Halo Wars Dev Blog: Birth of a Halo Wars Mission
Joe Gillum, Designer on Halo Wars, has written an awesome blog about how the Single Player Campaign missions were made. It's called Birth of a Halo Wars Mission. It goes into detail on how missions get designed, written and made and includes some never before seen screenshots of Halo Wars in development.
The first thing we do when we start a new campaign is to do some research. Instead of hitting the history books like in our Age of Empires games, we grabbed anything we could from Halo and absorbed it. We read books, played through the games, and talked with Bungie to make sense of any questions that arose. I personally spent a few days doing nothing but playing the Halo campaigns in the office to refresh my memory and get some inspiration. This helped more than I even hoped… people would stop by my office to watch me play and learned some things they may have forgotten about the games – or to yell at me to turn it down!
Check it out on the
Halo Wars Developer Blog.
Robot Entertainment Launches New Blogs
Robot Entertainment has rolled out a couple of new Blogs on their home page, RobotEntertainment.com.
Life at Robot talks about Dave Pottinger's project to build a Lego Robot Logo, complete with pictures showing how much more work will go in to it than expected.
"In terms of color, the official Robot logo is on a black background. We seem to have a lot of those already, though. We have this cool sign on the building. We have another one in our lobby. And one day, this door mat showed up. At this rate, 19 more black Robot logos will show up next week. We needed some other color, so we went with the white version."
In
Welcome to Art-bot Central, Art Director Dave Kubalak introduces all of the artists and goes into details about his home office/art studio.
Keep an eye on
Robot Entertainment Blogs for more awesome blogs in the future.
Halo Wars Dev Blog: What it took to make Halo Wars look like Halo
What it takes to make Halo Wars art, look like Halo is our latest dev blog by Halo Wars Artist Paul Slusser. Paul includes some never before seen concept art and screenshots in his blog.
The UNSC and Forerunner had to maintain the same geometry angles throughout their structures and vehicles while the Covenant had to maintain the same curvy organic look in theirs. The UNSC vehicles and Spartan armor all had a similar green metallic look that we tried to emulate with our materials. Using a similar Army green with a broad, gold, specular highlight worked really well for our camera distance and sun angle.
Check it out! on the Halo Wars Dev blog!.
Docks Skirmish Map Information Added
The Docks, a 2v2 Skirmish map, has been added to the Skirmish Maps Info Page. As always, 3 huge images of the map are included and the tips from Designers.
Because of the choke point and decent travel time from one side to the other early in the game, it’s pretty safe too boom up. This is why I really like using Cutter and elephant/marine rushing on this map. If I can setup my Elephant near the enemy bases and get it pumping I can slow down their boom sometimes, even keeping them off the open base location near their start area while my partner boom/techs freely.
Check it out!
Docks 2v2
Animation Exploration Dev Blog
Charles Tinney, an Animator on Halo Wars gives us an Animation Exploration. He details what goes in to making some of the animations in Halo Wars, and some of the unreleased sync kills for the Arbiter and Spartans.
There are two animations I want to focus on in this production diary. I want to highlight these because I took time to thumbnail and choreograph them; which is typically something I don’t have time to do at a video game studio. So, I really tried to get it right. Both of these are exploratory animations developed to have a loose visual guideline for what the fatality system would look like. Fatalities in Halo Wars happen when one awesome melee powerhouse, such as the Arbiter, kills one of the other infantry units.
He also includes a couple of really cool videos to go along with his sketches for the animations.
Check it out.