Filip Foksowicz | Game Designer

The open-world concept was something entirely new to the Halo franchise. The idea behind it, was to recreate that nostalgic sense of exploration and wonder that we all felt the first time we had experienced the first Halo: Combat Evolved years ago, and transform it into the modern age of gaming.

Knowing the team would be responsible for creating a massive amount of gameplay experiences, in a relatively short amount of time, with limited resources given that this would be Halo’s debut into the open-world market - I knew this task would be a huge undertaking.

Because of this, my intention was to create a system which would provide smaller teams the capability of rapidly developing and deploying multiple series of hand-crafted combat experiences throughout an open world setting. Additionally, my goal was for players to feel like the war experience was constantly evolving, providing them with unique experiences each time they set out to explore the environment.

First, I needed to identify the needs for this system:

• A trigger-based system that would be quickly deployed within a variety of areas and scales

• The ability to load and unload the encounter if players wandered away from the area

• The ability to quickly craft engaging experiences that could be fit into the surrounding area (enemy compositions, props, cover, and dynamic objects)

• The ability to include multiple variations in each zone, which would then dynamically determine the most suitable variation based on player condition (Has/needs vehicle, low health/ammo, current story progress, etc.)

• Simple to debug and iterate

From there, I was able to build a two-part system:

• The place able encounter zone itself, which would drive conditions, contain an instance-editable array of encounter compositions, and allow designers to customize each asset and transform.

• A quick-access library of premade encounter compositions, which designers could quickly drag into their placed zones, or create their own additions to the library themselves.

The system came out remarkably useful, and we were able to fill the world with 250+ encounter zone locations, each one containing 3-5 conditional variations.

The biggest challenge was getting the system to correctly diagnose the condition of the player, and it’s overall design for the potential of one day incorporating cooperative play.

I solved this by making additions to our player management system, which would dynamically assign and update flags for current player conditions:

• Ammo count

• Whether or not they had a vehicle, and if they’ve been on foot for a while

• Player skill and current story progress

• Have they been without a power-weapon for a while

• etc.

These flags would then be readable each time the player entered a new encounter zone, at an extremely minimal cost to performance.

My responsibility was to establish a team responsible for filling up the world with multiple combat experiences and challenges, in-line with the Halo franchise and the power-fantasy of being the Master Chief.

My intentions were to not only make all the necessary preparations to maximize the creative potential of the designers, but also to ensure that from a player perspective, there was enough density of gameplay opportunities that would keep players enjoying themselves without long stretches of empty traversal.

Firstly, I fully inspected every inch of our world in it’s current state, in various perspectives:

• Bird’s-eye view

• In-vehicle

• On-foot

I then separated the map into several regions and zones, then digitized a topographical map with grids and coordinates to keep track of everything. Once I identified all possible encounter locations, I then iterated on the pacing, density and feel, until I got everything planned out accordingly and communicated it all with our relevant parties.

Once my team was ready to act, my approach was to establish task assignments by sector, and to keep my finger constantly on the pulse - maintaining the production schedule, and where/how to balance assignments across my team as time went on.

The biggest challenge was just ensuring everyone knew where everything was, and what everyone was working on. In order to solve this, I maintained full transparency with my team by making the map assignments and progress a living document we could all update and reflect on.

In order to keep everyone’s motivations high, and workload manageable, I established a digestable workload through layers and a priority system:

• First pass, single experience at each zone (this allowed for early playtests)

• Second pass, an additional variation added to each zone with focus on high-priority areas (this gave us a minimal bar of coverage)

• Third pass, filling in remaining variation additions (this would be our accordion in which to expand or reduce, based on team health and current pace)

During my time on the project, I was able to successfully keep my team members motivated and on-track, whilst also personally developing 40+ Encounter zone locations myself - each containing 3-5 experience variations in each.

From my experiences of working on Gears 5, I found the importance of establishing a formula for creating well-crafted and engaging combat encounters, that would act as both a backbone for developers, and as subtle pattern for player instincts to immediately identify and formulate tactics that filled their power-fantasy.

Having realized early on that the team could use a structure for crafting better encounters, my intention was to create a guide for Halo: Infinite Designers that would help identify:

• Enemy combat and behavior types

• Enemy interactions and how certain combinations drive player behavior

• Combat fronts, flank routes and use of cover to navigate player awareness through the chaos of combat

• Availability of pickups, or lack there of, to throttle various experiences (survival, power-fantasy, pressure, etc)

First, I took a deep dive into Halo combat systems and gathered as much research as possible:

• Played through the franchise with a notepad

• Gathered information from various Halo combat designers and AI Engineers

• Experimented with my own encounters, and tested a variety of combinations and experiences

• Spent weekends playing Milsim Airsoft, to really dive in and re-engage the decision making process of combat

After processing all the information I’d gathered, I went on to formulate the knowledge into a well-comprehensible guide, containing:

• Information and references

• Illustrations and examples

• Easy to follow steps and various compositional templates to use as a starting point

My main approach to building these encounters was to mentally rephrase them as Combat Experiences, or Encounter Puzzles - The act of identifying all elements to an encounter and environment, in order to “solve the puzzle” effectively.

One of the challenges was establishing the various interactions between enemies, and how they could be utilized to create unique experiences and drive player behaviors. This took several tests and iterations, but I was successfully able to create an instructional baseline for designers to work with.

For example:

• How to create a pinned-down experience with snipers.

• How to raise tension and leave players in a state of survival

• How to drive a power curve, to empower players into being the Master Chief - heroically taking the fight to the enemy

And many more.

It was remarkable to see the transformation and increase in quality of our designers combat challenges.