This is the continued transcript of the first Bungie podcast, up until they mention Red Death. Each new line represents someone new speaking. If you have any corrections, please message me. Enjoy: Right now in the hot seat we are joined by Tom Doyle. Tom, you are an art lead at Bungie. Yes, yes. What does that mean to you? Explain your title. Explain my title. And your sunglasses Uh, right, I am the artist in charge of combat sandbox—weapons, vehicles, sometimes abilities. But, uh, yeah. Predominantly it’s like industrial design objects, you know. And, uh, work on the artwork that the players get to use as tools in the game. So guns? Guns? Guns. Guns? Basically everything we need to kill. Yes. Don’t call ‘em tools. They’re guns. [Laughter] Illegal arms dealer from the 31st century. [Laughter] Nice. So wait, so are you passionate about your work? Are you a gun guy? Do you, uh, do you celebrate guns? Yeah, is this a, is this a hobby? Is it a hobby you are in to? Or did you just sort of migrate in through . . . Well, when I, when I first came to Bungie I was an environment artist, and I’d always . . . I went to school for some industrial design, so I’m really familiar with product design and stuff like that, so, uh, I mean, I definitely love any and all things mechanical. And, uh, yeah. I think I just kind of found a, found a home on the weapon and vehicle team just because of my background and my interests. You know, I definitely have an interest in game design itself, and the weapons and the vehicles are a really good way of kind of expressing that part of my creativity, but also just, you know, visual design as well. Yeah, I got to, I mean I got to, I got to hats off. They look, they look . . . right now, as they stand, before they ship, they look amazing. Like, they look awesome. I love the, the design of it. The art pass in the game as a whole, they fit right in. They feel futuristic, but they feel real at the same time. Like, they have that feeling to them, right. Well, yeah. We had like, from Halo you had the very . . . I mean obviously you had different palettes, but if you just look at the sort of hero weapons, the UNSC weapons, they’re very military-industrial complex, and now we’ve got these, sort of, this great mix. And you guys are just able to play around in the space. Like, what’s the difference coming out from a very defined palette of weapons and moving into a clean slate? Like how did you approach that starting out? It seems like it could be pretty daunting. It sounds like it would be pretty exciting, too right? Yeah, yeah. I mean it, it definitely was pretty daunting, I know . . . Absolutely. When you make anything new for the first time, you know, uh, it’s exciting. You know, with Halo it was very much a military space fantasy game. Yep. And, you know, Destiny is absolutely a space fantasy game. But something that was important to the team was, uh, in the same way that when you looked at the Covenant weapons and the UNSC weapons in the game there was this kind of polarity between “I know what this is” and in fact “I know what it does, and I know how it behaves before I even pull the trigger the first time.” Yeah, there’s an inference that can be made just by looking at it, right. We refer to that as affordance. Right. Yeah. You know, I know what it is before I even use it. The Warthog’s a classic example of that when we built it as like, you know it, before you even put your right foot on the gas you know exactly how it’s . . . [Interrupting] You don’t go, “Can I run a guy over with this?” You just do it. [Laughter] Your first Halo LAN party was, “Meet me near the jeep.” It’s like ehhh, I’m not going to correct this guy because I like where his head’s at. Yes, yes. Well, you know, you want those things to be intrinsic. You know, like uh, for the player. In the previous game we had the good guy guns and the bad guy guns and, you know, there’s a certain amount of that in this game, but we’re trying to tell a much larger story in a much richer kind of fiction. And the weapons are, you know, they’re first thing you see. Yeah. They’re the things that are some of the most persistent forms of artwork in the game. So therefore it’s kind of like one of the loudest channels to tell those little stories in Destiny. First thing through the door, as they say. Yes, first thing through the door. You know, the only other art that’s more persistent is the UI, you know, in the game right. Obviously we talked about the Warthog and UNSC weapons, and some of those things became iconic, right, like they just became something in the sandbox that had to be there. Players had these stories about them, or had an affinity or a love for those things. Like, when you start, and when you approach design for a new weapon, like how do you, how do you frame that up? Is there, like, a conversation that’s happening between you and design? Are you left to sort of go off and explore the crazy ideas that come into your head and sort of think about the different palettes you might want to pull from? Like, what’s that process like? Where does it start and how do you get to a sort of a finished product that you’re satisfied with? That’s a really small question, I know, but . . . No, no, no. No, it’s a, it’s a great question. I mean, uh, something that Bungie has always done really well is, uh, and me and, you know, other people at the studio like Pete, you know, like we’ll, we’ll talk about the colliding . . . You know, people come to Bungie because they’re, you know, passionate about games. They’re passionate about art, engineering, design, the whole thing. And, you know, when it came to creating what is Excalibur in this game and using the Excalibur method for the, for the weapons, um, it definitely came from multiple sources. You know, uh, sometimes they came simply from a name. You know, like, uh, a few weeks ago we had David put together the, uh, kind of an exposé feature on Red Death, and really that weapon came from two words. [Talking at once in agreement] And, and you know, you kind of go crazy, you know, thinking about what does that really mean, and you try to do something that kind of typifies that.