Adrenium

From AboveTheGarage

One day Jon Mavor approached me and said he'd heard about a local Kirkland company that was going to produce a launch title for a new gaming platform. I assumed it was Nintendo but it turned out to be Microsoft. Jon, myself, and Jeff Petkau could see the writing was on the wall at Cavedog (it closed up four days after we left) so we took a pretty big leap of faith and joined a small Kirkland company called KnowWonder and started making an action/adventure game that become Azurik.

That game was made in 21 months from scratch. And when I say "from scratch" I mean we barely had desks. We bought computers and Jon and Jeff hired two more programmers, William Lott and Josh Taylor. That was it! Four programmers built the entire game engine. One great idea both Jon and Jeff shared after working quite hard on game editors at Cavedog was to ditch that idea and just use Maya as our level editor. In this way all of the exporting work, which was substantial, could be used for animation, lighting, level design, and embedded environmental puzzles.

We (that is to say, the programmers), also developed a build process that allowed us to make concurrent independent builds all day long, with specific team wide integration points, which I handled. (Well, except for the last two: Petkau did the final two builds because I didn't trust myself not to hose up some minor bit of tech for our final submissions. BTW, Azurik was the largest launch game submitted to Xbox certification and the only game to pass the first time.)

Since there were only four programmers, every programming decision was about "how can we empower the rest of the team to get stuff done without bugging us too much?" The result was a really powerful game engine that had all of the expressive power of Maya. After Azurik the engine was expanded to support PS2 and Gamecube.

My job was to produce the game. I handled all of the budgeting. (It's fun to spend several million dollars of someone else's money.) The team grew to about 30 people by the time we finished. During the last six or eight months of development I realized I was making more and more decisions about how the game would finally play so I gave myself the title of director. (Yes, I actually did that.) After Azurik I became the Executive Studio Director (another title I made up) and hired producers. From then on I would keep an eye on the team for each new game we were making and decide who was really making the detailed decisions and award that person with the title of director. The might be the producer or it might be the lead designer. It could easily be someone else. It was something I watched to see how it would emerge organically from the team.

Eventually I was involved in hiring and/or supervising 70 people that used the game engine to produce several titles for Amaze Entertainment under the Adrenium Studio name.

All-in-all, it was a lot of fun, and I was really pleased with the way the game engine came to match the business structure of Amaze. I think that is the reason it is still in use today (now called the Elemental Engine, which was the original code name for the Azurik project). It was a lot of fun to build an engine and a production organization from scratch and I'm grateful I had that opportunity.