Howdy gang!

Matt Lefferts here. I’ve been the animator here at Runic since the very beginning. To say that I love my job would be an understatement. It’s pretty much my dream job. I work with fantastic people here. I went to the Savannah College of Art and Design for Film and Game Development, and soon after found myself in Seattle. I’m still rather fresh to the industry, I’ve been here for about a year and a half and did freelance work for a couple of years before that.

So the basic day to day is pretty simple. I handle all animation content creation, and management. I get a list of what monsters we are working on for a particular level and go from there. I always start with the character’s idle, as it’s pretty much the most important. It sets the tone for the character because almost all other animations branch off from it. The start and end of other animations will use this pose. Often the idle animation itself is something simple, like breathing or looking ready for a fight. Once we have a full set for a particular character, I go through the process of exporting it and bringing it into our editor. In the editor we have a specific section for animations where we apply tags for things like what frame something gets hit on, or when a sound is played.

Now that we are winding down on the project, I’m focusing most of my time on polish. Going back through and making sure there is necessary secondary animation on bones we might have for bits of cloth that dangle, or a tail, or something else attached to the character that would be effected by the way it moves. Things are really moving along for us right now. It’s an exciting time and I’m really looking forward to getting this out there, into the hands of the player.

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