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Samwise Didier, lead artist

Samwise Didier was the lead artist for StarCraft 1 and reprises his role on Blizzard's team for StarCraft II. Didier gave a great interview with thorough answers to Gamespot Editor in Chief, Ricardo Torres's questions about the pleasures and problems of creating the artwork for SC2.

Didier enjoyed reworking artwork of old as well as creating all new artwork for the Terran and Protoss race but he has particularly enjoyed working with the Zerg. The Zerg are unlike the other two races visually, they are biological creatures that lack the rusty metal and robotic armor of the other races. They are flesh, blood and bones and that is a nice change of pace, said Didier.

When asked about the challenges he has faced with the SC2 artwork, Didier keyed in on the animations aspect of the development. Making the jump from 2D to 3D wasn't difficult, Didier said, it was having to tone back a lot of what they created. Similar to what Lead Game Designer, Dustin Browder touched on in his interview; Didier said the art team constantly has to keep in mind the number of body parts flying and machines blowing up in each death animation.

Having lengthy animations can disrupt the gameplay flow and likewise too many flashy and over-the-top animations going on at once can confuse the player and also take away from the gameplay. Thus, the art team's major focus is to try and keep the art looking flashy without interfering with the gameplay.

Didier and his team draw their inspiration from so many different places. Many on the team are huge movie and comic book fans Didier said, other inspiration comes from what they couldn't do in SC1. In the original game they were limited to 15 colors per unit and no more than five frames of animation, Didier said, having less limitations and more capability has been a definite inspiration.

Perhaps the best questions Torres managed to spit out was about the heroes of the game and if it has been difficult for Didier to create new artwork without straying from the old. Didier likened Kerrigan, Raynor and Zeratul to Darth Vader.

"No one wants to reinvent Darth Vader, Darth Vader is big, scary, black armor, lightsaber you know?" Didier said, "We want to keep our classic characters kind of the same, but we do want to infuse them with something a little bit new."

Didier didn't mention anything about how Kerrigan will look in-game and it seemed pretty obvious that he has been told not to reveal anything about her for the time being, bummer.

This interview was pretty much the same as Browder's interview in that there wasn't any new information unveiled but, it was nice to get a peak into the world of Didier and his art team and how they work along side the design team every step of the way. Like I said in the other wrap up, if you're a die-hard fan you'll probably want to give this video a look, if you're not than you might consider passing. Hopefully next time Gamespot goes out for an interview Torres lets someone on his staff with a little more life do the talking.

Check out Dustin Browder's interview with Ricardo Torres here.

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