Allen Murray, a three-year veteran producer at Bungie, presented “Building Your Airplane While Flying: Production at Bungie” at this year’s Game Developers Conference. His presentation was mainly for the edification of fellow game developers, to share the production processes that did and didn’t work over the course of Halo 3, in hopes that the entire development community can swap ideas and solutions — but it was chock full of insights us regular ol’ gamers would find interesting, too. Among the highlights:

Multiplayer Came First

When the Halo 3 team started, there were just three producers working with a team of 75 artists, designers, and programmers. With those resources, most of their energy was put into multiplayer modes, and the team couldn’t focus on more without growing. The game’s campaign became the focus midway through the development cycle, and the team grew to 110 and six producers. At the end of the ship cycle — and even today, as DLC continues to be developed — the Halo 3 team encompassed more than 150 people and 11 producers.

Saved Films Almost Weren't Saved

Late in the development cycle, it looked like the saved-fi lms feature was going to have to be cut for time. But two people “really, really believed in it and really changed the minds of the entire team,” said Murray. “I think Halo 3 would not be the game it is without it.”

Forge Was a Last-Minute Idea

Forge didn’t come into existence until six months before Halo 3 shipped, but it was intriguing enough that enough people wanted to do the extra work to bring it to life. “We had to cut some small UI features to make it happen,” admitted Murray, but with two or three people dedicated to making it work, it was in for ship.

Bungie's Office Isn't Really Made Up of Offices

The studio’s floorplan is an open environment. “There are no walls — you can stand up and see everyone in the studio, and all our desks are on wheels,” said Murray. This not only encourages a team spirit, but also lets different employees gravitate to wherever they’re needed most — with the multiplayer art team, the campaign programmers, wherever — at any given time. Over the years, Murray’s moved his desk an estimated 30 times.

Polish Is Non-Negotiable

Every person at Bungie takes two to four weeks at the end of their work cycle purely to polish what they’ve created. No new content is added, and Murray said the time is not there as “a contingency plan” — it’s all simply refinement of what is already there. In our opinion, it shows.

They Burned Down the Guardian Forest

“Halo 2 was pretty bad for the team,” Murray acknowledged. “They worked really hard and did a lot of amazing work, and at the end, a lot of their work had to get cut, and it was a big morale hit for the team. We didn’t want that to happen with Halo 3.” So, Bungie builds detailed schedules — not to “shame or coerce” people, said Murray, but to give the entire team data they can use to prepare for the task at hand. When the team sat down more than a year before Halo 3 shipped to look at the levels, they realized they were overbooked — the team simply couldn’t complete all the art and lighting assets in time. But the launch date was immovable by that point, and simply adding new team members would create its own training problems. The only reasonable answer was to “reduce scope.” That means a campaign level named Guardian Forest had to be cut, even though it was well under construction. This also meant losing a new enemy called a Guardian — a floating, conical sentry with a central laser eyeball that the player could tear out and use as a weapon. However, the team felt Guardian Forest’s Hornetflying sequence was too much fun to lose, so they transplanted it to a new section of Citadel. That’s not the only remnant of Guardian Forest to survive: the team eventually carved out a very small segment of the level and turned it into the popular small-scale multiplayer map Guardian.

Other casualties of scheduling included combining two smaller missions into what became the Cortana campaign level, and removing large sections of Tsavo Highway. Murray admitted that these cuts hurt, but they hurt a lot less than they would have had they not been made so early — and they certainly smarted less than similar cuts made to Halo and Halo 2. And the upshot was that the Halo 3 team found itself with a realistic schedule it could believe in, and the transparency of the decision made everyone feel informed and empowered. That’s great for them, but we can’t stop thinking about how cool it would be to rip out a laser eyeball and use it in Team Slayer…