Halo Infinite – Map Developers on Making a Multiplayer Map

Hubby join us first on stage from the audio team give him a round of applause got some fans got some fans up next we’ve got Cliff Schultz you might recognize him from our Forge fundamentals videos and our Forge panel earlier today and then last but certainly not least Donnie head of our

Multiplayer map art team Donnie thank you so much for joining us today how’s it going guys Robbie come on in a little bit come on in I thought you were going to sit uncomfortably I know I was like let’s let’s get cozy let’s get comfy we’re talking some Halo multiplayer uh guys

How’s it going you enjoying yourself here today yeah as Donnie got here it’s been even better definitely I agree with that yeah Donnie always brightens up my day too but uh let’s talk about multiplayer maps what goes into it you guys ready yeah let’s go I think so yeah

All right so you guys want to do a little intro background for you yeah hey Donnie Taylor I’ve been at 343 for 11 years now basically since it started as a relatively small team out in Willows uh I started as a lead technical or sorry a technical artist lead technical artist environment artist

Multiplayer art lead art director been here for all the games worked some on reach as well uh happy to be here to share what I know 12 years 12 years dang I’m old nice not old experienced experienced you say to old people how about you Cliff yeah so my name is

Cliff Scholl I’m uh lots of fans in the crowd you saw I was originally a community forager and I got my way into doing level design so I’ve been at three for three now for about five years has it really been five years later yeah weird right yeah that’s incredible

Robbie how about you my name is Robbie Elias I’ve been with 343 for over 11 years uh started working on Halo 4 in the early days and have been there since yeah of course of course uh so first I’m going to talk a little level design yeah so this is

The level design section of the of the whole panel uh obviously as you can see it says cake first broccoli last that’s how I describe level design we get to do design that’s like the sweet spot of everything and then once you’re done there’s a lot of hard work after work

Afterwards managing the map making sure it’s true so uh some of the things I’m gonna be talking about is going to be how does it start what are the things you consider about making a map things are running through your head so forth so some of the things I’m

Thinking about like when I’m making a map I’m thinking about like what kind of play Styles what kind of equipment items uh things on the map I want to put on and the other thing too that’s really important is the early development of a map uh during infinite is the sandbox is undefined

We’re trying to be malleable with their Maps so we as a team can work it’s not just me about making a sick map in just only me it’s about everyone succeeding and so it was kind of difficult at first trying to be like okay all the player heists set in what

All these equipments how are they interacting are they too powerful too little how can we showcase them um so yeah I mean uh I mean there’s a couple images here on screen one is early Aquarius and early earlier Behemoth uh from our uh designed by Tyler and shrewd

Now if we want to go to yeah yeah so testing and iteration the biggest thing I’ll say is don’t need jerk let things soak get enough feedback in there and sometimes people say like oh man this map is terrible if her name is Nate you just say his dog

The thing is uh yeah you let it soak because maybe there’s something awesome and people haven’t found the depth of the map right because the map is going to be be played for all the life cycle so how do you find that depth and how do you not just change something to accommodate

For something for someone uh yeah let’s go to the art part so this is a oh the handing off to Art right um this is a this is where I call broccoli because it’s when handing off to Art you have to kind of educate the artist

That you’re paired with right so it’s a collaboration so so they’re sophisticated no no they’re definitely educated but their perception of the map they’re looking at the artistic standpoint how do they make like key features Stand Out Beauty shots so forth basically in the in the sight lines right in the

Sideline block them intentionally I wonder if Cliff will notice um so yeah it’s like so my perception of the map is like hey these sight lines are important we can’t pit like a tree vine here because you’re able to be able to snipe across the map or hey we can’t

Put a crate here because now they can be able to jump up and so it’s a collaboration sometimes like ours like Cliff what you made is terrible like we cannot make sense of this and so we’ll have to turn bring it back in make it make sense for gameplay and the

Arts vision of of the map that they’re trying to go after which normally comes first the gameplay or the art chicken or the egg gameplay gameplay it’s kind of a mix right because sometimes like I gave you a free out well it’s like I want to work with the artist like saying like

