Justin Dinges, Troy Mashburn, and John Mulkey joined the monthly Inside Infinite series to reveal a few details of the campaign’ expansive world of Zeta Halo.
Campaign Art Leas Justin Dinges, Gameplay Director Troy Mashburn, and World Design Leas John Mulkey talked about the production of the campaign’s experience, Zeta Halo, in the new article of the Inside Infinite Series.
In the talk, the team members discussed key topics in the production as well as the teams’ collaboration. The discussion focuses more on the vision, guidelines for the players’ experience, and art direction, and reveals some interesting insights into the art teams’ life, including specific terms Super Soldier, Story Driven, and Spiritual Reboot to describe what the team is looking for in the campaign’s experience.
Things like “Super Soldier” sound like a no-brainer but it’s used frequently to call out when something isn’t supporting the super-soldier goal. “Story Driven” also sounds obvious but it’s a great reminder that we are here to tell Chief’s story. And “Spiritual Reboot” is a term we use to describe our approach to introducing new ideas while staying true to what it felt like to play the classic games. “Feeling” is the keyword here because we want to evolve, by creating new experiences and new opportunities, but still maintain the original essence.
Troy Mashburn via interview
Justin and Troy also dived into the process details and shared how the game creation goes at 343 Industries: “The world we have created for Halo Infinite is very large and with a finite team size to create it all we must be strategic in how we build each experience - there’s no one size fits all method for this project.” explained Justin Dinges.
Troy Mashburn added to the answer pointing out the uncertainty of the process: “ Making games is an organic process with many constantly changing variables like technology, deadlines, budgets, people, and pandemics. A typical process starts as a rough art “block mesh” where design iterates until it proves fun to play. There is back and forth between design and art until we decide to lock it down.”
Read the full interview on the Halowaypoint website. Don't forget to join our new Telegram channel, our Discord, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.