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GS: Did you make a conscious decision to assign one artist per character so that they could give it its own flavor and give it a unique look?

Phil: We talked about doing it more assembly-line fashion in the past, but the advantages of having one person working on a character makes it easier to make changes, makes it easier to retain a consistency within the character; there's more pride of ownership that way. The only reason to do it assembly-line fashion would be for speed and efficiency, but the disadvantages are that everything is probably going to end up looking pretty much the same.

GS: So, Phil, do you try to oversee those artists who are working on the individual characters?

Phil: To some extent, but it's a pretty democratic process. I'm basically there to just point to things that might be done more efficiently, and I'm in production just like everybody else.

GS: Which characters are you working on?

Phil: I did the Amazon, and I'm going to start working on the Necromancer pretty soon.

Matt: ...and a number of monsters....

Phil: Yeah, and monsters too. Not everybody works on a character, of course.

GS: So you guys also divvy up the monsters between artists as well, then?

Phil: Yeah. In fact, with the monsters, the individual artist has a lot more freedom in the design and creation of it. Pretty much, if an artist has an idea for a cool monster, and it fits in the whole scheme of things, we'll find a place for it somewhere, and maybe push it in one direction or another to fit within the story or fit within the environment. But the monsters are where we can get a lot more weird and wacky and interesting.

GS: If you're given the original design of a monster, and start to draw it, and then an artist decides to give it a certain attack because it looks cool, would you then think about going in and saying, "Hey, that looks good. We should make the monster do that"?

Phil: Yeah. Actually a lot of our ideas for specific attacks and powers and stuff like that happens during the animation process. We'll be working on something and it'll inspire some cool idea, or somebody will mention something, and everybody's pretty flexible, even the programmers, as far as implementing new AI behaviors or new spell effects or anything like that. Again, everybody's pretty much involved in the whole design of the game.