Today marks the second day of our first full campaign mission play-test, where participants get to play through every mission of the game and provide feedback. It’s always brutal getting feedback at this stage of development, because the game is really just now coming together, but it’s invaluable for us and allows us to make course corrections if needed. At this stage, AI are still doing really silly things, the environments are not complete, and we still have “robot voice” providing much of our mission dialogue.
We have auto-generated speech from the thousands of lines of combat and mission dialogue in the game right now. It’s hilarious to hear how the robot voice butchers much of the speech. Thank goodness Marty is down in LA right now recording all that dialogue with a bunch of very talented actors. Hopefully he’ll be able to get everything we need during this one massive two week recording session. But, I’m sure I’ll want something changed and we’ll need to get a few pick up sessions later.
I’ve been developing Halo games since late 1997, and the general process of making games has changed dramatically. Instead of 20 guys in an old building near south Chicago, we’re now 150+ near Seattle and building the biggest game we’ve ever attempted. But, while we’ve built better processes around making games, it will always be a creative endeavor – and that always requires more effort than anyone can ever reflect in a schedule.
BTW – we’re super pissed that all your comments are getting deleted from this site. Brian and Eric are looking into why this is happening. I love hearing from you all and peeves me off when I find all your comments are gone.
-Marcus
Marcus Lehto, Creative Director
Joseph Tung, Executive Producer 
