Our year is off to a great start with this Monthly Studio Update!
Last month, we introduced the first installment of our Around the Studio series, and we were thrilled to see how interested our community was in learning more about our team and the making of Project Legends.
For our second update, we’ve gathered insights from an amazing lineup of team members who are excited to share their experiences at Azra. This month, we’re joined by Azrans who are crafting stunning 3D VFX, ensuring the game is bug-free for players and showcasing the behind-the-scenes process of creating animations for Project Legends. Here’s what they’ve been working on!
Caleb Cosgrove — Senior VFX Artist
Egon Sternecker — Senior Technical Animator
“Working on Project Legends’ as a VFX artist my goal is making stuff look cool. A lot of that is about messaging and bring life to animated and inanimate assets. Most recently I’ve been focused on making VFX to be used in our World environments and areas of interest where players will be visiting most often. In school I studied Game development for Environment/Props and now I give life to those things.”
As a VFX artist, I help bring life and messaging to various props and characters in the game. I collaborate with other VFX artists, environment artists, concept artists, game designers, engineers, tech artists, animators (occasionally), and the audio team to add to or work with assets they have created or started.
Most recently, I used Unity’s particle system simulator, Shuriken, to create idling VFX for a treasure chest. The effect visually communicates to the player that “there is something in this treasure chest that hasn’t been opened.” I utilized materials, textures, and shaders created in Unity’s Shader Graph and Adobe Photoshop, incorporating them into a couple of particle systems that I set up to loop within the treasure chest asset.
The treasure chest itself was conceptualized by the concept artists, modeled and textured by the environment team, and assembled as a prefab by the tech artists. They also set it up with a timeline (Unity’s sequencer tool) to integrate my idling VFX. Now, designers can use this treasure chest asset in quests or various other areas where they want to reward players with this type of interaction.
Egon Sternecker — Senior Technical Animator
Egon Sternecker — Senior Technical Animator
“As a Technical Animator, I’m responsible for bringing characters to life from behind the scenes. I blend art and technology to design rigs that make our characters feel real. By creating tools, refining pipelines, and utilizing the latest techniques, I ensure that the movement of our characters is captivating and efficient to produce. If I do my job well, you’ll never even notice I was there.”
I’m currently pouring my time and passion into crafting an incredibly demanding and awe-inspiring character that I can’t wait for our players to encounter. My hope is that they’ll be truly blown away by every detail and nuance. At the same time, I’m building robust, efficient pipelines to integrate a wide range of characters — NPCs, enemies, and playable heroes — directly into our engine, ensuring every single one feels just as memorable and lively.
Joe Greene— Senior Quality Assurance Analyst
Joe Greene — Senior Quality Assurance Analyst
“Although my title is Senior Quality Assurance Analyst, let’s be honest — I’m still just a video game tester at my core. I’ve been fortunate enough to work on several games with Klicknation and Capital Games, and it’s an honor to be reunited with many members of those teams here at Azra Games. Usually, I don’t get to work on games that I would personally play, so it’s definitely a treat to be involved in such an amazing project that I think players are going to love.”
When I first started at Azra Games, my first project was preparing the build for the DICE Summit in 2024. The game demo was in heavy development, and then, around Christmas time, it entered a heavy polish phase. There were many late nights spent testing as fixes and iterations came in quickly. Here in Old Town Sacramento, there are holiday festivities nearly every night in late December, and I have fond memories of working late in the studio with Christmas music blasting outside and hundreds of people in the streets celebrating the holidays..
The satisfaction of delivering the build on time for DICE, receiving amazing reviews about how polished and stable it was, and hearing how much people loved the gameplay further cemented my belief that what we’re creating here is truly special.
Testing video games is fun. Sure, it’s a lot of spreadsheets, databases, software development tools, debugging, and data point collection, but during those parts of the day when I get to play the game and test the gameplay as a gamer, I feel incredibly fortunate. I’m proud to be here, helping to make this game better for the players.