Why do we envision this map to be right like for example fragmentation we automatically knew is going to be a forerunner map here’s a here’s kind of like a style guide because it’s like a city map compared to a natural train map you got to have that kind of Define

Because sometimes city maps might be thin walls and other Maps might have like thick walls and so like how do you make your design play well but also be able to lean into the art direction of the map yeah that extends really well it’s a forerunner

Which has a lot of angles and a lot of things that you churchly don’t see that affect us from art but also affect gameplay quite a bit yeah yeah that Foreigner art style you kind of have to know going into a forerunner map that you’re going to have those ramps angles

And all that stuff gotcha and then so up next yeah so yeah the your little Financial polish yeah um there is a when when you get the map back from Mark you got to make sure all the game modes are working got to make sure all the spawns are working then like there’s

Like little Geo things like where like a lot of the ramps in our games that will actually put like invisible like stair steps I I think I actually have like a picture of it later on yeah but it’s like how do you make the map feel and

Flow well so players don’t get like toke on something and blame the map like oh there’s a terrible map because I was like on an Overkill spree here and I caught the stinking Edge yeah those ankle catches sometimes yeah yeah I know what you’re talking about so yeah this is uh

This is a a fly through of a early day uh recharge blockout I took this over from uh a designer name um Adrian but uh yeah yep he made a Plaza from Halo 5. I believe we did rig as well in Halo 5. yes he did yeah excellent Maps

So you can see this looks pretty darn close to of recharge is final yeah the bones are there right like this this shot right here we did not have the Death Pit and um when we’re starting to get equipment in like repulsa got was made and we’re like

This is this is awesome how do we how do we showcases on the map here and so we blew out that section of the wall made a Death Pit and it also adds something like to entice players to jump across oh there’s an energy sword there but

There’s a guy underneath with a Repulsor like being a troll and Wayne to pushed you back into the Death Pit right yeah and if this guy with a sword he’s even more clever he gets a grab hook to come back up and back whack him so equipment kind of helping change that

Map up a little bit you had to make some changes once that came in say that again sorry once you started getting more equipment items in the sandbox that also impacted how you approached making the map Totally it’s like like I was saying like sandbox is not defined yet how do

We like showcase their stuff when there’s something that’s really awesome and how do we change our maps and I can’t shake uh hands well with with the sandbox very nice so yeah we go to the next slide a couple comparisons these are some like different angles from the

Changes that we’ve done so uh the the Pistons or B if you want to call it um that was wider they had more more pistons in the middle of it we reduce it down the top goal didn’t have the catwalk that went over um and if we go to the next one yeah

You can see the long call you didn’t have the overhang up there the I call it nerdy nades but the nade panel up there was really high you had to jump up and uh when you’re on C you can sh the problem with that one you can shoot

People’s feet and they didn’t know where they’re getting shot at so we had to bring it down and on the second image you the stairs wasn’t an elbow so we had to adjust that to make that um flow well instead of having like people can just jump up the stairs automatically

Uh let’s go to the next one yeah oh yeah middle is kind of the same back back uh gold there’s a height up there we flattened that down to allow the flow to be a little more understandable because a lot of times what would happen people would come through here and

Automatically get back whacked um and let’s go to the next one sure okay so yeah elevator oh actually sorry this top image uh control br this this has been stayed pretty dang true uh this this area worked really well for the map but we didn’t have to

Change much and the bottom one is we did not have the elevator like jump through so we added that in there as well uh the back jump up that you can clamber up all right and then this is uh this is an early version of streets block out

Should get started here in a second there we go so yeah this map was a lot smaller so we we kind of added some areas to uh to increase um room for the map and and how players are flowing through and I’m probably butchering this because I was not the

Designer on this this is Alex Bean he’s probably in the crowd right now shaking his head yelling at player metrics on me but again this map is also it stayed pretty true to its original yeah you can comes right like yet yep I think that was like one of the

Last changes Alex done to the map we cut some Alleyways for Forge late into the game or late into the development say that again we cut some back ways for Forge later on yeah so there is secret back ways to the map that we’ve added so people can build a forge on them

