How Bungie’s game design process inspired me to become a game designer
Bungie is known for creating the hit video game franchises Halo and Destiny. The company has certainly changed over the years from the first Halo game to today, they have had their hands out of Halo since 2011, and have been working on the Destiny franchise since. Some members have left to stay at 343 Industries to work on the Halo games after 2011, so the company design I will be talking about will be before 2011 when the company was at its peak in my opinion.
The way I had found how Bungie went into the thought process of Halo 3 is the ViDocs they had posted on Halo Waypoint around the release of the game back in 2007. I had found them again as reference for this blog post on YouTube and I can’t recommend them enough for anyone going into game design themselves. The one I keep coming back to is how they designed the main enemy throughout the game, the Brutes. They were added into Halo 2 a bit later in development, making them seemingly like Chewbacca and were very animalistic in nature. To improve upon them and making them the main threat, and not a secondary enemy like the previous game, they had to get creative in their culture and armor. They added headdresses to the Captains, and even more elaborate headdresses for the Chieftains, while the Minors had very standard and metal armor while their superiors (Captains and Chieftains) had shielded armor.
This video alone made me want to get specifically into character design and create concepts that would later be implemented into the game. Video game characters all start from being drawn in concept art, into AI engineering and animations, and then polished in the final product. This blew my 12 year old mind and I had to think of some way to get as close to this job as possible. The other ViDoc I had watched again was how they made the multiplayer for Halo 3 and competing against themselves with how much of a success the Halo 2 multiplayer was. They were stating that they wanted to make as good if not better than Halo 2, and I think Halo 3 did achieve that.
“It was pretty obvious to us when we started working on these maps, that have to be fun not just for the 100th time, but for the 200th and the 1000th time.”
— Steve Cotton, Bungie, Multiplayer Environment Artist
This mindset of improving upon yourself and competing against yourself, by setting an acceptable goal of at least meeting yourself where you were last to then improve it further, is the best game design thought process I’ve seen. The game design today seen at Bungie and 343 Industries doesn’t seem to implement this thought process. With new lead directors and game development leaders at both companies, these thought processes have seemed to be less favored than just trying to give the community what they ask for in what capacity they can. I would rather try the old Bungie way of “making a game that we want to play” when I finally make it into the industry and create my own games.