done by a small team. Game designer Eric Flannum, formerly of Blizzard Entertainment, recalls that there were only three other key personnel: two programmers and an animator. As more game features were developed, the team expanded. Flannum was tasked to lead four level designers, and Jon Gwyn joined Joby Otero on the art team. After the basic features of the game had been completed, James Phinney, lead designer and producer of Blizzard's 1998 real-time strategy game StarCraft, was hired to write the plot for the single-player campaign. His first draft was used as the script for recording placeholder voiceovers, which helped the team to judge the atmosphere in the game. Later, Shiny employed professional actors, such as Tim Curry and Brad Garrett, and various voice artists, such as Jennifer Hale, to record the final voices for the game's characters. Audio filters altered the voices for the gods, giving them a supernatural edge appropriate to their roles. For background music, Shiny hired Kevin Manthei, who had composed many scores for video games and big- and small-screen entertainment, such as Scream 3 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. His compositions for Sacrifice were played by an orchestra of 25 instruments. Shiny's founder, David Perry, was so busy with the game's development that he passed over the opportunity to create a video game for the science-fiction movie The Matrix. Graphics Sacrifices graphics engine was developed from Messiahs. The older game renders its characters by tesselation, using thousands of polygons to make up character models and decreasing the number of polygons when lesser details are required, such as drawing the object at a distance. A typical object in Sacrifice comprises 200 to 2,500 polygons. Shiny expanded the technology's application to the game's virtual world. The environment is not decorated with grass, flowers, and rocks by overlaying two-dimensional images of such objects on the terrain model. Instead, many tiny models of these terrain features litter the landscape. Objects in the game are composed of isosceles right triangles, each of which is infinitely divisible into two smaller isosceles right triangles. The array of infinite triangles derived from these divisions is stored in a binary triangle tree data structure, and the simplicity of the division and its data management algorithms frees up the graphic processor for other duties, allowing more resources to be spent on managing the level of detail. Sacrifices spell effects are composed of parametric surfaces,