Uh yeah so this is the biggest change you you cannot see from there was no b-rails and so that was another change that Alex has done that helped open the map yeah that that slight air that area right there is a little bit changes instead of the jump up into that bricks

Room it’s kind of that ramp yeah but otherwise pretty darn faithful pretty much identical yeah so yeah so here are some here are some different angles uh you can definitely tell like the from Cafe how the shotgun spawn how that’s changed up a lot uh it was really cool when Alex

Put that long sight light in that that was really fun uh obviously the top image I have uh it shows how you didn’t have that back uh back behind a to build a flow through there yeah behind a to uh towards that Cafe yeah and then the top image shows the B rails

Is not opened up uh same as the same as bottom one and then uh so the top one is a B Street one thing you can’t really tell in here is it used to be actually a lot higher so when you’re climbing up there it was it was actually a bigger uphill

And uh the one thing that I was really upset about that Alex got rid of which made sense if you look at the very top there used to be a platforming stand up and that’s where shocks originally spawned on the map I really enjoyed that area I

Was always a nerd up there and he removed my little nerdy ledge I would remove remove your nerdy ledge too don’t worry art was very happy as well rest in peace okay yeah so this car uh uh our invisible Collision so uh Kaylee our lead level designer he kind

Of taught me this trick and so around like these corners of the ramp stairs we will add like little like boxes on top we don’t want it super smooth because we still want to feel like it’s an edge but we don’t want players to get caught and being like

They can’t see why they’re getting caught and they get you know they’re in the middle of in a br fight and strafing another good example above the player model on the right uh that was actually added later on because players would get caught and they did not understand why

They caught so that’s another good quality of life from on top of the boxes to the ramp Yep this is good for art too because we don’t have to make like if we had to actually make the geometry to account for that little ramp physically the ramp would always look weird or feel

Weird or we’d have to solve it in a way that would just make the flow of the map feel different so this is a nice compromise between Art and Design to keep the map flow well but still hold true to what a ramp looks like

Yeah I think that’s the last of my panel all right I think very nice yes let’s talk about art wait we gotta go back one I got an intro oh sorry my bad no no it’s fine I mean we can go ahead hey Donnie Taylor here to chat with you about art

Um as Cliff just talked about we are a big gameplay first that extends all the way to Art uh I know from lots of experience that we have the ability to sort of enhance or break a lot of what the blackout was and a really big part

Of what we do is making sure that we maintain the magic that we found during the months of play tests and iterations and stuff that the design team do and another thing about art is it’s a it’s a conversation right there’s a cinema like a passing of the torch but we don’t run

And leave design behind we’re constantly interacting with them throughout the entire phase they’re in our Art reviews back and forth it’s very collaborative we can go to that face I got you all right thank you so what you’re going to see here is live fire internal name is interlock it’s

Gonna probably call all of our Maps the wrong name so I apologize there but you can kind of see as we progress through so the next few slides are going to talk at a very high level there’s a lot that goes into this art side of things like a

Lot of people involved a lot of process it’s just a lot to cover in the 30 minutes and 20 seconds we have left so I’m going to stay at kind of a high level and sort of walk you through what it takes to from a map to go from block

Out to basically in your hands before we talk to audio go to the next slide all right so after we get the blackout from design we do what we call a proxy phase you can kind of think of this like a squint test or like a thumbnail it’s

Kind of where we take the block out and turn into the essence of what the map will be that means time of day lighting rough materials like is the tree Brown is the rock gray is the good example here right you know we were going to

Have a very nice feel for each stuff we knew for blueprint we wanted it to be like a water treatment facility so we had a lot of things in mind and that sort of color swash kind of gives us in a good State as we’re running through

The map and also gives us an idea of as we’re moving if we’re breaking anything or if the lighting is too dark it’s just a good setup phase also in this phase we do things that we set up rough effects anything that moves I should move closer

Hello anything that moves or uh would Impact gameplay um stuff like that and for those wondering uh blueprint is recharge sorry yes blueprint is recharge yes there in the bottom left on your screen yes apologies no worries keep me honest yeah I got you I got you

