over the product, doing all the design work himself. He believed that working alone would foster creativity, whereas collaboration would result in a banal and standard commercial product. He did hire fellow comic book artist Benoît Peeters to assist with writing, but he soon left the project. Sokal wanted to keep the game accessible to inexperienced players. This meant avoiding sudden difficulty spikes, which could leave a player stuck; point-of-no-return scenarios, in which a player is stuck because they missed an item; and failure states in which the player character is killed. He admitted to thinking the game may have been too simple as a result, and promised that "if [they] were to make a sequel, I think it would be more complex, especially toward the end". Sokal wrote the game much as he typically wrote comics: first writing a linear story, then rendering it frame-by-frame as a storyboard. His guiding principle was to make "the kind of adventure that you no longer get these days, an adventure out of the early 20th century". The challenge for Sokal was making this adventure interactive; in that regard, he found Duquesne's input very valuable. He credits Myst as his inspiration to make the game, and also cites Werner Herzog films like Fitzcarraldo and the writings of Gabriel García Márquez as influences. He is quoted especially as saying "Myst is really the game that made me want to make Amerzone". Production The team began producing artwork in 1996, using LightWave 3D for character and object models, and Bryce 3D for environments. Modeling characters at Sokal's desired quality level was time-consuming, so the cast of characters was kept small. Being unfamiliar with 3D graphics, Sokal had to learn on the fly by studying the software documentation and getting help from the more technically proficient Duquesne. The latter's skills were applied to the game's more complex visual effects, such as dust particles being buffeted about. Sokal eventually realized the project was too ambitious for the two-man team, and hired Supinfocom graduates to help with the graphics from 1996 onwards. In 1998, Duquesne left to pursue a career at LightWave in the United States, and Sokal called on the Belgian company Grid Animation to produce cutscenes and do further graphics work. The experience made Sokal overcome his misgivings about working collaboratively. In an interview with JATV, he was quoted as saying: "I recall that [for] the