Here at Southern Pixels, when we were starting to develope the world of Reinforcements, we had the vision of represent these mystical medieval realms that so many times we admired on several games, looking at them with the nostalgia glsses that represented the golden age of the 8 bits. This decision made us craft the world with this aesthetics but bringing it to a 3D land, using the so called Voxels technology allowed us placing pixels in 3rd dimension for each character.
This is both a challenge and an advantage really, using these cubes. None of us at Southern Pixels has an artistic background so the solution came logically. Being all pixels, using these "voxel", you just have to fill the empty slots. You can't miss a line, you can's overflow a slot. It's a whole grid, and the choice was made, we came up with the first sketches with an editor we found at the Internet. We had to make many assets and learning 3D modelling in Blender wasn't quick enough. We tried VXL format but quickly we had to put that info in the game engine and the file format didn't lend itself very intuitive (unless you are modding Command & Conquer: Red Alert or mapping for Ace of Spades). The premise was to work with the existing tools, do not reinvent the wheel, and make it easy to develop.
After a while, we found an open source tool that, despite improvable, allowed us to quickly make lots of assets to input to the game. Remember, none of us was a professional artist, though we are gamers at heart.
About styling and setting there is not much to say, the golden age of RPG games was run by japaness game development companies and drawing with few pixels in detail, always producer something similar to the likes of Zelda, Final Fantasy, Fantasy Star, Ultima, Dragon Quest, etc. So the influence is inevitable for us. That said, we looked for a unique and own sense of style, that distinguish us, and we think we made it. Granted, with some allowance to increase drama (there are few ways to draw a sad face in a 4 by 4 pixel area), but we are happy with the results so far.
Voxels were also used for the terrain, items and weapons. And just drawing voxes is not "enough" to put them in the final product, but we are going to leave that for another post in our development blog.
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