I really love that art in your first screenshot - what's your art process for developing that?
I was inspired by what Double Damage said they did in Rebel Galaxy. The artist has minimal 3D art knowledge and building a lot of models is a tall order anyway so we went for stock art that he paints over in our style. I think it works pretty well for keeping our style while not being too much work for just me and an artist. Especially for scenes like that where modeling a tree isn't anything special, it is the heavy blacks he painted in the texture that make it something interesting.
I'm less happy with how the character models integrate with our art and looking back I wish we'd just gone with 2D art he drew and then animated via bones (Spine or whatever). I didn't realize how mature those tools are and they provide a pretty awesome middle ground between labor intensive pixel animation and a full 3D workflow.
Though all these screenshots use the models directly, but I have experimented with baking the models to sprite sheets or using shaders to turn them into sprite in real time. I think those blend the art better with our 2D but they had some issues when combat was non-modal and the enemies roamed the level. Now that we're limited to a separate combat space they might work better.