Stephen Rippy “What Ive learnt at Bonfire”
Hot on the heels of Robot Entertainment’s one year anniversary comes Bonfire’s own anniversary and is blogged about by musical genius Stephen Rippy.
This evening, Bonfire Studios will have a small party celebrating the end of our first year as a company and the beginning of our second. In honor of that sort-of startling milestone, I wanted to take a minute to look back at the past twelve months and maybe share a couple of things I’ve picked up along the way.
Stephen talks about the transition from Ensemble Studios to Bonfire Studios. Turns out they didn’t move very far, just down a few floors in the same high rise building:
The end of Ensemble Studios as an entity also meant the shuttering of the space we’d occupied for the previous ten years. We were nearing the end of our jobs and our lease, and had nowhere to go but down. So down we went, literally – ten floors lower in the same building. And we did it ourselves. Over a single feverish weekend, fueled by junk food, beer, and months’ worth of accumulated angst, we grabbed our inherited computers, desks, and full-sized arcade machines and hauled them down, one armload at a time. There were cuts, bruises, and people walking around with refrigerators strapped to their backs, but at the end of it all, we had something that was our own: a new home.
The team at Bonfire have been working incredibly hard over the past year and while there is nothing to show just yet you can be sure these hard working developers will come up with a great game, perhaps more will be revealed at E3 this year.
For all of that, though, we’re confident and excited about the future – and we hope you’ll come along with us! To everyone here, congratulations on our first anniversary. See you back here this time next year.
Keep an eye on and read the full blog over at the Bonfire Studios website!
Last of the DLC maps “Blood River” is detailed along with more Clash of the Titans from Brad Crow
Justin Rouse and Duncan Stanley are back again on the HaloWars.com website with top tips for players on maps from the DLC map pack “Historic Battles” available for just 800 points on Xbox Live. This time one of my favourite maps in the game, Blood River gets detailed.
With starting positions placed in opposite corners, up on a hills, and a river with only 2 crossings above it, even the inexperienced player can feel relatively safe at the onset of a Blood River match. Then there’s the look, we chose this map to be set inside of the Forerunner shield world simply because we didn’t have one in that location yet. We always intended to make sure players of all game sizes (1v1, 2v2, 3v3) have a chance/choice to play on all our worlds.
Says Justin Rouse, map designer at Robot Entertainment. Community Manager, Duncan Stanley continues with some professional gameplay advice:
If you can hold the middle and keep pressure on your opponent, you can spend some time building armor or flying units which can really turn the tide of a battle, especially against UNSC. If they build a flame thrower army to counter your infantry, some flying units can really tear them up.
Given how small the map is, it’s very risky to try to boom on this map, map control early on is much more important than going for late game heroics with super units.
So beware of the rushers in competitive play! Get the full scoop over on http://www.halowars.com/GameInfo/maps/BloodRiver.aspx
In other news we have Brad Crow, an art bot from Robot Entertainments pods with his entry into the Clash of the Titans with Perseus confronting the Kraken:
Looking awesome as always from our favourite Art Bots. Be sure to leave a comment and check out the full blog post on the Robot website!
More Lego, more pictures and more Halo Wars map information!
Big update today from Robot Entertainment. Firstly the adventure continues in Dave Pottingers quest to install a Robot Entertainment logo made out of Lego. Its actually a very tricky thing to do.. now with the boards joined together the tricky task of getting all the lego pieces on to the board are soon to follow. Keep an eye on updates and see how its panning out over on the Robot Blogs.
Heres how its been left in this update:
But thats not all… theres a few new Robot photos featuring on the site one of which shows the construction of the “Biergarten” probably where alot of Robot folk spend thier time!! :
You can find the rest of the pictures at:
http://www.robotentertainment.com/Studio/Photos
And also! Theres a new Halo Wars map update where Halo Wars map designer Justin Rouse talks about his top tips on the 1v1 map “Release”. Here’s a brief extract and link:
“Release is the only map where you have a little bit of “Control” over the flood in Halo Wars. You quickly learn that controlling the Consoles that release the flood is key to victory but many players make the mistake of using the flood as a solitary attack strategy.”
Theres a good few links on this post for fans to check out- blogs, photos, maps. I will sign off for now and probably play a game of Halo Wars whilst you chew through these updates! – Until the next time!
