Dinoblade

Jean Nguyen didn’t set out to be a solo independent video game developer. He wanted to be an animator and has been successfully doing that for about a decade. He started in mobile games on titles like Dino Hunter. “You can tell I am into dinosaurs,” Nguyen says. For the last three years, he has been an animator with Sucker Punch, where he worked on (and continues to work on) Ghost of Yōtei. “A lot of the NPC fights and boss fights – that’s me,” Nguyen says.

But before Sucker Punch, he worked for about five years on the first version of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. That game famously swapped developers, and as a result, Nguyen decided to leave and spend time building out his portfolio with animations of dinosaurs wielding various weapons. “I love dinosaurs. I wanted to get into creature animation, and it seemed like the easiest for me to animate,” Nguyen says.