Rift Cel: the RiftPets art style

September 29, 2026 by the RiftPets team

Every RiftPets creature is drawn in one style. We call it Rift Cel, and we wrote it down so precisely that a reviewer can check it with a ruler.

Here is the one sentence version: an early 2000s web vector cartoon, flat cel colour, thick constant black ink, chunky hard edged clumps, an egg shaped body on stubby legs, big round glossy eyes, and original creature mashups anchored in an archetype.

That sentence sounds like a mood. The rules below turn it into a test.

Why write rules at all

After our overnight batch of look alike pets, we learned that a style guide made of adjectives does not hold. Words like "cute" and "soft" drag a picture toward the most common cartoon on the internet. So we measured our best characters and turned the numbers into limits. You can read the full story in why every RiftPet is an original creature.

The shape rules

The body is one rounded egg or barrel. At thumbnail size, the whole creature should read as one blob. No long thin frames and no waists.

The head is big, about 31 percent of standing height, with a short neck or none at all.

The legs are short cylinders tucked into the lower third of the body. Feet are simple flat pads. If a creature needs toes, it gets two or four, never three stubs.

The muzzle is short and blunt, built from two or three flat, overlapping shapes: a pale patch, a small nose or beak, and a mouth line. Never a pointy snout.

Ears are solid wedges, flush to the head, with a flat colour patch inside.

Hair, mane, crest, frill and tail tuft are always chunky clumps with hard, jagged edges. Each clump is its own flat shape with its own outline. Never flowing locks and never a fur texture.

The eye rules

The eyes are the signature. Each one is a large black pupil disc, a coloured ring just inside the outline, and one or two hard edged white highlights in the upper outer corner, the same corner on both eyes. There are no soft glows, no star highlights and no sparkle fields.

The line and colour rules

The outline is one near black line at a constant weight, roughly 6.5 pixels on a 1024 pixel canvas. It wraps the silhouette, the part seams, the mouth and every clump. No coloured lines, no tapered lines and no fading lines.

Shading is flat cel: a base colour plus one hard edged shadow step, and at most one small highlight patch. Never gradients, airbrushing, texture or painterly strokes.

Bases are drawn in natural colours with medium saturation. The game recolours them while you play, from a palette. A galaxy look is reserved for eyes, never the body.

The identity rules

Every species is an original creature with an invented name. And every new species is a redraw of an approved character, never a description alone. Three signatures show up on every creature: the eye construction, the clump treatment and the egg shaped body. Those three things make a creature look like ours at a glance.

How we keep mashups on model

Hybrids are where drift shows up first. Our method for a mashup like Pippet is simple:

1. Describe the creature as a sentence before drawing anything. For example, a horse like body with a chunky ruff and a gill crest. Two or three parts, and at least one of them from a creature we already have.
2. Choose a reference character that matches the body type, and match the pose to the target pose.
3. Change one thing at a time: base first, then views, then faces, then parts.
4. Judge the drawing in natural colours, run the checks, then ask a blind reviewer who did not write the prompt.
5. If a result drifts, do not add more adjectives. Change the reference or the anatomy sentence and start again.

The most useful rule of all is the last one. When something looks wrong, we remove the shape that is wrong, whether that is a flowing mane, long eyelashes, a sparkle or spindly legs, and redraw it. Recolouring a problem away never works.

Why bother

Because a game about collecting creatures needs a consistent world. When Fanphant, Koibear and Dotback stand in the same pen, they should look like neighbours. And because a tough style guide is the best defence against looking like somebody else's work.

Meet the results on the creatures page, or read how pets grow by care.

Join the beta list on this site for early access.