So after we take our proxy actually we take our proxy phase we run it through our amazing concept team and we have them sort of flesh out the vision in a very fast two dimensional way they can concept stuff way faster than it will take us to realize in 3D it kind of

Gives us a head start on things we Concepts pretty much everything we’ve concept trees we concept the beautiful Beauty corners or points of interest that you see on screen uh props basically anything that adds life or helps us tell a story in a visual sense and this phase continues throughout most

Of the map well into the next phases because we’re constantly iterating on it constantly getting art Direction feedback and we keep moving through the process and are these Concepts paint overs or are they separate they’re mixed most of them hear our paint overs uh for instance live fires are sort of Beauty

Corner area paint over where we take a section of the map and we take it as far as we can with what we have so that we can make sure that our assumptions about what the map will look like actually read well and fill well and it also sort

Of gives us the mindset of what we need to build or what tech we are missing because oftentimes for instance for Behemoth we ran into a lot of roadblocks and as we were going through we realized it would be awesome to have tired treads on the sand our trained tool at the time

Didn’t actually let us do that so we added it to our list had people start working on it it’s sort of like a good good chance to gut check a vertical slice is what most people would probably call it but on the art sense it’s also a

Good chance to get us sort of the lighting mood the lower uh right is Aquarius and originally we actually had painted a red side and a blue side sort of a warning side that was supposed to be shut down and overgrown we later ended up changing aside to not be uh so

It’s a good idea of what’s going on sweet all right so artify is probably our biggest phase and probably where we will cause design the most headache which I’m very proud of um it’s kind of where we take our squint test and we bring it into Focus it’s uh

We take everything there’s a rough material and we slowly start adding to it section by section we do a very solid lighting pass um we take and start tuning our materials start finding our concrete basically anything that’s basically I don’t want to say making them at prettier more bringing the map to

Realization essentially like at the end of the artifact phase we’ve done our goal if you can tell what the map is it’s mostly shippable though we’d still want to do a lot more work to it and you can just sort of get the feel it’s also

A good chance as we find as you run through the map a lot of people make assumptions as they’re running through a blackout or a proxy about what it might look like and they sort of get married to that look and then when we get to this phase oftentimes we Veer in a

Direction and we get some interesting feedback about people being like oh you went you went that way and it’s it’s very good back and forth it actually dictates sort of the way that we change our Maps but yeah blue Ford oh right we got a video so this is actually recharged

About halfway through the artify process I think I still have the name on here say blueprint so apologies but this gives you a pretty good idea of where we’re we’re almost about to roll into the Polish phase for this so it gives you a good idea of where we are what’s

Survived the artifact phase and also what changed during the artify phase you can see a lot of it is dark there’s some neat Shadow stuff in there that really hard to dial back because it it wasn’t great for performance but it also made the players very hard to read and we’re

Constantly going back and forth trying to figure that out you can also see you’ve got a good material responses there’s lighting bugs that I’m sure you’ll see with the lights flickering uh got some animations in but we don’t have the final affection for it but this is

This is a very solid phase for us to be in and this map sort of does a really good job of expressing Where We Are to get my little Art Cuts about usually after this phase what we do particularly for this map is we’d actually send it back to concept again

And we’d be like okay it’s missing like for this one right we’re like it’s missing color it’s very monochromatic and we go through the phase or quickly just experimenting adding color changing of materials and a very fast two-dimensional way we can kick out stuff in like a couple of days that

Would probably take us a week to do and we find a look that we like we move forward this is actually great the barrels because this was our temp solve for trying to figure out some weirdness that we’re running into and eventually end up finding a slightly better

Solution that was that was fun this is also I believe these don’t move yet do they no they don’t move yet um this was us blocking in and then later adding sort of some animations that would be that we also again later tweaked I think in Polish phase we ended

Up tweaking him because we just couldn’t find the right Rhythm to them the other interesting thing about this phase is we ended up changing a lot of the lighting for navigation a lot of times you can see two doors that unless you know unless the lighting or there’s

