Obituary: Rumble Roses character designer Shiro Kotobuki

Gamasutra has learned that Hiroshi Kobayashi, the Japanese artist best known in the game industry for his work designing characters in the Rumble Roses fighting games under the name Shiro Kotobuki, has passed away.

The news comes courtesy of a post to his Facebook page (in Japanese) which claims that he passed away suddenly this week.

He worked on both Rumble Roses and Rumble Roses XX in addition to a variety of other projects, and he learned to illustrate using a mouth-operated stylus after a traffic accident when he was young left him mostly paralyzed.