• Yes, he does. In terms of Story and Fiction, everything they’ve created was created to build towards the goal they have with the Story and the Fiction. Everything has a heavy fictional bias. In terms of hidden nooks and crannies, thanks to the Tectonic Cracking there are literally plenty of nooks and crannies everywhere, plenty of secret areas both on the surface and in the interior because the Hellmouth is pretty much a castle and those are always full of secret areas. • They made the Earth extra big and colorful to contrast with the grey lunar landscape, it makes the Earth feel threatened and rather ominous, you feel like you could fall right towards it. • Halcylon changes topics to Mars, and asks if the Moon was easier to work on than Mars? We have more information and knowledge about the Moon than Mars, so did they have to take more of a Fantasy Pass with Mars to make ends meet or was there enough information to solidly ground the design in the familiar? • For both destinations, neither was easier or harder from a creative standpoint, Mars has a depth and wealth of satellite imagery that they went crazy over and they discovered that Mars has all these crazy colors that you wouldn’t expect and all kinds of terrain. This made Mars relatively easy for the main emulation of what Mars is, wheras the Moon was a little more difficult because it was slightly more limited by the terrain pallet, but they got around that by focusing on the human elements that we’ve come to expect when we think of the Moon, wheras Mars is much further out in terms of settling it and colonizing it so it’s a bigger mental leap on the part of the developers and the players to imagine what it’s like to settle there but Mars is very easy to be creative with because there’s more room for fantasy. • Were there challenges in trying to paint a realistic picture in familiarity for players on the Moon given that you are breaking a lot of the rules with fictional concepts like the Traveler who has done some stuff that they haven’t quite peeled back stuff for the players; there’s also things like differences in lighting from the Moon and other places… • When you look at pictures of the moon those images have a lot of contrast between light and shade and that makes it difficult for Bungie to instill a sense of atmosphere and make it look good but it’s something they have to do so it makes it feel like a more real place. • They’ve tried to do stuff with the Moon before in Halo, and they’ve tried so many different lighting schemes to give the place atmosphere and such. • DeeJ changes the subject to Grognok, and asks how the tools and experiments have changed between the tasks of building something for Halo and building something for Destiny. • Using the old engine, the lighting is very different, one of the issues with the Halo engine is that you were locked into a specific spatial arrangement and lighting set very early on and it was difficult to go back and change it because you had to change the light maps and it wasn’t dynamic by nature, the iteration time goes from hours to days. But with the new engine the lighting has time of day built in so you have “Moon at day, Moon at night”, they can work with the light in real time which makes a huge difference. • They mentioned an Earth Demo (Urk almost let slip the name of the particular location) where you would shoot a clock and time would jump by twelve hour chunks and not just the lighting but the atmosphere would change, apparently Ryan is the next guest on the Podcast coming up and they’re going to talk more about Grognok. • Urk talks about how Halo had Mission Designers and the transition to World Designers in Destiny where you aren’t taking players from Point A to Point B but you’re thinking about Destinations inside of this location, and he asks about how easy it is to work between Design and Art. • They’ve worked closely with Design since inception, working on the Palettes together, hammering out the specifications for “Oh we want a ramp, oh we want this door” even though they aren’t so involved with the visuals, but now more so than ever they work closely together because their content gets checked off together so they are on top of each other so to speak. Each is conscious of what the other is doing all the time and it’s been immensely beneficial with more communication and less throwing things over the wall. • DeeJ brings up an amusing joke where Dan Miller (a Mission / World Designer) goes up to the art team and says “Nice space you’ve created here, you know I’m just going to fill it up with crates right?” • Has working on this game changed the way you look at your own solar system? Absolutely, Sam has never spent so much time on Wikipedia in his life. He’s learned so much about the Moon and now there’s a wealth of information he can think about when he looks at it, he’s very thankful for the amount of research they’ve put in. • In terms of Research they’ve looked at NASA research and such, but have they looked at any fictional sources like 2001: A Space Odyssey and things like that? Some of Sam’s favorite Moon movies are Moon by Sam Rockwell which depicts the Moon pretty harshly, 2001 which has the closest fictional correlation to what they are trying to do, man’s unearthing of the Alien presence, the dramatic music and really cool lighting, and Apollo 18’s visual depictions of the Moon. Halcylon facetiously references Transformers 3, and how he really liked their realistic depiction of the Moon. • Sam apparently met with members of the JPL team (Mars Rovers) to get plenty of firsthand information about Mars. There’s some amusing anecdotes and admiration for those guys. [quote][b]37:55 – Beginning of the Ryan Ellis Section[/b][/quote]• The Podcast returns a week in the future, apparently Marty came back and was mad and evicted them from the Ivory Tower, so now they are back in the Foley Lab and they are on a tight schedule because apparently it is harder to schedule time with Ryan Ellis than it is to schedule it with Jason Jones. • Ryan Ellis is a Technical Art Director at Bungie. In his own words, he does a lot of lighting stuff, he runs the Technical Art team, some random art direction stuff here and there, generally he’s a huge pest that tries to get things done. • The Technical Art Team has made a bunch of proprietary stuff specifically for this game which is super rad and gives them the control they need to create things like dynamic lighting over the course of a day. They use Grognok, they use this thing called Bonobo, Photoshop, Lightroom, Max Maya, they use everything. • What is so special about Grognok? Why did you build it? It’s exactly built to do the thing we want it to, and that makes it highly specialized. Another nice thing about making your own tools is that if something goes wrong, you can go directly to the engineer that programmed it to yell at him to get it fixed, you can’t do that when using someone else’s stuff. • What’s the difference between making a Mission in Reach and making a Destination in Destiny? There’s this thing called BSP Binary Space Partition, most 3D engines used to be that which is very restrictive, all the geometry you create has to be seamless and watertight which can be a real pain in the ass, but the new engine doesn’t care about that, you can place anything anywhere, you slam something into the ground you can place a light, it’s like Forge 3.0. They no longer have to seam everything together and that alone is a huge timesaver that is worth the price. • Both art and design staff are working in the same toolset which is a first for Bungie and it makes everything so much easier. • Some facetious jokes are made about how quickly they made the Moon Base in the GDC Presentation and how that must mean they make all of their environments in 10 minutes, giving them plenty of free time to burn. They couldn’t make the stuff they are making now with the old engine, it would be just too much work. • What does it take to ship something that is representittive of Destiny? The quality bar is really high, it takes a ton of talented people too numerous to name, it takes the lighting team the world art team the design team the character guys the effects team the Spec Ops team (apparently they work exclusively on things like doors opening and explosions, lots of one of animations that they want to put a ton of extra time into making it look sweet, it’s a new team for Bungie). • There’s a lot more communication with the teams now, what’s it like trying to build things from the ground up? It’s very much like riding a rollercoaster while you’re constructing it. The Marketing comes up to them and they’re like “Where are you guys at on the Moon? It would be nice if we could show it off in a few weeks…” and the teams are tearing out their hair and are like “-blam!- YOOOOU!” It’s both exciting and terrifying to show something to the community because we have a high bar and they have an even higher bar for themselves. • There’s a few amusing anecdotes about how the Community team would see an image and they would go “Oh wow this looks great, let’s tweet this out and show the Community!” and the image is only 40% done and they ask for another week and they give it to them and they are blown away by the results. • What’s the work process like, are you massing things out and then going back in to add details? Yeah, it’s very much a layered cake, they make a rough sketch and they work with the designers to make a grey mass out world, then they go to architecting where they pay way more attention to the form, and then there are many steps that end with lighting, color correction and polish, it’s really very similar to how you would build up a frame in a movie.