Something that guides you you don’t actually know that the two rooms are connected behind so we do a lot of back and forth with our lighting and a lot of back and forth with play test play test a ton to really make sure that everything we’re doing not only informs

The story and the lore of what we’re trying to tell with the map but also again keeps the player flowing naturally through the map you know having that good gameplay readability really comes in the gameplay yeah to add to that you were talking about the lighting this is a good

Example of design working with lighting the back orange hallway we did on deliberate because players could not see where that would go and so we wanted to paint that orange so they understand that which doorways led to where you know back connection so if you’re standing like a Whirlpool room you see

The one doorway you can see the top goal they’re like oh I’m pretty sure that’s connects there did you match the colors yeah it gives you also a good chance to be like hey if I go here I intercept him or if he goes there I start watching that door that’s

Where he’s going to come out because there’s nowhere else he can come out gotcha makes sense yeah keep moving yeah we can keep moving sorry my eyesight sweet so this is probably one of my favorite phases which is the Polish phase um it’s only about 15 it’s one of our

Shorter phases when it comes to Art but it really accounts for a tremendous amount of life that we add to the map later on I have slides of the differences between the each ones and you can really tell just how much we do we do everything not just the visuals

You see right a lot of the grease pass as Kaylee calls it where we go through the Collision we work with design on uh more tweaking of sort of the ambience we spend a lot of time working on the post-processing the map so that we pull the players out since we let players

Choose a wide variety of colors and skins and shapes it’s very easy for you to sort of play the map with a specific skin to get an advantage we work really hard to make sure that we can pull everyone out as best we can make everyone readable and then we also added

Tremendous amount of kickables that I’m sure design loves that we add and also begin setting up sort of like the foundations of working with Robbie on the audio side about what sort of sounds work out when this is usually around the time that audio steps in and starts doing just a rough pass

Yeah yeah so I can probably fit in on this we’re getting there we’re getting there we’re getting there there’s a few there’s a few things that have to be true for a map before audio steps in because of a lot of our uh audio systems that I’m sure Robbie will will happily

Tell us about uh yeah this is this is you can really tell particularly if you go to the next slide oh apologies we skipped this stuff I’m sorry I missed the most important step which is all of the content we have been putting into our map over the past

Several months uh always comes with a little bit of attacks uh it’s not free and we usually find that in bugs I think a great way I like to think about our bugs as you’re playing with a jingle board that’s a mile in diameter and a mile high and you remove a piece

Or add a piece and you think it’s good and then someone on the other side of the jingle board pulls a piece and then somewhere on the other side a part of the wall falls down you never find it yeah until later and how we find a lot

Of our bugs is either through our extensive play testing or through our awesome QA department or honestly even through our fans and our Ur tests who are very creative at breaking our game which we greatly appreciate uh you can see everyone knows what the upper right

One is that’s one of my favorites that was a great bug when we found that the bottom one actually is uh Bazaar early on we knew we wanted a ton of fruit stands like a ridiculous amount of fruit stands and it looks like you got a lot

Of fruit stands so we were we were testing our boundaries I like to do that with the design team we’re testing our limits how much Dynamic stuff could we put in before they start to freak and so I think we put in like I don’t know 20 or 30

Um turns out our engine doesn’t like that and they they grow slightly sentient and start attacking you when you start running into them uh it’s it’s really fun uh there’s a lot of we had a lot of fun with these fruit stands everything from the way they broke to

The way they broke our game um it was it was really awesome this is probably one of my favorite bugs uh also probably led to a lot of our fruit stands getting cut but uh you know you’ll win some you lose some I remember the wet floor sign was in I

Believe the first tech preview yeah before infinite came out and that was a fun one for people to find yeah I think some somewhere along the lines I got blamed for that I don’t know why um but it’s not my fault I blame Cliff no actually I think I know

We’re not going to talk about that hey I do want to add something Donnie about working with art and you mentioned lighting I guess whenever uh lighting artist has come talk to me especially Tyler he uh I always tell him like Hey Tyler you’re here to brighten up my day

