The Sprint: Mr. October

The Sprint: Mr. October is a video documentary by 343 Industries, about the development of Halo 5: Guardians.

Transcript

• Announcer Sprint : Making a game on the scale of Halo takes hundreds of people with different skills, a singular vision and time. Lots of time. But before a game reaches store shelves, the team must create thousands of assets that are tracked in two-week deadline, we call Sprints. 343 Industries invites you to join us on our journey, creating Halo 5 Guardians from the ground up, one painting, sound and line of code at a time. This is The Sprint.

Somewhere in Washington

• Tom French : Alright so we're gonna head down into the woods, so we can do my photo shoot for the “Men of Game” development calendar. My friend Rob is in the calendar and I worked with him before that's the next thing you know I get an email, how are you going to say no to that right. So the idea is the king is there in the center of the frame that would be myself. The battle has just been one but there's still violence that needs to happen is we're gonna try to get like me in the center and then one on each side. So that when we do that like when people get mouse pads and stuff they get the directors. They get the whole thing.
• Mason Cobb : That's good. I've done this before but I was just blacked out, yeah and then my friends did it to me.
• Tom French : I wanted to attach his head from his body. You know was a game development time it was like we're gonna kick ass today it was about slaying and so they're gonna slay.
• ? : This should be posted on YouTube.
• Tom French : Oh will be.
• ? : Under what title be.

SEASON 3, EPISODE 3
MR. OCTOBER

• Tom French : So Forge is our editing tool that allows the community to build Halo maps and share them with the rest of the community to play. We use the Forge a lot internally, we are building our Breakout maps all in Forge.
• ? : Three of the maps that we're building for Halo 5 were being designed by our internal Pro Team but then after that we're going to take them on to our board team and art them up.
• ? : Let's go. Breakout baby.

Pro Team Design Playtest

• Tom French : I think really what I found is just go through the accent pieces. We have a corner like find an axing piece that's a corner and then kind of jam it in there kitbash it together and then just build around that. Helped a lot bring the ares the light.
• Eric Hewitt : Oh Side! Ya know, I think that there's a lot of like, lot of a… lot of chances for us don't you open it up like even the back area, like there's this whole spot, I love the new art design by the way to look, yeah it's so much nicer than the original. We had only a few days to put together our rough designs of each map and then after we had that we had a review figure out, you know what kind of changes we need to make see if they're, you know 343 quality that you know any other map designer goes through. Mike Altitude, so it's very very versatile. There's a lot of cool features that you won't see on a lot of the other maps. So we've got some cool lifts than just a lot of little flank routes that you can take. So this is gonna be the first time we played this map so we're really gonna actually take this feedback to see where you take the map forward. It's been a collaboration between Queen and myself so. Queen added in this big tower here in the back, originally there was nothing bad I don't-- not just land into the map and it's just a really open area. But he added this in up here and it's a nice little spot to bring the flag back. You actually have to get up to the top of the tower making it a lot more difficult.
• Tom French : The theory behind the Breakout one is that and say if normal capture like single neutral flag capture the flag, the flags in the middle, you grab it you return it to your base, in the Breakout mode it'll be the flags to neutral in the middle but you have to return it to the other team space and so it's a different kind of push. Having more than one way to win besides killing I think really won't fix some of the issues with Breakout ~~ from our beta. The people would hide at the end of the matches and so you couldn't you just had to hunt the person down and became a boring and so having that flag cap, you can't kind of hide out in camp anywhere you have to play fast or you're going to lose.
• Mason Cobb : We are pro players but initially when we first started you know we were noobs and but at the same time we still know what's fun new we played every single Halo game, you know real religiously, yeah we just knew that as long as it works what other people that came into play test and if they weren't you enjoy having fun, then if we played in our room and we had competitive games we knew that it was going to be a quality.
• Cavanaugh : Wow, Side and getting away from Dust and Ghost.
• ? : Where’s my team? Where they are? Where they're go?
• Tom French : So I'm gonna focus on getting them arted and then I'll pass them back to you guys and then I'll probably grab one at a time and I do this cinematic stuff to get that done. Game designers just don't play games all day loud, we do actually have to work.

343 Industries

• Scott Smis : Is this a popular American thing?
• ? : Yeah.
• ? : The thing is that you're supposed to get like as many different colors you can and if you don't do that you're really not doing it right.
• Scott Smis : Yeah, it's not very good.
• Matt Aldridge : Mostly for us now it's like nostalgia, if triggers like childhood memories but since you did yeah you're just hitting avoid.
• ? : Childhood memories of going to Hawaii, son of rich !

