interview

Bungie AI programmer Max Dyckhoff last month mentioned a long-standing bug in Halo's driving code he'd found and eliminated. He was later kind enough to go into a bit more detail about how Halo's AI figures out how to handle driving and riding in vehicles.

Q: You're one of several active community members who went on to actually work at Bungie. How many Halo games have you worked on now, and what were your primary contributions to each?

A: I started at Bungie at the beginning of production on Halo 3, where I worked with Damian Isla on the AI systems. I spent some time adding a few AI features for ODST as well, such as Firefight, before moving on to Reach, where I have again been working on the AI team. For Reach I've added a bunch of great things like new flying behaviors, better vehicle driving, Elite combat, and so on. The AI team is typically very small, just 2-3 for most of Reach, but we get a lot done.

 Click here for the complete text.

Jaime "Case" Griesemer, longtime Bungie designer, gave a talk at GDC about game balance in Halo, with some specific mention of the sniper rifle:

Spectacle, too, is important to keeping players in flow, with the sniper rifle creating a contrail and sound effects being subject to a delay over long distances. Such exaggerated causality makes the gun look good on YouTube, because viewers can easily see what's happened, and players don't break out of the game's flow in order to figure how what's just happened. And most sniper rifles aren’t fun, he claimed, because they don’t generate flow.

A full rundown of the talk is over at Edge Online.

In an interview with GamePro, Bungie's own Joe Staten talks about Halo 3: ODST, due out this fall, clarifying when the game takes place (between the end of Metropolis in Halo 2 and the Arrival scene that begins Halo 3).

Of course, he also teases fans about an unknown enemy, but what do you expect? It's Bungie.

Saw the link in 2900d4u's post in the HBO forum.

GamesIndustryBiz has put up the second part of an interview with Bungie's Brian "SketchFactor" Jarrard and Luke Smith. Here is part one.

Sketch remarks therein that Bungie has complete freedom to choose the publisher and platform for their new intellectual property-- property that Microsoft does not own. Microsoft does own Halo, and Bungie has a team working on the Halo 3: Recon expansion, due out next fall.

I'll do some spin right now: just because Bungie can choose a different platform and publisher doesn't necessarily mean that Bungie's next non-Halo game won't be published by Microsoft for the Xbox 360, but it doesn't mean that it won't, either.

EDGE has a feature up here: http://rampancy.net/weblink/bungie/Edge_Interviews_Isla about the AI in the Halo series. They interview AI programmer Damian Isla, where he brings up an interesting concept I'd love to see in a Halo game-- or any Bungie game, really:

There was the well-known example in Halo 2 where your 'hog full of marines would just drive off if you got out. That's actually not that easy a problem to solve because how does the game know you intend to come back?

My grand thesis is, what if you can say: "Wait for me"? Communication with AI has been sorely neglected; you can ask them to charge, retreat, go there, but what about a richer level of communication than just orders? Even just a 'You're doing it wrong' button - literally.

Yes, Damian. Please. Yes.

Bungie president Harold Ryan tells Variety how to be swallowed by Microsoft and emerge unscathed. Some highlights: thoughts of going independent went back 3-4 years, the preparations went back more than 2 years, and one of the driving reasons was the freedom to work on non-Halo titles.

... well, not really THAT personal. However, Ducain at HIH did go into an awful lot of detail in his questioning of yours truly and Louis Wu at HBO, and the resulting fountain of verbiage is now duly formatted and posted for the benefit of those wit intestinal fortitude to spare and time to waste.

Comic website Earth's Greatest interviewed Eric Trautmann about his comic Checkmate. Trautmann previously worked at Microsoft and was involved with Halo and the Halo novels written by Eric Nylund.

Asked about working on Halo, this is what he had to say:

Helping Eric Nylund craft "The Fall of Reach," the first HALO novel was a treat. Eric's a hell of a writer (and I actually was one of the people who more or less bullied Del Rey into using him in the first place) and a good friend, so that kind of contribution is effortless.

Working on the game itself, HALO: COMBAT EVOLVED, was a considerably less pleasant experience. The deadline pressure was enormous; my co-writer at the time, Brannon Boren, and I had just a couple days to bang out a massive amount of dialogue at the request of the game's designer, John Howard, and Bungie co-founder Jason Jones. Apparently, whoever had written the original in-mission dialogue had not done a job everyone was happy with, and they needed, essentially, a writer or writers who could work fast. We happened to be around and available, so we agreed to do it, but Bungie is VERY secretive, and, despite the fact that we operated under the same non-disclosure agreements THEY did, they can be quite mistrustful.

So, we had three days to bang out some ridiculous amount of dialogue, but they wouldn't actually let us LOOK at the game (which is why some of the dialogue doesn't make total sense; I conservatively estimate we got it about 80-90% right, which I think is an accomplishment given how blind we were flying).
THAT was no fun at all.

Deadlines are never fun. Check out the full interview for more information on some of the work Trautmann is doing for DC Comics and has done on Lucasarts properties in the past.

1Up talked to Brian "SketchFactor" Jarrard (community lead) and Tyson "Ferrex" Green (multiplayer design lead) about what worked (and what didn't) in Halo 3. A must-read item. Kudos to PlanetHalo via Louis Wu at HBO.

