In case you missed it, or don't want to watch the whole thing or don't have time, I've summarized the GDC lecture. I have it in video form, but if you would rather read, I have the script here. It doesn't cover absolutely 100% everything, but if you want 100% everything, you should really watch the full lecture. This is a summary, my opinion is at the bottom. Warning, it is pretty lengthy: Beginnings: We start with Master Chief. Bungie's character customization starts with Halo and this iconic figure. Halo was great because Master Chief was faceless, you could put yourself in his character. But they wanted something new and unique for Destiny while keeping that "YOU are the hero" feeling. To succeed, they needed a deep customization experience. They drew inspiration from "power fantasies" like space marines, cowboys, pirates, etc, and created the classes we know today. They started with head, chest, arm, and leg armor and gave each class a different shape to differentiate them. They added the 5th class slot to each class to feel more unique, the hunter's cloak, the titan's badge and the warlock's bond or arm band. The hunter is the frontier scout, they are "hacker cowboys, recon snipers and bounty hunters." They scavenge gear from the wild and they have a scrappy or almost haphazard look. Their armor is lightweight; mobility is important. Warlocks are warrior scholars. They want answers to mystery of traveler. They are very secretive, mysterious, and can use traveler power in a much greater fashion than the other classes. They rely more on abilities than others, but still wear somewhat durable armor. Titans are based on the knights of older times, very noble and brave and have sworn to protect the City. They are the most heavily armored of the classes. They wear tight fitting suits layered with heavy metal plates. Their armor is inspired by medieval armor; the badge is like a tabard that knights used to wear. But where could they go from there? There were still many questions: What could different versions of the classes look like? How can they make a system around this customization? Halo Reach featured a unique system, you could pick specific details on your helm and for Destiny, this would be extended to other armor slots. However, this Halo Reach system wasn't efficient enough for the artists. The sheer volume of content meant they needed to change their game plan. During Reach, someone accidentally put add-ons from one helmet onto another, and it worked. It could quickly "z-buffer" to make new variants (No idea what that means, but I assume it's good). Thus, Scott a built a mock up based off of this accident for a system of building pieces of armor quickly and efficiently. Goal: Their goal was that they wanted to have a BASE armor that wouldn't need to be rebuilt after every time they wanted to make a new piece of gear using that base armor; they wanted to be more efficient. They want to build a base shoulder pad ONE TIME and use it however they wanted with no extra work in other pieces of gear. If changes needed to be made to that base, they needed to be able to fix that base ONCE and have it affect all of the pieces of gear using that base. Other goals included being able to work with and address older content down the road and that artists need to be able to change assets quickly without breaking anything or doing extra work. The Plan: So, instead of thinking of characters as these fully built characters already, they started thinking of characters like Legos and thus, "Mash Up" is born. Individual pieces or "bits" would be used to create different pieces of armor that artist can mix and match, stuff like vizors, belt buckles, whatever they wanted. They'd simply pick out pieces from their stockpile and build armor arrangements. Dyes will control color, detail maps, and specular qualities. Each arrangement has a dye for armor, cloth and suit which is rubber or leather. Each character in the Destiny world is assigned a certain amount of game memory (by the way, this next section gets a little more technical). Going beyond that, each piece gets a specific amount of memory depending on your class. For example: the titan's arms and chest get a greater memory chunk than other parts because they are the most prominent feature on the titan. The warlock doesn't get as much memory dedicated to arms, it's put MORE into chest because it's more prominent, but each class gets the same amount of memory. However, this is not something you will have to worry about, it is on Bungie's side of the game. (The next part is even MORE technical, talking about how they create specular, which I'm not still not 100% sure what that is. I think it might be about how light affects the colors of the dyes and gradients of the dyes, etc, it starts at about 25:30 in the lecture. We'll skip over to the result, which shows a wide variety of colors and textures for Bungie to choose from.) Originally, each player would have three colors assigned across their character, they didn't want every color showing up. However, this needed to change. The visual impact wasn't enough for players to get excited about new gear, despite a silhouette change. The human eye reads changes in color better than shape. Color AND shape changes are needed for maximum impact. With both things changing, players will really see when they have gotten a stronger piece of gear. Each tier of gear is assigned a different color to make it more obvious. The hunter cloak picture that leaked earlier is a great example of this system in action, but it is only an example and not exactly what we will be seeing in the game. The changes felt good for players AND the artists. They created "Mantini" to view these armor arrangements to check color patterns along with any technical issues, like clipping between gear. The rest of the video explores the overall difficulties Bungie experienced, what worked, what didn't, and where they're going to go from now. One of the main difficulties was that most of the artists were more comfortable with creating full characters as opposed to a modular system, which also took some fun out of the process. The other was that the tools they were using were still in a work in progress mode. They weren't fully stable, which led to slow downs in content creation. What went right? Well, the thing works, so that's always a plus. The flexibility of the program really helped them streamline any issues. Fix one problem and it's fixed in every armor set. Where do they go from here? Decals are something they want to incorporate into the dye system. Another thing is multi-platform development tools. They want artists to be able to focus on creating art, not worry about memory issues or development restrictions. They also want to expand the dye system, more colors, more textures, etc. That concludes the lecture portion. The next part is about 15 minutes of questions from the audience. We're not going to go through ALL of them, but, I do want to go over three questions. They're in the next post: http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post?id=64333005&path=1