Thunder Lotus Games details the animation work that went into Jotun: Valhalla Edition

A portion of a PurePlaystation interview with Thunder Lotus Games...

PP: The way the animations bring these drawings to life is something that really impressed us when playing Jotun, how difficult was it to bring the drawn concepts to a playable state? How similar was this process to, say, animating a TV cartoon?

TLG: It’s not too dissimilar I suppose, except that you’re doing it all from multiple angles due to the interactive nature of the game. There’s a lot of work involved, we had two animators and some of the work had to be drawn literally frame by frame. We had some puppet animations as well, but we’re talking about 5 angles for your character, 2 for bosses – which is then mirrored to give you 4, and then other elements as well like the vines that pop up and attack in the first area. Add to that the fact that we’re talking about 5-6 hours of animation [runtime of the game], as opposed to the standard 1-2 you would find in an animated movie, and you can see how big a job we’re talking about.