Jaime Griesemer: At the begining of Halo's development
there was a team of five or six working on a PC sci-fi RTS similar to Myth, one of our previous games. Three years later there
were a team of 35 to 40 people working on an FPS for Xbox. As you can imagine, that required a lot of added staff and changes
to the design. Luckily we were able to conscript several Bungie employees from other projects, and were able to increase the
size of the team quickly. We also had experience making shooters, so we were able to move quickly in the new direction.
How many of your original ideas didn't make it into the final game? What
are your favourite bits that got left behind?
Things get cut during any development process, especially the kind of organic experimental
process we used on Halo, so lots and lots of ideas didn't make it into the game. One of my favourites was the exploding spear
gun - there isn't anything funnier than stabbing someone with a spear and watching him run around until he explodes. Even
though that weapon didn't make it in, it lives on in the plasma grenade. That happens fairly often; the best parts of something
that is cut are worked into the things that don't get cut.
There are some brilliant little touches in the game - the dreaming Grunts,
the wobble on the tank's aerial. Were these in the game from the very begining or were they added as finishing touches?
Those details are one of the things that Bungie prides itself on. It comes from
the combination of having extremely good programers writing very robust and comprehensive systems, and very creative artists
pushing those systems as far as they'll go. The reason the warthog has a speedometer and the AR shells have dents
from the firing pin are because everybody here is obsessed with creating an entire world, all the way down to the insignificant
details. Sometimes the details are so minute I doubt most people notice them. The tank aerial you mentioned doesn't just
wobble, it actually gets blown in a specific direction by the prevailing wind. The Assault Rifle has a very complicated
shell ejection system that you can almost never see because it opperates so quickly. Even though most people don't consciously
notice these details, it definately contributes to a more believable world.
Work-in-progress shots of the game showed a chain gun and a flame thrower.
Why were these dropped for the final game?
That's the danger of showing work in progress, especially when you're in the experimentation
stage of development. They were dropped for various reasons. For instance, the chain gun was cut because we decided to put
more of the high-powered weapons on vehicles. It was the right decision, but cutting is always a paiful process.
Were there scenarios planned for the game that didn't make it to the final
cut? Likewise, were there any enemy types that were designed but not used?
There were lots of scenarios and enemies that didn't we thought about but
eventually removed because they didn't fit the story we were trying to tell or there were better places to expand the effort.
Most of them never got out of the concept stage, but some of them were pretty far along when they were cut. Coming up with
ideas is the easy part; it's implementing as many as you can that's hard.
