David Leary speaks about fellow Robot’s plus new photos from the studio!
Ever wonders what goes on in the walls of Robot Entertainment? Well, its mainly two things.. 1) Playing games and 2) Beer. Oh! and of course not forgetting developing games at number 3. David Leary, Designer at Robot Entertainment today writes about the types of games fellow Robot-ers are playing including the shock and horror of Joe Gillum firing up the well past its sale by date MMO “eve”.
Firing up Eve again? That was just wrong – so very, very wrong.
The Robots are quite keen MMO players having previously wanted to develop an MMO under Ensemble Studios, leading to the cancelled Halo MMO. Another popular genre in the overly cool offices is FPS games including Battlefield Hereos. Find out more about whats going on in David “Learguy” ‘s blog!
But thats not all!
A blog is complete without a few snaps of the inside of Robot Entertainment and thankfully the good Robots have updated the gallery pages on the website! I refer to my earlier point about what happens at Robot and we’ve covered point 1, playing games and now its onto point two.. the beer.
Beer O’Clock
![Biergarten-is-christened[1]](http://remember-ensemblestudios.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Biergarten-is-christened1-300x225.jpg "Biergarten-is-christened[1]")
Yes, that really is a German beer garden in Texas
![PlayDohTable[1]](http://remember-ensemblestudios.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/PlayDohTable1-300x225.jpg "PlayDohTable[1]")
No beer for the kids though, meet the PlayDoh table. But wait! Whos that?? Yes, its Robot CEO Tony Goodman. A kid at heart? I guess you have to be to set up a video game company!
And more..
Find a whole bunch of additional pictures on the Robot website. Sehr Gut!
Joe Gillum talks Halo Wars single player campaign design
Another developers blog post on community website HaloWars.com. This time Joe Gillum gives us an insight on what its like being a campaign designer on an Ensemble game. The Ensemble guys spent alot of time reading books, player Halo games and talking to Bungie to get ideas about level design. The art below demonstrates this nicely:
![Hole3[2]](http://remember-ensemblestudios.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/Hole32.jpg "Hole3[2]")
Here’s an extract from the blog and a link to the full article – an excellent read!
The first thing we do when we start a new campaign is to do some research. Instead of hitting the history books like in our Age of Empires games, we grabbed anything we could from Halo and absorbed it. We read books, played through the games, and talked with Bungie to make sense of any questions that arose. I personally spent a few days doing nothing but playing the Halo campaigns in the office to refresh my memory and get some inspiration. This helped more than I even hoped… people would stop by my office to watch me play and learned some things they may have forgotten about the games – or to yell at me to turn it down!