Okay I’m sorry for the dad jokes I enjoyed it thank you next slide all right all right so this is this is a great example of uh moving from sort of the design phase to the end of our uh art phase essentially at this point what you’re seeing on our right is what

You’re playing today it’s had all of us polish it’s all set up and ready to roll this was actually about the phase and looks about right where we’re going to hand over to our friend over here and this is about when they plug in fully awesome

So I’m going to talk about the audio for the maps uh we usually come in around the Geo lock stage so if you want to go to the next PATH I want to recognize that that edit you made to the slide he’s got a headphones Donnie did that for me

Was not the chief helmet no yeah you have to go back and look at it someone’s gonna have to check the rebroadcast I did notice yours had a bunch of color on it yeah I felt bad I was like added color and everyone else didn’t and I

Thought that so I modified Cliff asked me to do something and then uh Robbie I just said here you go very nice very nice um so the first pass that audio does is an Acoustics pass and this determines um our obstruction values for all sounds and our occlusion for all sounds so

Obstruction is basically um if a structure is in between the sound and you as the player it will cause the sound to sound muffled or not as clear oh yeah not close enough a little closer yes I was worried about me too I’m an audio person so I forget

Um so that’s what obstruction is it’s basically how Geo can affect a sound so if you go behind a structure like in that picture there’s the whirlpool machine in recharge between the one sparked and firing and the other one listening to it that gunfire is going to sound muffled because there’s a

Structure in front of it occlusion is how sounds travel from room to room so in Old Halo games we did not have an advanced system but in this one we have an advanced system that simulates audio traveling from room to room better and more accurate to real life so what it’ll

Do is if somebody is firing in a different room the audio will actually reposition itself to a portal or a doorway so that it plays from the nearest open area to the next room this actually helps gameplay a lot because not only are you hearing somebody firing

Their gun in another room but you’re also hearing it from the nearest direction to get there in old games you just hear that somebody was firing on the other side of the wall and if you didn’t know the map really well you’d have to figure out how to get there so

It kind of helps you without you even realizing it I remember what was like five or six years ago when this first came on and you were demonstrating it how much of a difference it made through the map just it was it definitely makes the map sound better as well so that’s a

Very nice detail that’s working behind the scenes that does a lot of work if you go to the next slide how we do it is a technical audio designer will actually go in and draw acoustic zones for every room what is that you not me actually we have a large

Audio team that does this kind of stuff so he writes on tanks what was that he rides on tanks yeah I just does and take fancy selfies but um basically they’ll draw acoustic zones for every room and they’ll draw acoustic portals for every doorway and basically

An acoustic Zone will scan a room and figure out all the Geo that’s in there and lets the audio know what it can and can’t go through and acoustic portals lets it know what it can use to get from one zone to another it can’t go from one zone to another

Zone without a portal acoustic zones also contain a lot of information like the type of Reverb to use the type of gun tail to play and also the type of 2D sound to play acoustic portals tell the sound how much of it can come through it so it’s like the difference between an

Open window and a closed window it’s also one of the reasons why audio comes in so late into the maps development because it would be very bad if Robbie and the team set all that up and we decided to remove a wall or close the door any differences between the Geo

After that point can throw it off so if you throw a grenade in a corner you might not hear it clearly because it thinks that there’s Geo there when it’s not so it has to come in after Geo lock and Donnie has to behave and not change

The Geo unless it’s a bug and then I’m allowed to fix it yeah and then create another bug in the process um this is a picture of live fire with all the zones and portals that Zeke our senior technical audio designer Drew spent a lot of time doing that uh if you

Notice that line of blue along the right side that’s actually several portals that he had to place just so you can hear the Pelican that flies in the sky box without that you would never hear that Pelican because it’s in a different Zone than the rest of the play Space

Yeah I was curious why why place the audio zones on the edge of the map just for that exterior you have to account for any fancy art stuff Donnie does in the Sky Box I said dig a little bit more why we do the fancy art stuff in the sky boxes we

