Vijay Thakkar completes the final part of the Halo Wars leader power blog
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]](http://remember-ensemblestudios.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/ob11-300x168.jpg "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]](http://remember-ensemblestudios.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/vortex11.jpg "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!
Some lighter news – New Halo Wars leader powers blog and 10,000 spartan figure giveaway!
The issue of leader board wipage is still continuing and there has been no official announcements on Robot’s plans yet, though expect news soon. However, amongst all the panic of leaderboards loss Robot’s Vijay Thakkar has been busy writing up the third part of the Halo Wars leader powers blog this time looking into things like heal, ODST, cyro and disruption bomb leader powers. Theres also some awesome early game screenshots like the one below in the latest blog post.
![ODST1[1]](http://remember-ensemblestudios.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/ODST11.jpg "ODST1[1]")
Here’s the summary of the post on the Halo Wars website:
The leader powers in Halo Wars had a variety of roles to fill: they needed to illustrate the identity of each of the leaders, to stand out as different gameplay than the traditional RTS, to break stalemates in games, etc. Most apparently to me, they really needed to make the player feel powerful and dominating on the battlefield. All this needed to, of course, fit inside of an RTS world and be balanced. Quite the challenge we had ahead of us.
Read all about it in the leader powers blog part 3.
But thats not all.. fancy getting your hands on one of these?? :
These Halo Wars spartan figures will soon be released by Mega Blocks but you can get your hands on these limited edition figures by visiting the Mega Blocks website tomorrow, July 31st. If your one of the first 10,000 to register Mega Blocks will send you the spartan figure for free! * Minus shipping costs of course!
A perfect item for all your Halo Wars collectors out there!
Halo Wars bucket changes and Leader powers part 2
Great news for all the Reinforcements fans! Robot Entertainment has changed the setup of the Halo Wars buckets so that Tug of War Team 3v3 and Keep Away team 2v2 are no longer available. These have been replaced by the ever popular reinforcements in 1v1 and 3v3 modes along with the existing 2v2. Anyone with Strategic Options DLC can enjoy the most popular game type of the pack, Reinforcements on Halo Wars right now! I’ll see you there later tonight!
In other news Marcin Syzmanski has completed part 2 of his very interesting blog about leader powers in Halo Wars. In this part he discusses the MAC Blast (my favourite), the complexity of the transport power and some closing thoughts about his role at Ensemble Studios and the implementation of leader powers as a whole. Recommended read with two more parts to come!
One major element that we wanted to add to the leader powers was some sort of arcade-style timing. We actually brainstormed some cool minigames, unique to each power, that would allow a skilled player to add a small boost to each power. For example, we prototyped a “golf swing meter” input method for MAC Blast that allowed an expert player to crank out a perfectly timed series of max-quality shots. Unfortunately, the realities of scheduling meant that we had to cut this feature – implementing the full array of minigames, in a polished and fun way, would simply have taken too much time.
http://www.halowars.com/news/devblog/archive/2009/07/21/Leader-Powers-Part-Two.aspx
