The Sprint: Showtime

The Sprint: Showtime 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.

Kirkland, Washington

• Tim Longo : Demos are a big deal for the team. We have to keep going, E3 is happening but we ship this year. For shipping in fall you actually, by summer you need to have your beep together and be pretty, pretty done. We're getting down to sort of zero bug territory for the game, so people are really shutting things down. E3 happens right, smack in the middle of that, so it's super fun. So that's why everything's so busy right now. All of the missions are in heavy production right now, literally the whole campaign, warzone’s had their first playable milestones a few months ago and they're getting into polish phase and we're going to show that at E3 as well. The E3 demo needs to be crafted in some way, we have to actually get a lot across that wouldn't normally be in a mission, like we're classing it all, it's of all these big things are going to get over the first like three hours of the game, we have to kind of squeeze in here. We actually kind of acted out, we'd go through and start storyboarding the different moments that we want. It's something that people will watch mainly, not a lot of people will play it so it needs to be entertaining to view.

EPISODE 4 : SHOWTIME

May 18, 2015
Four Weeks Until E3

• Chris Haluke : Okay do you guys want to try to take a stab at our new path, stumble through? Okay on the count of three. One, two, three. Just go ahead guys, let's keep on going. Now the grunt is not timed properly. You're doing prep and dry run for our E3 stage presentation, so we're trying to make sure that the flow is correct, that we have everything tastes well, there's a lot going on in the demo so we just need to make sure that we're on. Ok I'm going in, Destruction Alley, I see the guardian. Ok I see it, I'm looking. Somebody hit the trigger. There's a lot of rust. Ok let's get going guys go go go go go. Go Vale. Ok I'm on Vales back pocket. All right I'm sliding them in the ICS I'm hanging I'm looking down. Ok you guys get going. All right TJ get to your mark, yeah we've got Atlas pose. I'm looking up and around I'm checking it out. Ok the crawlers are coming in. Phaeton’s in. I'm going to move to my mark. All right Buck get going slide out like we talked about, yep that's good. Shoot, shoot, shoot. Ok it's down alright so the soldiers should be coming in, I can see the effects. There's the first one the second one punches me then I forgot to shoot shotgun. You guys go to the left we're going to go to the right. Okay I'm gonna grab the plasma caster. You guys are off-screen we're shooting at the soldiers, I killed Buck or somebody killed Buck. That's crazy. Alright just move to your positions the warden should be coming in. Okay there he is we're all looking at him and his glory. Bam, he's got me he's bringing me in. What, the skybox is going mental.
• Tim Longo : Is he good?
• Chris Haluke : No. Ok let's go through her laundry list.
• Nicole Makila : The grunt on fire so is that too late that it happened.
• ? : Yeah I don't know why it fired too late.
• ? : Flippy’s the name of that guy.
• ? : Flippy?
• Chris Haluke : Did you just trigger effects the play off of his head on fire?
• Nicole Makila : And then when we going about I saw that hologram in there. So we have to talk about if we want that there or pull it out.
• Chris Haluke : It's getting better, it's getting closer to what our final will be but I know that Lighting's still going. I think there's a lot of effects work that still has to be done. Kenny looks lost.
• Tim Longo : Kenny. Do you really have to really put that thing I'll take it out?
• Kenny Magnussen : There’s no lightmaps anywhere.
• Tim Longo : Who controls the brightness of the hologram? Can you dim it way down?
• Kenny Magnussen : The main problem to me right now is that I need to on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday do cinematics. So I have no time to react to things. Because cinematics needs help. This is bananas. What texture is it there?
• ? : I don't even know, it looks like a cruiser?
• Tim Longo : Vege-games!

Forerunner Audio Design

• Kyle Fraser : Right now I’m just building sounds mostly for the new forerunner vehicle, the VTOL, and also different visual effects for forerunner characters, warden and soldier. So I'm just trying to get these kind of like glitchy, kind of zippy elements that I could kind of mix in with all these different animations of their little bits and pieces breaking apart, forming back together. This is the eurorack format it's basically just a modular synthesizer and you can pick and choose all the little different, different pieces of hardware and kind of form your own instrument. And you just get a lot of interesting textures that you normally wouldn't get when you're kind of just working inside the computer. I really like this approach because it's just infinite, it's like an open wormhole and you can go down there and come out with some really amazing, incredible *beep* but sometimes you can kind of get lost in there as well. Sending this basically into a mixer then splitting that out into multiple effects, so the output of that mixer goes out into all these other effects then I'll put all those effects go back into the mixer and it's just kind of this continuous loop of never-ending chaos. I'll start here with just like this contact microphone which will just take the actual like physical vibrations from my hand and that will be an actual sound source. I'd basically just have a little mason jar with two magnets basically tracking to each other and that way I could just kind of move this along and kind of get these nice little interesting textures of the actual magnet sliding against the little ridges of the glass and kind of get all these nice little glitchy actions going on. This is basically just a circuit light sensor, has a photodiode on it. Basically it just picks up the intensity of lights and then it translates that into audible frequencies. Can we cut this light here. It could be time consuming but it's always kind of worth it because it's just that little bit of unique element that only you have. Yeah there's definitely some motion textures going over there, the zaps they kind of got this release from it, it's really interesting.
• Reporter Sprint : He did you can be described. Yeah. That's my life, like, every day. Some of the really interesting stuff is probably more of the deep drilling stuff, that I can kind of conform into some nice different loops for vertical acceleration and horizontal pitch and all that stuff so I think a lot of that stuff will yield very beneficial or some of the beautiful source.
• Kenny Magnussen : There's fog coming flying here that they have added? And the hair is obviously being hit by more than eight dynamic lights, and you can see the fog coming in and the hair is rendering above the fog. There you see the hair doesn’t get affected by the effect.
• Olga Zinoveva : This fog was specifically requested by Brian so… and he wanted it to look very…
• Kenny Magnussen : We will but with patchy fog, not with effect because it can't render with the hair.
• Olga Zinoveva : Ok. Ok, awesome.

