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Archive for August 4th, 2009

4
Aug

Vijay Thakkar completes the final part of the Halo Wars leader power blog

halowars

More exciting leader power development blogging from Robot’s lead programmer Vijay Thakkar. This time the blog post looks at the covenant leader powers Rage and Vortex along with some very interesting early screenshots of the development process including this early UI mockup of the Spirt of Fire menu:

ob1[1]

Its come a long way!

It sure is interesting to hear about the background behind the design of leader powers and the hurdles Ensemble programmers encountered getting them to work. Warthogs pushing Brute Chieftain into his own Vortex, Rage taking out whole buildings etc.

vortex1[1]

Oops falling into his own Vortex wasnt intentional!

“It was certainly a challenge to try and create all the experiences we wanted to illustrate with the leader powers, especially under the gun of the inevitable deadline. We quickly learned that in order to make any of the powers live up to the intensity they needed to portray, a high level of polish was necessary. The meticulous details like adding a tenth of a second delay to an effect, a subtle controller shake, or Spirit of Fire chatter in the targeting UI may not have been overtly noticeable, but they were absolutely pivotal to taking the powers over that last step from pretty good to really great.”

Read all about it in the final blog!

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