NEWS - Thursday, August 23, 2001
Azurik Interview @ Xbox Active
One of the most anticipated titles coming to Xbox this fall is Adrenium’s Azurik: Rise of Perathia. The Executive Studio Director of Adrenium, Stephen "that’s two LL’s in Willson thank you very much" Clarke-Willson, spoke with Xbox Active about Azurik and offers up three new exclusive screenshots along with office pictures of concept art.
XboxActive.com: What is some of the background on the levels in Azurik? What was some of the inspiration for the creation of the levels and the components based in each one?The interview spans over five pages and is well worth the read. Be sure to click here and check it out.Stephen: Remind me to send you a picture of the design wall. Paul Knutzen, Dominick Meissner, and Matthew Stipes sat down for a month solid and hammered out the overall level design, including what I call “wienies” for each level. The “wienie” is something cool that you see in the distance that pulls you into the level. (The “wienie” term is from Walt Disney who compared leading a person through Disneyland to leading a dog by the nose by hiding a piece of hot dog (“wiener”) in your hand.) Once we agreed early on to go with the “Earth, Air, Fire, Water” thing, it became a challenge for the designers to make each level distinct. They did this by finding a function for each level – cleaning the air, generating energy, grinding up earth, and like that. They came up with 33 of these, of which 22 made it into the final game.
Source: http://www.xboxactive.com/