Have um there’s a lot of behind under the hood technical scaffolding that we have to set up and one of those things is we partition up our level for memory optimization and for um sometimes for more light map resolution or I guess in our case like probe resolution so that

Creates again more interesting things to solve and that’s where the audio team came in it’s like okay we can solve the fact that you now took your map and basically split it into two maps so we appreciate it I appreciate you Robbie thank you um so

Another pass we do is we place audio emitters so a technical audio designer will go in and they’ll place um audio emitters so that I can play 3D sounds to support anything that Donnie creates like a machine event our team creates art team creates I will stop blaming our Donny for everything

Um so there’s some examples of things that audio emitters can be used for they can be a point source or a spline a spline is just a complex line that we can use to cover rivers and longer things where we want the sound to follow the player as they’re walking along it

They also have you see the graph in the top right corner that’s a attenuation curve and that is basically how we control how the sound uh is like the volume of the sound as you walk away from it so every sound has an attenuation curve and it’s custom and

Set up unique just for that moment every single one of those audio emitters you custom tune yeah the most popular one is the footstep one pro team loves to complain or iterate on that one so footsteps sounds are always a popular topic or discussion in any game really

Yeah you just have a ninja fantasy yeah oh yeah yeah uh but so you you really go through on every map customize all of these yes and if you go to that that’s a slide yeah you’ll see how many um so this is a top down of bizarre and

Joshua our technical audio designer went in and was meticulous and placed every one of those green dots which represent the sounds and the list of audio positionals for the map is on the left there so there’s a lot of different things that we placed in there to make

Bizarre sound like it’s alive all the more reason why Robbie will murder us if we go in and change anything after this stuff yeah these have to be aligned with the art if they’re not then it’ll you’ll hear like water drips when there’s no puddle or you’ll hear like a vent when

There’s no vent gosh gotcha makes total sense uh we also do audio for dynamic objects so like btb big moments for example or like the loot cave and fragmentation um also the piston and recharge and the uh breakable stuff and bizarre um one of the most complex ones that’s

Worth talking about is the laser in breaker so that one was a technical and creative challenge so we had to work around a lot of technical limitations that our engine has as well as creative challenges you also had to work early with design on that yeah so do you see

How it played the whole map yeah I was actually just about to touch on that that comes into the creative challenge there so level design actually wanted a sound that you can hear across the map so that players know that the laser is about to Fire and they don’t die in an

Unjust way um so I had to figure out a sound that could play across the map every minute for 15 minutes so on average in a match it’s gonna play 15 times so I had to figure out how to make a sound that did not annoy players but

Also communicated that the laser was going to go on uh it was really tough that’s actually a good point to touch on for um Greg’s map where we put that beautiful waterfall in and then you were like why did you put an amazing waterfall five feet away from our play

Space do you not know how loud a waterfall actually is yeah that attenuation curve for that waterfall was set up meticulously by Joshua as well to make sure that you weren’t here in White Noise the whole time you were in the map I also had to make sure the sound of the

Waterfall was not too white noisy too because that can really disrupt gameplay and it’s important to note that all ambient sounds need to sound a little bit stepped back so that they don’t distract from sandbox sounds because we don’t want players not to be able to

Hear gunfire or not to be able to hear footsteps so there’s a balance between putting sounds in there and not getting in the way of the important sounds so there’s a hierarchy and ambiences are definitely on the lower but we want to make sure it’s as realistic as possible

Yeah so gameplay always comes first still yes that is always correct person that we have to follow kind of thing now I’m going to talk about creation so any given map will create about 300 to 500 sounds for the map just for the map alone just for ambiences and the bottom

Left corner you’ll see a digital audio workstation and that’s where I create the sounds and that’s a picture of the session where I created the sounds for streets so basically what I do is I pull in a lot of source from several different locations I might record it

Make it with a synthesizer or find it in our internal library and I will affect it so that it sounds appropriate for the Halo Universe and it fits in the map and I will manipulate them by either layering splicing them together affecting them with a plug-in or stretching it pitching it down there’s

