Jotun - Art Design @ Gamasutra

Who: Jo-Annie Gauthier Jotun art director

I was in charge of building the game's stylistic approach, and making sure we didn't drift too far from it! It was my first time as an art director, seeing as I have mostly worked as a 2D artist (animation, illustration, storyboarding) in gaming and publicity. Working with William Dubé on this idea for a Norse game was definitely an opportunity I did not want to miss.

Being the studio's first game, <em style="line-height: 1.6em;">Jotun[/i] had several challenges we had to overcome: some tougher and some easier. Converging on game ideas was definitely one of the easier ones. One of the tougher ones was finding an art style that would fit the theme and still be natural for us to work with. […]


Who: Alexandre Boyer, lead animator on Jotun

Hi! I’ll be talking about our animation style and system.

Animating Jotun was very fun and challenging. I couldn’t miss the opportunity to build something with the rest of the nice and talented folks at Thunder Lotus studio. We call our animation style ‘’hand-drawn’’ rather than traditional, since we use a lot of flash-style trickery using the Toonboom software. There’s a lot of drawing involved, but we try not to have to redraw every frame from scratch.

Making a top-down 2D action game is not a simple task, since our characters must move in all directions. The most obvious example would be the old 2D Zelda games, <em style="line-height: 1.6em;">The Minish Cap[/i] being the last one of those.

Their animation system is quite simple, but it works wonderfully since the style is so cartoony and the animation clips themselves are very good. Dividing the environment into an X and Y grid also made having only 4 angles of animation (North, East, South, West) seem natural. […]