on Bluesky, or on Instagram.