Watching a game come together is like watching a cathedral self-assemble during a hurricane
Making a modern video game, like filming a blockbuster movie, is a profoundly complicated endeavour. Hundreds of staff, working in different departments, in different disciplines, all contributing content to a mass of code, spread across hundreds of computers and a vast server network. Behind it all, there has to be one creative vision – a consistent fictional universe. The challenge is to ensure that, at the end of the three-year, multimillion dollar development cycle, something of that vision remains.
Releasing on Tuesday, Destiny looks like one of the most ambitious video games ever made. It is a multiplayer online shooter, a narrative adventure and a co-operative role-playing game rolled into one. In a distant future, the solar system has been invaded by aggressive aliens and the Earth is all but defenseless. 500 years of peaceful technological process, watched over by an alien presence known as “the traveller”, have come to a violent end. As guardians of the planet, players must fight back. The battle will take them off-planet, to the Moon, Mars, Venus and beyond. There are worlds to explore, battles to get into, new players with whom to make friends. The beta was played by 4.6m people. The launch of the game could triple that.
So how does a company like Bungie, which spent a decade making the hugely successful Halo series of sci-fi shooters, start on a new concept? Where did Destiny come from?
Although production officially began in 2009, the story goes back much further. “I can point you not just to early ideas, but to actual code implementation in 2002,” says the company’s chief operating officer, Pete Parsons. “We had to turn that into a pitch and draw concept art in 2008. But Jason Jones [Bungie’s co-founder] was thinking about this back in the 90s. It’s like, James Cameron wanted to do Avatar in 1995 but hit a wall: he knew there was no way he could pull it off. Destiny is an experience we’ve wanted to explore for many years, but maybe didn’t have the bandwidth, the technology, the expertise, the critical mass to get it done.”
Art and inspiration
While engineers were working on the logistics of constructing one seamless online galaxy for players to explore and meet in, the 14-person concept art team was beginning to sketch out the look of the world. “Creating a universe requires a whole host of disciplines,” says lead concept artist Jesse van Dijk. “The first thing you do is try to define the atmosphere of the game, from there you progress through looking for images that express that feel. It is a somewhat fragmented process – there won’t be a single image that defines everything about what you want your world to feel like.”
The team studied science fiction art from the 70s – they wanted a vintage flavour to the look of the game, something that would hint at its origins as a fantasy title. “We admitted to ourselves that we love sci-fi, so why should we veer away from that simply because we’ve done it before?” says van Dijk. “But we’ve retained a strong fantasy element, we dubbed it mythic science fiction.”
The artists looked at the work of surrealists including Zdzisław Beksiński and Peter Gric, as well as seventies and eighties manga. The team then started creating its own concept sketches, paintings and computer generated art. One of the earliest environments they drew was the wrecked Russian cosmodrome, where vast starships were built to take colonists across space. There are elements of Andrei Tarkovsky movies – a forlorn wasteland littered with high-tech wreckage.
But the idea at this stage wan’t to design anything playable. “We’re very detached from the actual concerns that come with the rest of the design pipeline,” said Van Dijk. “It allows us to make observations that deal exclusively with the aesthetics – we don’t have to worry about things like texture memory.”
Building a world
When the project shifted from pre-production into development, the team started to grow and preliminary design work started – even before the game engine was built. “We started by building core encounter spaces in our existing engines,” says director of production, Jonty Barnes. “We got teams of players colliding with each other in the world and we looked at what it would be like if they were in on different agendas. We’d build levels quickly and learn from them, we had lots of ideas, some of which may still come, some ended up on the cutting room floor. We also thought, what would it be like to plan for ten years? If we’re making a story or new characters, are they strong enough to stand up for a decade? That was a heavy filter on the things we developed.”
All the while the team was growing. “We got to the point of committing to the architecture and starting production, and it actually timed very nicely with us shipping Halo: Reach,” says Barnes. “Over one weekend – and, my goodness, I remember it so well – we moved over 160 people who had just finished Reach and had some vacation time. We had to do a series of seminars showing them what we wanted to achieve with the game, the direction we were taking and getting them on board. Also getting hold of the new consoles was highly informative – we were able to work with Sony to plan ahead.”
At its biggest the team was 500 people, made up of 200 artists, over 100 engineers, and other coders and support staff. The groups were continually shifting, thanks to a vast open office space that allowed all the desks to be moved around.
