Hello! My name is Jakob and I’m the new animator on the Shadowrun team. I’m extremely excited to be working on Shadowrun and, hopefully, you’ll see that passion spill over into the game. I’ll be creating an extra level of immersion through animation with small things like ambient animations for NPCs in the background as well as designing new animations for the super awesome skills that have been added to Shadowrun: Hong Kong. One thing I really want to tell you about, though, is my favorite character you’ll be running with in Hong Kong - Gaichu!

Gaichu is a samurai and one of the ways we can show this is through his movements. To help catch the nuances of his traditional samurai technique, I looked at a lot of older samurai films such as The Seven Samurai. However, Gaichu’s also a ghoul and, typically, ghouls are deteriorating and don’t have complete control over their muscles. This leads to the very unique way Gaichu moves about the world, how he swings his katana and how he deals with his opponents.

This is why Gaichu is getting a whole suite of animations where you’ll be able to see the fusion between his ghoul deterioration and his samurai training. Everything he does is his own, and no one else has the same exact animation due to his unique situation. This, in turn, makes him standout an incredible amount compared to other people you’ve met in our previous Shadowrun games.



As you can see, Gaichu can utilize either side of his ghoul-samurai duality. He has an assortment of ghoul based attacks, as well as a number of new samurai-katana based attacks.

But that’s not all!

Gaichu is just one of the many characters who will get unique animations. Not all characters get full new suites of animation like Gaichu, but, oh boy, there’s a lot of new stuff coming. Almost all of the existing animations are getting pushed farther to be more appealing, and all of the unique skills your team members and you acquire will have their own animation sets. The goal is to make you and every other character you come across somewhat varied in some form or fashion. I want to try and capture the diverse universe that is Shadowrun, and a great way to do that, is body language.

Overall, I’m so excited to be working on a game that everyone on the team and all of the fans are so passionate about! It’s great to be surrounded by people constantly pushing to bigger and better heights, and to have such a dedicated community at our back.
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