Halo Wars Interview with Jason Pace, Senior Producer with MGS

Part 1

by jinx

What is your role in the development of Halo Wars?

I’m the Lead Producer on Halo Wars from the Halo Studio at Microsoft – I worked with the Ensemble team throughout the development process on all aspects of the game, with a focus on ensuring that the game felt like a Halo experience and fit into our universe.

Describe an average day in your office.

During development: Coffee before anything else, answer e-mail from the night before during coffee, play the latest game build, write-up feedback on the build, chat with the Ensemble guys, log bugs on the build, panic about the build, talk to Test about the build and stop panicking because things are under control, see the new thing that Ensemble just added, jump up and down because the new thing is the Coolest! Thing! Ever!, drink more coffee, look at the latest play test results and think about what we should focus on changing/fixing, talk to Marketing/Print/Manufacturing/Operations/Xbox Live/ESRB/International Team to make sure the 10,000,000 details are in place that need to happens for a game to actually make it to store shelves, stop drinking coffee because people begin asking me why my I have crazy eyes, then chill out with the co-workers and maybe play some *other* games.

How much contact does the development team keep with Bungie, the developers of the first 3 Halo games?

Ensemble consulted Bungie throughout the development of Halo Wars – those guys were instrumental in helping us make sure the game was a genuine Halo experience.

As an example, we needed to accurately represent how each of the units looks and “feels” – warthogs must control, sound and feel like warthogs, Covenant grunts must move and act like grunts, etc. Bungie was a great resource throughout the development cycle to help make sure we captured the essence of each individual unit, and we discovered that when we nailed how units and characters felt in the game it significantly contributed to the overall sense of being in a Halo experience.

What kind of challenges have you had in translating the Halo universe from an iconic shooter to a strategy game?

The biggest challenge was understanding what is required to capture the essence of a “Halo experience” and making sure we reflected that in our game -- fans of the FPS series have very strong expectations for how a Halo games looks, feels and plays. Halo is all about heroic action to save the entire human race, epic battles across the galaxy, visceral, highly-tuned combat and heart-pounding tension -- these are core themes for a Halo experience, and we need to make sure they’re clearly conveyed to players of Halo Wars.

The most obvious challenge in creating a Halo strategy game is that the camera moves from first person to 3^rd person, 40 feet above the action – finding ways to connect players to the battles on the ground as intensely as they feel connected to the FPS games was an ongoing process throughout the development cycle. We did have a few things going for us:  instead of taking on the role of a single character you’re now controlling an entire army -- so everything is magnified, from the number of different weapons firing simultaneously to the size of potential targets (entire base structures) and magnitude of explosions.

The giant battles, the great input from Bungie on how to best represent Halo units and Ensemble’s awesome story and innovations to the RTS mechanic and controls -- gives us confidence that we’ve not only made a Halo game delivering fans a first-class Halo experience but also a game that will set a new standard for Strategy games on the console.

Continue to Part 2 >>