This past week has seen some new members and we have a promising future ahead of us with excellent 3D artists, 2D artists, designers and sound engineers. With the influx of attention and personnel, we have had to become more organised. Leads have been appointed, and solid work is being done.
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2D Art (Lead - Vice)
The business of creating textures usually comes after the creation of the intended geometry. As a result, the pixel people tend to twiddle their thumbs a little. To keep their hands busy, Vice, Ali and Jatin are doing a very important piece of work: Researching and documenting the design traits of the three cultures in Halo (Human, Forerunner, Covenant). This body of work will make it much easier to create consistent environments that seem real and true to the Halo universe. Just how tall is a forerunner corridor? How steep are Covenant ramps?
3D Art (Lead - Farsight)
Farsight has been working very hard on a Covenant character model this week, and it's looking very nice indeed. It should be in the hands of the art guys at some point next week. We expect to make good use of specular maps on this one. Bob is all keyed up to get animating, but until we know the methods used by the HEK, we can only speculate on possible idle animations. Kooky has been prototyping a new weapon that will definately pack a lot of punch in the mod. It is still a work in progress, but already looks very 'Halo' and should fit into quite a nice niche. Wraith has been working on concept models for the Covenant starships as well as a new type of Coventant heavy weapon that will fire extremely large needles.
Level Design (Lead - Crispy)
Crispy is currently laying out the first half of the game at a fairly coarse scale. The aim of this exercise is to make sure that the action and story flow sensibly from scene to scene. When complete, it will show divisions between BSP partitions, and level breaks. This will also let us ensure that the levels are of a consistent length and checkpoint density. This concept sketch shows a typical part of this process. Some parts of this message have been omitted for security reasons.
Sound (Lead - Jatin)
Kooky's new weapon inspired Jatin to get out his highly specialised sound equipment. It turns out that pots, pans and a broken stapler recorded and manipulated actually make very realistic noises. The sounds fit the design very well and really bring it to life. Jatin's collection of more conventional instruments will also shortly be put into use as we start to consider new musical themes.
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Whilst we got a terrific response from last week's update, we're still looking for some specific staff members. We would like to talk to you if you can :
1. Design levels. You don't have to be able to actually build them, but if you know what makes Halo fun, and can translate that design ethic to new locations and stories, we'd like to hear from you.
2. Run a website. Soon, we will want to have a website that shouts our name to the world. If you can run a website, and have experience doing so, tell us about yourself.
Contact RunningRiot ([email protected])
or Crispy ([email protected])
Stay tuned and have a nice day!
-First Strike Dev team
