My Halo 3

If you’re someone who considers themselves forging experts, of either Foundry or Sandbox take heed of today’s post. Although I don’t think anyone is an ‘expert’ with Sandbox quite yet.

In Bungie’s weekly update, they featured someone who is an icon in the Forging community, Cosmic Rick. He has created classic Forges, such as: Kentucky Tango, and Pallet Parade.

Bungie had a Q&A session with Cosmic Rick about Forging, and it’s a very interesting read. Here’s a response from Cosmic Rick about how he builds maps…

“The process really depends on the map. For Utah Mambo, the only thing I really had planned out initially was the Defensive base, and that I wanted something asymmetric which could handle symmetric games, too. Then I looked at what attack angles and lines-of-sight would make for a fun objective game and designed the central structure (with a little inspiration from Sandtrap) around that. I find that it’s usually better to have a solid idea, but to be flexible during the build process. It’s definitely fun to just throw things together until something works, though. (I’ll admit it: that’s mostly how Pallet Parade and Kentucky Tango came about.)”

Cosmic Rick has a new Sandbox variant coming out by the name of Utah Mambo. It’s looking quite impressive, and I plan on giving it a shot later on.

Tags: Bungie, expert, Forge, foundry, Q&A, sandbox

• Halo General
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For those out there who are seriously thinking about getting into game development, should know a couple of things. First, it’s a very hard field to break through in, and second a lot of it is who you know, and some luck.

This interview with Bungie’s sandbox engineer, Jon Cable proves my points correct. Here are some Q&A’s about how Cable got his start at Bungie.

Q. Did you get any guidance during your time in High School?

A. I remember one test saying something about an electrician. I think the system was so old it didn’t know what a computer was. I tried to talk to authority figures in high school as little as possible.

Q. Did that aversion to academic authority lift long enough for you to earn a college degree?

A. Yep – a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan.

Q. And how did you end up first make contact with Bungie?

A. I was interning at Microsoft in the summer of ’05. We had a weekly Halo night where we played on system link in the conference rooms on these big projectors. I met another intern there named François, who was working at Bungie in level design. I asked him to get me in touch with someone here, and a while later Chucky contacted me and we started the interview process. I still had two years of college left, so I got an internship for the next summer.

Q. What did you bring along to the interview process proper?

A. I brought my laptop with a couple games I had written. I didn’t get a chance to show them off until the very end. But mostly I just came prepared to meet whatever challenge was thrown at me.

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So, there you have it. Be sure to have a portfolio of your works. Then make sure you can somehow get in good with people over at Bungie.

Tags: Bungie, developer, engineer, halo 3, interview, ODST, Q&A, sandbox

• Halo General
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I think Bungie’s site is at its best when there isn’t any killer news to report. This week it’s been mostly about Halo 3: Recon, but with not much to say about it they held an open Q&A forum with their site users.

Like with most Q&A’s, there were some morons that showed up but there were some questions of worth, that followed with interesting answers. Here are some of them:

Q: In the news earlier, it was said that Halo Wars will come with the Halo 3 Mythic Map Pack including three maps. What happened to the other three? Aren’t they part of the Mythic Map Pack too? Did we just read wrong and when you were referring to the Map Pack, you guys meant all six of them. Any clarification would be wonderful.

A: This question has popped up a handful of times around the Internet. The Mythic Map Pack in question (comprised of Assembly, Orbital and Sandbox) will be included as part of the Limited Edition of Halo Wars. Those are the only Halo 3 maps that will be bundled with Halo Wars.

Q: I believe I remember Shishka mentioning that there might be a playlist with user created content in it. Is there any more info on that, or am I delusional?

A: Shishka was here super duper late earlier this week looking at exactly this sort of thing. I even saw Jones stop by Shishka’s desk to watch him run around some user created map. Jones said, “Huh, this looks neat.” And before you ask, no, it wasn’t something that was messaged to him via Live, it was something he found here on the site using the tagging system. That said, he’s looking at maps pretty regularly, but the quality of them is mostly in line with the quality of this batch of questions. That doesn’t mean that they won’t be used in some fashion. Shishka’s thinking about using them for a new content series here at B.net titled, “What Not to Do in Forge.”

Q: How is the render-to-video feature coming along?

A: It’s still in the works and it’s still shaping up to be sweet. The Wolf is hard at work on it and it’s going to take a giant mountain of servers and flowing rivers of bandwidth.

For The Full Q & A, click here.

Tags: Bungie, halo 3, mythic map, pack, playlist, Q&A, Recon, website

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