Halo Wars Single Player Campaign Cinematic: The film that opens the SPC has been released and can be seen on many sites. Here it is on Gamespot.

http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/strategy/halowars/video.html?sid=6198625

Halo Wars in Korea: As part of their Asian PR tour, Harter Ryan and Brian Lemon finished at the International Content Creator’s Conference in Busan, South Korea. There they made presentations to the Korea game media and met with some fans eager to see the game and try it. Here is a photo of Harter making a presentation.

Halo Wars at Tokyo Game Show: Graeme Devine and Bill Jackson went to this major game show, presenting both a keynote address and then several days of interviews off-site. Showing the single player campaign was new and created a renewed interest for journalists who had seen the basic game already. One of the messages they concentrated on was that Halo Wars is a true Halo universe game with a great Halo story. You can watch five minutes of the game from the keynote with Graeme driving and giving commentary here.

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/41105.html?type

Or you can see Graeme giving a demo to Kotaku here.

http://kotaku.com/5060932/but-im-talking-bout-halo-wars?cpage=2&sort=asc#viewcomments

This was a grueling trip that included doing some voice over edits in LA on the way to Japan. There were long rehearsals in Tokyo, mostly because our guys had to wait while the other presenters went over their parts. Graeme and Bill have been involved in much of our PR work around the world, and Graeme says he went over 100,000 air miles for the year on the way out there. We hope the good showing is reflected in success for the game in Japan.

Halo Wars Update: We have reached the point where pretty much everything that is going to be in the game is there. The official milestone is called “Content Complete.” For months now every time I played there seemed to be something new, from sound effects, music, animations, to units, etc. I expect to see less new stuff each session, but an increasingly better performance, overall polish, and smoother experience.

Over the past few weeks the team has pushed really hard, working extra hours, to get the single player campaign finished and all other features working. As part of that process a few things on the wish list were cut, but that is always the case. We traditionally are very ambitious with our games and shoot high, but the reality of getting them done in a reasonable time means some things have to be left out. In the past, those left out things often were part of the next game.

Our focus in the remaining time we have is bug fixing and the polish already mentioned.

Halo Wars Bug Counts: Producer Chris Rippy continues to publish daily the number of new bugs found and closed out. I believe every day in October we had a positive count, if not way positive. Bugs are ranked in order of priority with higher priorities being real show-stoppers (game won’t ship with any of them unresolved). We are working toward a milestone called Zero Bug Release, or ZBR. There can’t be any critical bugs for that to pass.

Some bugs are almost funny. For example, one was logged because a Spartan using a sub-machine gun was ejecting cartridges when he fired. This sounded reasonable to many, but it was pointed out that on Bungie’s Halo Universe site they say the M7 submachine gun fires case-less ammunition. If we had found this one late in the process I doubt we would have held up going gold to fix it.

Juan Martinez’s Render Farm: Juan has been overseeing the rendering of components into the in-game cinematics and talking heads that occasionally appear on screen during the single player campaign. These appear to be short film clips in play but would actually completely hog down the CPU of any machine running them if they had not be pre-rendered into a short film clip. Juan has organized a “farm” of PCs around the office, all running the correct software, and he has them do the rendering overnight when the machines are otherwise not being used. At one point he had 351 renders to do and had a peak of 40 machines working in concert. That’s 40 very high end PCs working for hours each, which is a lot of processing power.

Having a Sense of Humor Helps: Here is a thread on a bug from several weeks ago that made me smile. These are the exact messages in order.

Jerome Jones: “I was playing O5 and the Command Center has no art. It is there but there was no fly-in animation or art after it was finished. I will LYK if I see more.”
Jerome Jones: “OK the barracks has no anims or art as well. I am going to assume this archive is somewhat busted.”
Jerome Jones: “Now I am missing units and other objects as well. They are there with selection circle but the art is just invisible.”
John Evanson: “The first sign of insanity is when you start talking to yourself….”
Jerome Jones: “Trust me there are many more signs before that.”
Tony Goodman: “I told myself the same thing.”

Tammy Hopkins Bakes a Cake: Here is a photo of an amazing cake baked by our Dion Hopkins wife Tammy. I have never seen anything like it. The bottles are caramelized sugar and the edible labels are from a cake specialty shop. The tub, ice, and bottles are all edible. As we focus so much on finishing our last game and putting in all the extra time to do that, we can overlook what are families are going through as well. This was a pretty startling reminder that there is life outside the office.

Halo Wars Builds: Archive build #1000 was posted by Lead Programmer Angelo Laudon on October 1. His note said it was a “build for user research tutorial testing.” I saw archive build # 142 go by today and we average about 10 work builds a day.

Bruce Shelley