Mike Zak (Halo 3) Interviews - Features

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Mike Zak (Halo 3) Interview

Conducted by Omni

How long have you been at Bungie?

About four and half years now.

And before that you were at Volition.

Yep.

What did you work on at Volition?

Red Faction 2.

What was your role on Halo 3?

I’m an environment artist, so I built the world, I built the game levels, along with many other fellow environment artist. We do anything that’s terrain, architecture, trees, mountains, skies, water, etc.

Maybe you could just jump in and tell me about your biggest challenges as an environment artist on Halo 3. Everyone’s going to have their own challenges, like making sure the gameplay flows, etc. etc. but what was your biggest challenge?

Interesting…

I think initially our biggest challenge had to do with the technical possibilities on the Xbox 360 and working with the engineers to really optimize the engine for the new hardware. For the first time in many of our careers was almost had more power to play with than we knew what to do with. We just weren’t used to authoring content to that depth, with that level of detail. It took us a while to find a “sweet spot” – you’ve got resources that come out of different buckets so all of a sudden you decide that maybe we don’t need that much texture memory so we can we have a 100,000 more [little features] like blades of grass? There was a lot of

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adjustment that way. And once you start narrowing down that vision it’s just a question of we had such a big staff this time and so many people – full time staff as well as contractors – so just getting everyone to understand what that standard would be and make assets that would all fit. That was definitely a much bigger challenge than on previous projects.

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When the designers wanted to change something – make an area smaller or bigger or wider – was that easy to accommodate?

It’s harder later in the game, because you’ve done a lot more work so you’ve got a lot more to undo when you want to change something. But it actually went smoother this time because we actually planned things better. We did a lot more test scripting of levels – so we would mask them out in rough forms and we’d actually script the gameplay and play them and iterate on them at that stage before we started committing to upping the detail and adding things.

Multiplayer is going to play a huge role in Halo 3’s attraction and longevity – both co-op and versus – did multiplayer considerations and pushing information over Xbox Live play into the overall look of each level?

No, at least not on my end. That was a problem the engineers had to solve. We just get our budgets then we exceed them they come over and beat us with sticks. Surprisingly, Halo’s a game where we don’t think about… as prominent as co-op is I think the AI systems work so well under the hood… most of that stuff is beyond me but back to the original point, it’s a non-issue as a level builder.

With Halo 3 being the close of the trilogy, did the team think, “I’ve almost wanted to do a level like this” and try to shoehorn that in?

That was definitely on our minds at the start and our initial list of environments we wanted to explore definitely had to get trimmed. But I think we certainly hit the highlights – the top picks on our wishlist. We still got a good amount of variety into Halo 3 – you’re not going to be playing the same environment for too long.

One of the things I noticed when they did the demo at E3, all the functionality of the replay/save films feature – was that something planned from the beginning and was there some trepidation on your account that people can zoom in on everything? After all, if it’s not

perfect forum threads will go crazy with “The water looks like shit.”

Allowing people that level of scrutiny is definitely new territory for us artistically. We did have to design some systems – obviously, we had to learn the camera movement to some extent, we can’t just let people fly out of the world. Once in a while you’ll see a video of someone who managed to do it, so we did have to design the system to limit that. Generally, I don’t feel like we actually worried about tops of cliffs or much more than we normally do. Even in the other games people always found their way up there – we always knew someone was going to get there. We were always at least making it decent. Obviously, you want to focus on the critical path and make that shine like nothing else.

We spent a lot of time as artists in “flying camera”, in debug mode, when we’re developing – from the early stages and all the way up to the end, I’m always checking everything I’ve done with flying camera. It’s actually kind of nice that we allow the player to do that because it’s almost the reverse of older games… because we as artists are in flying cam we’re polishing things that maybe we didn’t really need to in previous games. Our mantra after Halo 2 was, “We need to be in first-person more often as environment artists.”

Mike Zak

"It’s rare that you see a forum thread that’s actually discussing an issue at length. And really, to be valuable to me as an artist I need to know the reason something was “to awesome” or “to suck.”"

The criticism will start hitting the fan next week, so as an “artist” do you have a problem with people saying something looks like crap, particularly something you may have worked on and tweaked to make right?

The internet is a great place for people to post opinions! I’m always interested in how people are going to react, whether it’s negative or positive. The tough thing about the net is that it’s pretty hard to get more than just an initial, subjective reaction. It’s rare that you see a forum thread that’s actually discussing an issue at length. And really, to be valuable to me as an artist I need to know the reason something was “to awesome” or “to suck.”

I really appreciate when someone actually takes the time to critique. There were a few posts like that around the [Multiplayer] Beta – discussions of the visual bar that were actually really interesting. All the employees at Bungie are all sort of trolling at different times and if somebody finds a cool thread it will get posted internally.

With expectations so high for Halo 3, do you feel any pressure or any anxiety about how it will be critically received?

Honestly, right now, I think we felt the pressure a lot more in the early stages because we had made a lot of decisions about how we wanted to make the best conclusion to a trilogy – and there was a lot of internal debate. Over the period of three years, as we started to make those decisions and look at those decisions and then just polish the game more, lock-down features were always wishlisted, now we knew we could promise and deliver… And we got to trickle it out. The press really knew our history, had huge expectations and we could see their reactions over time. At this point we’ve shown it to enough people and we’ve had enough time with it ourselves that – with some objective distance since we didn’t finish crunching last night; I actually took a vacation in July – that everything will be fine.

I was going to ask about burn out – towards the end of the project did you want to get away, just go to Amsterdam ?

There was a lot of that on Halo 2. This time we did a much better job managing our time – I’ve actually been back at work the couple of months cranking out new stuff and I feel totally refreshed. The burn out rate was way better this time.

(September 21, 2007)


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