Editor's note: Ferrex does reveal that originally, the Ark was buried on Earth, and the idea of a portal that leads to an Ark somewhere else came later. So, in the final moments of Halo 2, when the Arbiter asks 343 Guilty Spark where the Ark is, and the scene shifts to Earth before he can answer, that was indicating that the Ark was on Earth. It's just that it was moved before Halo 3 was made.

John Olin at Xbox Evolved interviewed Wideload Games' Matt Soell about how he came to Wideload, about Hail to the Chimp, and also about Stubbs the Zombie. Stubbs, it seems, may be getting a sequel:

Stubbs is near and dear to all of us, and we’ve heard from lots of people who would like to see more of him. I can’t say anything specific right now, but it’s safe to say he’ll be back. They say you can’t keep a good man down, and that goes double for the ones with an insatiable hunger for brains.

For more info on Hail to the Chimp, be sure to check back regularly at the animal news station, GRRNews.

Over at HaloBabies, mr smiley has posted an interview with DigitalPh33r, creator of the Arby 'n' the Chief machinima at machinima.com.

Newsweek columnist N'Gai Croal interviewed Bungie's Joe Staten about the Halo 3, Halo 2, and the Halo movie back in August of 2007. The first part is online now. Croal picked out one blockbuster revelation by Staten to highlight in a second post prior to the publication of part two, however: that the faceless Master Chief wasn't really going to be the film's protagonist.

In the film, the other characters begin to comment on Master Chief's anonymity, like "Who is he?" and "What's his story?" He becomes a really wonderful source of mystery, a sort of anonymous problem solver. So we definitely worked on that. In the final version of the script the Master Chief was certainly absolutely critical to the film, but there were other characters around him which carried most of it, that did most of the emotional heavy lifting. The Master Chief was there in support of their story.

Staten also does confirm something that many fans have long suspected, and that even some people "in the know" have expressed doubt at: that Halo 2 was supposed to be the end of the story. Staten says, "we didn't think we were necessarily going to make Halo 3. I mean, we made Halo 1 not knowing we were going to make Halo 2. So we started out designing Halo 2 not thinking that we were going to make a Halo 3." Halo 2's third act, even though it was different from what we got in Halo 3, could have ended the story. Halo 2's cliffhanger simply made it impossible to stop there.

All those who think there must be a Halo 4 should take heed of that.

Last time I felt I had to apologize for mentioning Ron Gilbert's new adventure game, DeathSpank. It's not a Bungie game. It's not a Halo game. Gilbert never worked for Bungie, or worked on Halo. The two have nothing to do with one another, and this site has always been about Bungie or people and things connected to Bungie somehow. In my own twisted way I justified including the item because while completely separate, Gilbert's Monkey Island games stood out to me as special and memorable, as well as the pinnacle of good concept and solid execution in a graphical adventure.

This time, though, Gilbert makes my job easy when he answers the question posed to him by Rock, Paper, Shotgun, about why adventure games have lost their way. He blames Halo... sort of. Kinda. Well, not really. But he does mention it:

In same ways, adventure games are just as popular as they were back in the day, the real issue is that the rest of the industry took off without them. I blame Doom. That game showed up and interjected testosterone in gaming that wasn't there before and adventure games had a hard time competing with that kind of energy. There is an audience for adventure games, but it's not the same people that are buying Halo, Bioshock, or even Mario. Problem is, until a company really decides to focus (spend money) and discover that market, it's going to remain small.The future my lay in good adventure hybrid games, like... oh just to pull one out randomly... DeathSpank.

Ron... not entirely true! We're here! We love Halo and Monkey Island, and we're looking forward to DeathSpank! Really!

As a footnote: for all the old RHL gang who remember the great Crotchfest, Gilbert offers this:

DeathSpank frequents a local pub called the Haunted Crotch Bar and Grill (all you can eat salad-bar Tues nights) owned by Grimtub Hobblepotty.

There is no game so good that a few crotch references can't make it even better.

HaloBabies just recently announced the new Halo comic Larry The Marine, which I neglected to mention at the time and richly deserves it.

In addition, HaloBabies has posted a profile of Halo fan artist Kelli "Etoli" Davis, who is now working on an upcoming game at SuperVillain studios. Check out mrsmiley's interview with Etoli over at HaloBabies.

Avateur in the HBO forum pointed out a Halo Wars Q&A with Ensemble Studio's Graeme Devine over at GameTap. Devine is the lead designer on Halo Wars.

In addition to mentioning how Ensemble must simultaneously respect the Halo canon and being free to make the best Halo RTS game Ensemble could make, rather than the best Halo RTS game Bungie could make, the article touches on the touchy issue of console controls:

GameTap: Obviously, the control scheme is always an important subject when discussing real-time strategy games on consoles, how do you go about striking a balance of offering the depth that RTS games are known for, but at the same time, keeping the controls simple enough as to not be overwhelming?

Graeme Devine: I think this is key. When we started work on Halo Wars we started from scratch, we threw the mouse and keyboard paradigm away and rethought what it meant to control a real-time strategy game. I really think that's one of the big differentiators with Halo Wars because it allows us to bring the depth to the controller while, in our opinion, improving how controllable we can make the genre.

Although no solid date is given, Devine says that Halo Wars has the "magic in the disc" to be one of the "biggest games of 2008" so that seems to indicate fans have twelve months or less to wait before they see the first non-Bungie, non-FPS Halo game hit the shelves.