About - Visual
Dean Dodrill joined the Jazz Jackrabbit 2 team later on during the project and worked on the cinematics for the game. He also helped create some marketing art and helped with beta-testing the game.
Dean was a huge fan of Jazz Jackrabbit 1 and even copied Nick's drawings since he liked Jazz as a character so much. Dean has been drawing and animating for a long time and has adopted a Disney style of drawing and animating, but with a lot of action. He eventually saw the job opportunity of animating for a sequel to the original Jazz Jackrabbit and went for it. His process of animation was a mix of traditional and digital. Every frame of animation was first drawn on paper. It was then scanned into the computer. At 12 fps (frames per second) animation, he had to do a lot of drawings. After each frame was scanned, it was then cleaned and colored in a program called Autodesk Animator Pro. Although it was an old program, Dean felt that it was still powerful nonetheless. The biggest limit to the program was the 8-bit palette he had to work with. But in the end, that worked out well for the game. After that, he added special effects like flashes of light and lightning using his computer. Finally, the animation was merged with the background, which was colored in Photoshop and Painter, and was completed for the programmers to take over.
Lori was also drawn by Dean Dodrill.
Nick Stadler was an animator at heart, so most of his contributions were in making the characters and their movements fun to look at and watch. He also wanted to make level graphics that would be appealing for extended amounts of play time.
During the process of making each tileset in the game, Nick had many things that he had to consider. He had to make levels that look interesting and pleasing in and of themselves, which required him to use a lot of variations both along the separate tilesets and within each tileset themselves. He also had to make sure that the different tiles were flexible because he could never be quite sure what the level designer was going to try to do with them. The most difficult part of all was making the tiles actually be tiles. This often required a lot of pixel-by-pixel work to make sure there weren't jagged edges in any of the levels made. He often drew out the larger shapes into a picture with paper and pencil, and then went in closely to piece out the individual tiles like a puzzle.
Out of all the tilesets he made, Nick didn't really have a favorite one, but there were bits and pieces of each level that he was particularly happy with. The backgrounds on the final hell levels of the game was one of the things he liked. Another thing was the ship in the underwater level. He also liked the gargoyles in the Medivo levels among some others. In some ways, he wasn't happy with how much of it came out because the game was originally conceived as a low-res game. That's why 320 x 200 (the original resolution of Jazz Jackrabbit 1) is still the resolution that Nick plays the game in because he feels it's much more fun and challenging that way.
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