“Early in development, art will stay with art, the concept artists will be by themselves, engineering will be doing a lot of pure research,” says Parsons. “But by the time you get into full production, those teams merge. The concept artists are working inside the world destination teams, and each destination – Mars, Venus, the Moon – has its own full team - it’s own engineers, artists, designers, testers, producers, you name it. We have some destination teams that, in themselves, have the same staff compliment as the entire original Halo.”
“Every sub-group had its own producer, who costed everything out in terms of development time. We went from one producer on Halo: Combat Evolved to 30 in Destiny, not just because of the size of the team, but the complexity of the project. It’s like what Jason Jones once said, ‘watching a game come together is like watching a cathedral self-assemble during a hurricane’.”
Seamless universe
Factored into this is the way that the single Destiny build (there is one “universe” that runs across all the different console versions of the game) needs to cope with an array of different gameplay systems and demands.
“The scale of the world, the amount of content we build is a major challenge,” says a workflow engineer, Brandi House. “There’s also the fact that so many teams cross over now. With Halo, we were used to one designer working on one mission and that was his thing. Now you have one mission that may intersect with a public space, and the character that plays through has their own set of gear so we have to work out how the level progresses and what sorts of loot and rewards you get. Then you mix that with how we tune difficulty. All these interacting pieces just require a tighter set of communication than we’ve ever had to do before.”
With content coming in and a full roster of staff, the engineering focus shifted to testing the online infrastructure . “We created client bots, essentially fake players and we bombarded our systems with million of them,” says Barnes. “We have some of the original architects of Xbox Live on our team, we partner with Activision who have done Call of Duty and large scale games with Blizzard. There are live analytics running on every part of the game. We have servers distributed globally so we have to make sure that whatever territory you’re in you’ll have a good experience.”
Community care
And then the players come in. Like most online games these days, Destiny has been released in a limited demo form to gamers – once in June as an “alpha build” to a small closed group, and again in August as a “beta” to a much larger audience. But the studio says it also listens to – and takes on board – feedback through its website and social media.
“I think Bungie has led the charge in improving the lines of communications between developers and gamers,” says community manager, David “DeeJ” Dague. “Through our user research programme we’re making this game in conjunction with our community. We have a database of willing test subjects – sometimes they’re answering questions about games from the other side of the world, sometimes we’re luring them into the lab to get their hands on it and give us a fresh perspective. That’s not something we shy away from.”
Indeed, deep within Bungie’s huge office, a converted multiplex cinema, there is a UI room, where gamers can come in, play and talk about the game. The key though, is in interpreting the feedback without simply handing over the creative process to the players. “The community informs development, but the act of creation begins with us and our ideas,” says Dague. “Over time we iterate on that by studying the behaviour of people who infiltrate this living social world, sort of observe the way they behave with each other and pick out the forms of behaviour that we think will be most interesting. This is important. Take Halo – we could never have anticipated that something like Rooster Teeth’s like Red vs Blue would come along. We need to learn from that.”
Barnes, agrees. He says the recent beta test provided a wealth of data, that is going to inform way beyond server loads. “We need to understand player behaviours. Are we seeing a convergence all going to one thing at once? What trends are we seeing? How do we broaden access? It’s not just about ensuring that the game runs well, it’s informing plans for the game. It’s about what players like to do at what times of day.
“We’ve always planned this universe to build upon it, and part of that will be informed by players - what activities do people like, what are the most successful public encounters? We always wanted to change the way people play cooperatively. It seems to have resonated well with players.”
Preparing to launch
The test, of course, comes on Tuesday. When the servers are live and the game kicks off for real. All the bot tests and beta sessions in the world can’t prepare a developer for that – as we dramatically saw with the chaotic launches of Grand Theft Auto Online and Battlefield 4. How many players can they cope with? “We have scaleable plans – there is no upper limit,” says Barnes. “We have a forecast of what we think is going to happen, and we have large steps that we’re ready to pull the trigger on. We’re in a really strong position.”
Pete Parsons is confident in the 24 system engineers he has running shifts, monitoring the server loads all day every day, both the company’s own, and the server partners it is working with across the world. “We have an incredibly complex infrastructure. When the red lights go off it could be anything from ‘hey, we need to replace a drive’, to ‘hey, we need to call in some exploits because something bad is happening’. It’s about constantly managing load so we know that we can scale up and down. If players report an anomaly we can run test cases to find the same problem.
“We have a motto in our Destiny operations centre: in Bungie we trust, all others we monitor.”
