Halo Wars Update 06.29.07
Ok, I know what you’re thinking. Another bunch of text? We want renders! We want to see this game, give us screenshots! I know this is what you’re saying because it’s the same thing the lynch mob outside the office is yelling. Well on a related note, I have a little tale to tell you. Every once in awhile during game development you have an experience where your game takes a leap forward. I recently had one of those moments…
Picture this. I’m sitting on one side of our open playtest area with one of our programmers who goes by the name of Rob “Xemu” Fermier” having just cleaned my clock in a game of Halo Wars sitting on the other side. To be honest, he had completely mopped the floor with me. It was sad, and a number of people who had just witnessed the game were heckling me. We ended up having a rematch...
To further set the scene, we had a new surround sound system hooked up to the TV that I was using and at this point, Producer Chris Rippy stepped in to crank the volume.
The game fired up and I had to weather some early raids by Rob’s Warthogs. I managed to survive that and then eventually managed to field a large force of units, the largest force I’ve seen in the game yet. The screen was almost full. As I wiped out Rob’s units, I just kept cranking out more guys. I was using a combination of land and air units that not only looked cool, but was very satisfying to use in Rob’s base with the sound of destruction and weapons fire ringing in my ears. I think I may have heard Rob’s units calling out for him to resign so they could be spared the onslaught. (This is where Rob stops reading and comes down to my office and challenges me to a game, and I tell him I have to wash my hair.)
Thanks for the game Rob, especially taking it easy on me during the rematch! In short, the game ended up not only really looking like a massive battle scene from Halo, but also sounding like a war from Halo. It won’t be too much longer before we’ll be comfortable to share more imagery with you all.
That was actually the first of two “Holy…cow” moments for me this month. The second came when… [CENSORED]
I can go into more detail about that in a couple of weeks *coughJULY6* in the next monthly update. Next month is going to be a big one for Halo Wars. We’re going to be launching a new version of the Halo Wars website, which will largely just be a cosmetic facelift for the old girl, but we also have something cool going on the side as well.