E3 Lightning Review

• Kenny Magnussen : So why we have four, five TVs in here’s because the consumers have different TVs and every TV has a little bit different saturation color, more blue, more green because they have decided that they like that more. So we just want to have a large range of different TVs to see exactly how our game will look.
• ? : Awesome! Look at that, look at those pelicans with sunlight hitting them.
• ? : Yeah!
• Olga Zinoveva : I don't think it looks like streaming dude, it’s more like shaders.
• ? : It's gone now.
• Kenny Magnussen : This level is important. Keep Halo at the people will do see at home or whatever this, people will play, play and play and play. We'll see how, if the game plays good or not. First of all this looks amazing.
• ? : Could you back it looks like it was getting the cascading shadow from that bridge. What? You get it on one part… yeah it's not hitting them. In the internal words of Kenny: whaaat?
• ? : What is that, where is that coming from?
• ? : Look up to the gap.
• Olga Zinoveva : Mike just came over and told me earlier and this is feedback from Sparth. I don't know if it's the signs in this hallway or the other one, where they flash to a green. He wants the green to be less green. So we have three weeks until ZBR for this map. For all the other parts we have till August.
• ? : Was that the water volume you're seeing in the distance that’s like aqua green type?
• Kevin Dalziel : Yeah it has the whole story of like everything's flooding here and all the miners are getting out of there.
• ? : It’s funny.
• Olga Zinoveva : Except for the 24 guys who are duking it out for a garage.
• Kevin Dalziel : Yeah they’re like hey let’s hit each other in the face.
• Kenny Magnussen : I think we're good we don't have to look at anything more.
• Olga Zinoveva : Kenny, no, no, we're gonna look at see this week.
• Kenny Magnussen : No we're not gonna look at ??? because we have to relight it.
• ? : Ok. Who's relighting ???
• Olga Zinoveva : No, I was the only one here who prepared an hour ahead of time you're not gonna look my way. Kenny, I’m so disappointed.
• Kenny Magnussen : But we don't have to look at it I've looked at it so many times.
• Olga Zinoveva : How do you know?
• Kenny Magnussen : I have.
• Josh Marvel : Um we're fighting right now.
• Kenny Magnussen : Wanna join?
• ? : No, I was saying this room is booked for 2:30.
• Kenny Magnussen : Ok so then we have to go. Good, perfect. Sort of Olga, I’ll give you some nice person or something.

Phaeton Audio Review

• Sotaro “Tajeen” Tojima : The VTOL is super important vehicle for Halo 5 but this is a flying vehicle use some consistent looped sounds, like a just imagine such a sound you know… It's consistent very noisy loop. So that kind of sounds will makes our mixing pool broken super easily. You know we couldn't hear any enemies gunshot or explosion what any important feedback. We’ve been pretty much working on this sound design for pretty much two years.
• Kyle Fraser : So yeah I just have a bunch of different ones here can't you check them out.
• Tajeen : Yeah this is cool sound. Okay the second one please. Yeah I don't like this one high-frequency one. Can you back to the previously?
• Kyle Fraser : I mean this thing you know it kind of sounds funny by itself but like with everything else kind of going on top of it really kind of cuts through.
• Tajeen : So that can last part of the video, can you play it, it's actually Banshee. High frequency and super low frequency. Why the Banshee sound does work very well in the game is actually can static sound itself it's pretty quiet, you know actually, and this like boost sound itself is clearly more powerful and probably we should bring a pretty much similar approach to the VTOL. So on top of this like base sound you will work on the firing sound as well.
• Kyle Fraser : I think you guys just gotta record all these mouths sounds.
• Tajeen : My English is not so good you know I'm still running at Engrish and sometimes I got some noises by mouth. It’s very helpful. It's like an international language right.
• Kyle Fraser : Exactly I mean that's the cool thing about sound.
• ? : That's Fleebie.
• T.J Perillo : Luke has a habit of improvising Fleebie’s name.
• Tim Longo : Fireteam Fleebie!
• T.J Perillo : Cup-cup is in the game though, is he not?
• ? : We've been in this room too long! What's happening right now?

Twelve Days Until E3

• ? : On three. 1, 2, 3, ok I'm looking at my mark. Okay we got the grunt, flowbee. Going outside, soldiers coming in, switching targets tracking, keep on going, so far so good. All right go, go, go. Much better. Okay hanging looking down.
• ? : It's coming together it's looking great. Every time I look over an artist shoulder it looks amazing. Yeah it's super impressive so everybody's feeling really good about where we are right now.
• ? : At this point we've had all eyes on the project we had most everyone at 343 come in and give warzone a playtest and tell us what they think. Team is being just absolutely killing it with the long hours as we push towards this E3 demo.
• ? : We can get their court!
• ? : Red team's pushing for us!
• ? : Then we gotta push it harder. This is Warzone not Arena.
• ? : Summer has hit Seattle and it is a great time to just take a break and a load off. As we've kicked those final bugs out for E3 and then finally push toward ship.

End of Sprint

• T.J Perillo : That’s a wrap.