Lots of tools you can kind of do to do that on the top right you see a picture of my eurax synthesizer I’m quite proud of that thing it makes some really sweet really proud of that thing yeah um this is a video that we’re going to

Play I’m not sure if you’re going to be able to hear it but it’s basically shows uh collecting different source and the areas in which the source is kind of used in levels you probably don’t hear it here but hopefully you can hear it on the stream since we can’t hear it here

I’ll just talk over it yeah have you ever lost a mic in the water those mics were awesome okay very careful answer there oh there’s the sound now okay it might sound terrible here because of all the sound going around but just know it sounds awesome video

This is actually a rain machine I made in our Foley room to simulate rain so that I can put it in recharge does your does your boss know you were doing that huh does your boss know you were doing that in this case now that’s where all of our cups went to

Oh it really gets Bassy up here huh wow I apologize in advance that’s a fridge that I found in a hotel room punching the table yeah it’s a massage machine that I’m using to make rattles for streets that was an expensive Red Bull yeah you just paid twice for it

Well I I canceled yeah so all the computer sounds go there a lot of computers hums and stuff like that refrigerator sounds go there like the one I recorded in that hotel room the beep from the Red Bull a Red Bull on Aquarius yeah these sounds were recorded at the computer Museum in

Seattle I love that place and the rattle from the stadium is right there so all of these are those custom audio emitters you were talking about earlier yeah perfect like hand touch fine-tuned to be perfect it sounds so huge on here so if anyone saw our behind the scenes

Videos uh that we were doing a few years ago uh Robbie was in charge of doing that had a bunch of video footage and the audio sounds recorded and you can you can see some of those on the Halo YouTube channel uh that was an effort pretty much driven by Robbie and the

Audio team uh they just love sharing their work with the community and we’re getting a closer look here now too so you see all the synthesized sounds those were used for the breaker laser as well as a lot of those metal creaks and hits were used for the structure that kind of

Moves on the right side of the breaker laser obviously it sounds completely different from the source because you have to kind of dial it back and tune it so it sounds great in the environment another thing to note is the breaker laser actually sounds different if

You’re on the top layer versus if you’re on the bottom layer oh wow and that’s done using acoustic zones and mixed States if you’re in the bottom layer you hear more lava being affected by the laser if you’re on the top you hear more of just the laser and what’s producing

It kind of thing gotcha so more that Splash yeah on the lower level we wanted it to sound much more nastier when you’re down there versus a little bit cleaner when you’re on the top of it and we do that with acoustic zones and mix

States that can be set on them so uh the technical audio team did a lot of favors for me I called in pretty much every one for the breaker laser and that’s uh how we do the audio for the map awesome well closing thoughts guys thank you so

Much thank you yeah I guess the last thing I would like to add as well there’s only three of us up there it actually takes a small army to build all of these Maps we’re very happy to be representing uh but there is a tremendous amount of people uh even

Tremendous amount of disciplines that weren’t necessarily covered in here they’re all an amazing part of the team that it takes to actually take everything that we do and present it forward so we really appreciate you spending almost 45 minutes with us uh anything else you two would like to add

Yeah you know you’re saying about the big team size yeah I get asked a lot about like K Cliff like what’s your pro tip about like you know if I join the industry or anything like that like was like my biggest thing I’ll say is like teamwork like I can’t stress that enough

You could probably be extremely good at your job or your skill but if you have no teamwork no one’s going to be wanting to like see your vision through no one’s going to want to like be around if you’re grumpy and so forth so if you’re working together like you can achieve

Your dreams my dreams Robbie dreams and so forth yeah got to be a team player yeah absolutely totally yeah for Carson that laser wouldn’t sound good you survived Robbie by the way you did good uh any any glass closing thoughts uh no no I’m good no you good you’re good awesome awesome

Well thank you so much for joining us up here can I get a round of applause for the team behind makeup Halo infinite thank you everyone uh but guys thank you so much for joining putting this presentation together for everyone and uh I hope you all enjoyed and we will be

Uh doing even more Community stuff here on the stage we’ve got I believe Steve and Jen coming up to read some awesome lines