ToB Developer Profile

RPGVault has posted up yet another Throne of Bhaal developer profile, this time of Tony de Waal, lead animator on the Baldur’s Gate II expansion. Here’s a taste:

Jonric: What would you rate as the best and worst parts of your job? And what are the biggest challenges?

Tony de Waal: The best parts of my job are being able to have the freedom to give characters their own personality. When we are assigned a character to animate we are given basic ideas to what our designers want to see, like a character description or an example from a movie. From there we are allowed to add our own style to the character.

I guess the worst part of the job is just trying to do the best job you can in as little time as possible. With three games in production; Throne of Bhaal, Neverwinter, and Star Wars, our animation department team of eight animators and one technical animator has the task of doing all character animation and cut scenes, which is a rather large amount of work.