Musical Prague

Ensemble Studios Music and Sound Director Stephen Rippy recently ran off to the Czech city of Prague for a major recording session.  Stephen has been busting out the tunes that will score the cinematics in the game as well as the stuff that you’ll hear when you’re busy laying waste to enemy bases.  Here is the update that he shared with the team before taking off to finally record his music:

“Next week, as Bill [ES Producer Bill Jackson] mentioned, I’ll be heading to Prague for the bulk of the recording.  This session will be for all of the orchestral and choral parts associated with both the cinematics and the in-game music – so about 40 pieces total.

After that, I’ll move everything to Seattle for piano recording and mixing.  The mixing process is where everything – the Prague recordings, plus the synth and guitar stuff that I’ve done here - will be forced together into some kind of cohesive whole.”

Rock on Stephen!  We hope to share some of the results of his work with you all when he’s finished the final mixes and polished the music to some state of perfection.

Ensemble’s April Madness Tournament (of destruction)

The first Halo Wars tournament in history will be taking place here at Ensemble Studios soon.  As a way of taking a look at the state of the current build and getting some competitive spirit pumping through our veins, Producer Bill Jackson is organizing the April Madness Tournament (of destruction) for Ensemble employees here at the office.  It will be played here in our playtesting labs and will involve twenty three teams of two.  The brackets have been made up and here’s how they look at the moment:

The initial e-mail that was sent to those of us who are participating inspired some teams to create logos and team names for themselves.  Here are a few examples of our handy work, you may be able to tell which of us are not artists:

Easily the winner of the best use of real names in a team name, Ben Donges and Karen Swanson make up team Swanges.

My teammate is a fairly new Ensemble Studios employee, and it is customary to make newcomers feel welcome in this fashion.  I have about 15 years experience as an MS Paint artist.

  …and certainly one of the more intimidating logos.

 
A few more logos were shared, and then the e-mail thread devolved into cat pictures and the taunting of various teams.

The build of the game that we’re using for this tournament is one that we’ve been working hard on for an upcoming milestone.  The team has been cramming in a lot of content and working extra hours to get it in a good state.  We’ve been having open playtest sessions here at the office so that we can get a lot of games played on the build to find major bugs.  This has generated a lot of strategy talk amongst those of us who usually only play once a week and has also resulted in the nerfing of at least one unit.  This is also allowing tournament teams to get some practice games in together to work out their strategy.  

Part of our strategy discussions actually revolve around bases in Halo Wars.  One of the many changes to the game to come out of our mad iterations earlier this year has been a socketed base system.  This is where buildings are constructed in a predefined location as opposed to anywhere the player desires.  So far this has worked out pretty well and added a new layer of strategy to the game as you have a limited number of sockets to work with, but we’ll see if it can stand the strain of our playtest sessions. 

That's it for now.  We'll kick out a new update next month.