Official Robot Entertainment blogs go live!
The Robots at the spacepod like office in Plano have launched their official company blogs with Dave Pottinger and David Kubalak. Dave Pottinger shares with us his dream of having the Robot Entertainment logo in Lego form much like the Google logo shown below:
It is infact a deadly serious project and Mr Pottinger has been spending his free time experimenting with Lego base boards to get them a suitable size for the Lego Robot logo – here he is, in action!
One might wonder if Mr Pottinger spent too much of his childhood playing with Lego! It does seem like a fun project though and if Google can do it why not Robot? You can stand by for updates on this by following this website or by subscribing to the Robot Blog RSS feed.
In other non Lego news..
David Kubalak lifts the curtain on the faces behind Robot’s art team:
Please note: The above picture may not accurately represent entire appearance!
You can click the image to enlarge and from left to right you will find:
Bryan Hehmann – Environment Artist, Nathan Stefan – Concept Artist, Gene Kohler (bottom) – Character Artist, Dion Hopkins – Visual Effects Artist, David Kubalak- Art Director, Charles Tinney (bottom) – Animator, Rob Walden – Hard Surface Modeler, Juan Martinez Technical Artist and Animator, Brad Crow (bottom) – Art Director, Paul Slusser – Environment Artist, Duane Santos – Hard Surface Modeler, Won Choi (bottom) – Concept Artist, Chris Moffitt – Character Artist, and Bart Tiongson – Concept Artist.
All of those people are Ex-Ensemblites! Its interesting to read about the individual roles each artists has. David Kubalak is the Art Director and has his own blog where you can find some of his artwork at: http://www.davidkubalak.blogspot.com/
Clearer Robot Art picture discovered!
You may remember a previous post where I mentioned Age Community were studying Robot Entertainment pictures closely for any hints on a new Age of Empires game. David Kubalak’s blog contains an image extract from a news article which shows a picture of Gene Kohler working on some textures. Check out the image below and be sure to enlarge!
Discussion on this can be found on the Age Community forums.
Further reading..
I encourage all fans to check out the Robot website to read the full blog posts from the two Robot Daves! Looking forward to seeing more posts from them soon!
Lets see how this Lego logo develops!!
Tim Deen talks about Halo Wars unit counters in detail
The official Halo Wars website has the second developers blog online and this time comes from Tim Deen who is the Lead Technical Designer on Halo Wars. Halo Wars players might recognise the resemblance between Tim Deen and Fort Deen, which is a 3v3 map on Halo Wars- a possible connections methinks!
The summary on the Halo Wars website reads as follows and you can click the link below to read the full blog entry.
“…a detailed look at the Halo Wars RPS reveals that it is a layered system of 3 RPS systems with a specific order of priority in application. Also each RPS system provides a different flavor to the game and serves to provide a specific combat flow purpose. Additionally the RPS relationships are split into the two separate buckets of “soft kill” and “hard kill”, “soft kill” relationships are where the units have a medium advantage in combat and “hard kill” is where units have a very strong advantage in combat. “
Bonfire Developers blog goes live
It looks like Bonfire Studios will be continuing the Ensemble tradition of having developers blogs on the studios website. You can catch the first blogs here: http://www.bonfire-studios.com/blog/ which are regarding Halo Wars controls.
Stay tuned for more blog updates! Its great to see that post-Ensemble studios are continuing to provide fans with blogs and I hope they continue.
Part 2 of Bruce’s blog restored & new studios update
You can now find the images restored to part 2 of Bruce’s blog archive: http://remember-ensemblestudios.com/?page_id=240
The rest will be restored soon.
Update on new studios:
There has been no news as of yet for a name for the new studios and nor do they have a website setup. I can confirm however that Ensemble people are indeed managing the ESO servers which run Age of Empires 3 and Age of Mythology. My ears are to the ground and will update this site as news develops.
Restoring ES Blogs – Part 1
I have restored images for Bruce Shelley’s most recent set of Ensemble blogs. You can find them in the blog archive.
Over the coming days more images will be restored to older Ensemble blogs. I will be doing Bruce’s blogs first and then Ben Donges after.
Stay tuned!