Growing up, Andi Swart was never far away from her sketchpad, constantly doodling and drawing. Today, that love for art has turned into a job at a video game development company, where her drawings come to life.
Swart works at a small company in Durham dubbed Elephant Mouse, soon to be renamed Villain. Alongside her coworkers, she helps create video games for smartphones. Games made by the company include “Archetype” in 2010 and “Star Trek: Rivals” in 2013. On Friday, Swart sat down with The Sanford Herald to explain how her job as an animator works.
What does it mean to be an independent game developer?
As an indy game developer, we haven’t made a triple A title. When you think of video games, you might think of Rockstar Games like Red Dead Redemption, Need for Speed, Call of Duty, big games like that. Indy developers work in small teams. I’m one of five people who are employed at this company and I’m one of two artists and we have one programmer. Our team size is drastically smaller.
A lot of indy developers do release (games) on Steam because it’s a very easy way to get your game out there. We’re currently working on a mobile game, but we have worked on console games in the past, console being PC, Playstation, X-Box.
How do you create the images for games?
I work mainly in Photoshop. We’re making a 2-d game, so all of the art is drawn art, there’s no three-dimensional objects. In photoshop, I’ll sketch out a couple ideas for the icons or art piece that I’m working on and then share it with my lead artist. He’ll look through them and say what he’s likes best out of that and then I’ll go in and refine it and make it a clean version.
How do you animate static drawings?
We use Unity. Unity is a game-developing platform. For animation, we’re actually doing something that a lot of game developers don’t do anymore. We’re doing traditional frame-by-frame animation.
(It’s) a digital flip book basically. We draw all of these frames and … the images play in succession and it looks like it’s moving. We’ve been doing that for our game to give it a specific feel, to make it feel really smooth and have more character. I think when things are hand-drawn, they just have something to them that’s different … By drawing every frame, we get to add some more emphasis and exaggeration in the areas we want to.
What is it like seeing your art and animation in video games?
Animations of characters for video games are especially exciting, because after I create all of the movesets — walk, run, jump, interact, etc. — the character is out of my control. In film, the characters have a specific way that they move and interact with the world, and they’re animated to do exactly those things in a specific order. Those character animations are so final. Characters in video games, though, are being controlled by numerous different players who are creating their own, unique paths and stories through the games.
In this way, it kind of feels like the video game characters have a life of their own, as no two players will move through a video game in the exact same way. It’s a really cool feeling to create something that can then exist and move independently from me!
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