Production Meeting

• ? : All right, hey everybody. Thanks for coming in today. We're going to go over some of the new stuff that we've got planned for sustained, we've got a number of maps, vehicles, weapon variants, we're going to go over one of our newer items right now.
• Damon Conn : The H1 pistol for sustained and we're just going to make sure everybody's like cool with the work that's coming online for that in the near future, I think Andrew is scheduled to start on this like next week. You know, we know that we've decided to go away from doing a new version of the old pistol and kind of adhering to the original aesthetics from Halo 1 if you will.
• ? : So this is the original writ.
• ? : Yes, this is it.
• Damon Conn : Let's talk about animation, so there'll be a melee a special H1 flip, boom. Are we cool with that work? Good, no big deal. So all right great visual effects use reuse the Magnum.
• ? : Some good.
• ? : Fantastic.
• ? : All right!
• Christopher Blohm : You do not gonna wanna touch it at all. I mean you use exactly the Magnum from five.
• ? : Yeah, but it's… it's just a flash.
• ? : It's deadly though, I mean it'll be one of the most deadly guns in the game who want to I mean is the tracer different from one to five is there something else there.
• Jeffery Palmer : Yeah, I think I like if you guys want something different for the design to really show that it's punched up and it's something special especially a tracer in the muzzle flash ~~, ~~ have to.
• Daniel Wiksten : It is a mythic things we need to make it as cool as possible without me.
• ? : No ~~, but it does that is like high damage and I keep the retro look.
• Jeffery Palmer : I mean if we're going with the model mice to support it with the advice as well.
• ? : Then sound effects would be nice to authentic treatment firing sounds.
• Kira Anderson : We would like to do that.
• ? : Awesome!
• Kira Anderson : Four days.
• ? : Four days?
• Kira Anderson : Yep.
• ? : Okay. Cool. Done.
• ? : You're right Damon, though I would trade every weapon we do for this well.
• ? : That's a strong statement.
• ? : I would it's that important.

Magnum 3D Modeling

• Andrew Bradbury : Because it was so long ago in game terms, trying to capture that simplicity in our engine was surprisingly difficult. The original Magnum was a very simple model with simple shading, we weren't using things like normal maps to give it additional details, it adds back sort of geometric looking detail on to a very simple model when you add the normal map on to it's almost like magic where it adds back a level of detail that you wouldn't expect purely adding the normal map has brought us back to this point where it has so much extra detail. As far as the texture goes I tried to get it as accurately as possible even coming down to the individual sort of brush strokes that existed, and there's things like the Japanese characters which were in the original model but pretty subtle. That's the heel of 5’s magnum. So it has 15,000 triangles. The Halo CE magnum has almost 1400, this is an order of magnitude difference essentially. With the new one we’ve even gone in and actually added a bullet into the top of the magazine. I built it as pretty much a fully working pistol so these are the slide, it's completely removable, as a barrel and so that's proper rifling. Even a gas piston, the pieces will remove all too, so we can take off the top shroud and the laser sight and the hand guard will remove. We want to give the fans something that they love, so bringing the weapon back exactly as it was in the old game, they're gonna hopefully really appreciate the work we've gone to to make it look exactly as it was.
• Tom French : My way of working is I make post-it notes and I just scribble dumb things down, sometimes I don't even know what they mean later when I try to read them. And then this what we started doing was I had Sparth come up, and we can change the colors in Breakout now and I was like we need five different color palettes for the maps and so we sat and broke them all down. Whereas in preview we only had the two, now all of the Breakout maps will have a different look and feel when you start. The Pro Team guys have their maps and we basically were cleaning them up and arting them up. They were very blocky and they needed to kind of match the rest of the art style that we're doing for the rest of the Breakout maps, and then also thinking about that how do we showcase the Forge palette and the different objects and stuff that we have. Or like this originally when I first finished it was kind of boring looking, so I was like I need to detail and accent it up, and so I would do things like shove this little piece into the wall just to break up the lines of it, it's a pretty… they're meant to be pretty plain in simple walls. Break it up with the pillar which also ends up leading to this room having a pillar on the other side which changed the shape of this from being just a square box to having a little bit more of an organic shape in nature to it. Soon we're gonna have Cartographers coming in to help build maps because we're gonna build BTB maps in Forge which is kind of interesting and exciting. We have one that we kind of tested everything out can we build BTB in Forge, and we build kind of a remake of Blood Gulch internally, that we're really stoked on. So hopefully in the next couple months we'll have a full plan, actually an understanding of when they're gonna come in and actually start building.

Three Months Later
Halo 5 “Gold” Build

• ? : He just ran to their side Hydra.
• ? : Whoa watch the language phones.
• ? : Did you're so shameless it's only one shot it oh my dubskies.
• ? : Oh spread them like a book.
• ? : Oh my God party oh my god dude.
• ? : Tom in ice help one left left.
• ? : I just want one one random person to come.