outcastii.net : Can you introduce yourself briefly and tell us how you happen to work with Appeal ?

  M.D. : My name is Michaël Defroyennes; I am the person in charge for the creation and the animation of a part of the characters of Outcast 2. Before working with Appeal, I was employed in a small development of arcade games company Art & Magic where I got a lot of experience and where I met the founders of Appeal.


  outcastii.net : What is your inspiration for the creatures: movies, comics, and books?

  M.D. : We don’t get our inspiration directly from what we can find in diverse books or movies to be able to keep an original design for our creatures. But we have a huge database about military equipment, weapon types, to help us in the design of the human characters.


  outcastii.net : The animation of the characters in Outcast 1 was done in "motion capture". Is it still the case for Outcast 2? If not how do you do?

  M.D. : We continue to use the motion capture for the characters’ animation but all animations can’t be made with this technology and it is not possible for the movements of the animals. So we use a mix of motion capture and traditional animation. That allow us to create strange and very dynamic movements while keeping a very realistic rendering.


  outcastii.net : To be more precise, how many different movements will the creatures have and will the animals have an animation for their head?

  M.D. : For the moment, the main creatures have about 20 different animations but it can depend on the type of behaviour or the interactions with the characters. All creatures will have an animation for their head like for example jaws, eyes, tongue movements or an aggressive grin if attacked.


  outcastii.net : How do you intend to proceed to allow the player to identify him (her) self even more to Cutter? Is his customisation planned for example?

  C.F. : We have worked a lot on the personality of Cutter compared to Outcast 1: this is characterised by: a deeper richness about his psychology, his past, his strengths but as well his weaknesses. At the graphics level, his face is much more detailed than the one on Outcast 1 and benefits from a sophisticated system of facial animation (like other talan and human characters), which allows controlling the different types of facial expressions, to reinforce the personality during the dialogs.