Welcome back Bungie Community! It appears that we have another new [url=http://downloads.bungie.com/podcasts/bungie_podcast_102513.mp3]Bungie Podcast[/url] on our hands and so I’m back to write up a Summary. Naturally since it’s me, by Summary, I really mean like a shortened transcript, but the point is to give you a lot of the raw information that was shared in a format that should take five or ten minutes to read as opposed to the hour it would take for you to listen. As always, I highly encourage you to listen to the real deal as there is always detail that has to be cut down on to fit the summary to a couple of 10,000 character posts, and of course I could always make an error or portray things wrong. Let me know if I've got anything wrong, and let me know if you want me to keep doing these in the future or if there's anything I can improve on! Let’s begin the 10/25/13 Mooncast! [quote][b][url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post?id=62379062&path=1]CLICK HERE AND SCROLL UP TO READ THE FULL THREE POSTS![/url][/b][/quote] [quote][b]Introduction[/b][/quote]• Second Bungie Podcast, Deej, Urk, and Halcylon return to host the show. • Prior to the opening sequence, DeeJ openly disparages England and every other country who “Didn’t have the courage to go to the Moon themselves” • The recording of this Podcast occurred soon after the release of the Moon Trailer and the release of the Preorder Bonus, so this is early October for them. • They’re gearing up to go to Milan, Paris. • Dave Dunn just got back from Australia doing some IGN Podcasts and such. • They try to spread things out so the Team doesn’t suffer from the absence of a person for too long. • The first Podcast was pretty successful, they were #1 in Games in ITunes for a while, and that was with the majority of their downloads coming through B.net. • Both the Podcast and the Bungie Weekly Update are a great way to expose the thought processes about the game, and they have plenty of powder leftover to create some spectacular explosions by the time Destiny releases. • There is an amusing anecdote about how Halcylon, Scott Kankelborg (Skank), and some of his co-workers tried to brainstorm ways that they could say terribly inappropriate things that would slip past the filters and end up making DeeJ look silly. • They’ve been kicked out the of the room they were in last Podcast by Jay Weinland (Head of the Sound Department) because he needed to record some Voice Overs, so now they are currently recording in the Ivory Tower. • There is quite a bit of humor made at Marty’s expense. • A lot of people have been asking to see more about the Moon for quite some time. • The first guest is Sam Jones, one of the members of the Art Team who is the leader of the World Building Team for the Moon. • Everybody always says “Oh yeah, our game looks just like our concept art!” and usually it’s a lie you tell yourself, but they can put concept art for the Hellmouth next to the version in game and say “Wow it looks better”, they were giving Dorje Bellbrook props for that (I met him [url=http://www.bungie.net/7_New-Destiny-Info-from-Ghosts-in-the-Machine/en/Forum/Post?id=62367116#referred-Destiny]last night![/url]) • They also talked about another example about how the concept art for the interior of the Wall matched the E3 Demo so well with the purple cross tubing and such (That’s Jesse Van Dijk’s work by the way, I also got to meet him [url=http://www.bungie.net/7_New-Destiny-Info-from-Ghosts-in-the-Machine/en/Forum/Post?id=62367116#referred-Destiny]last night![/url]) • Sam is always eager when sharing what he’s working on, and apparently has an accent of some form which hopefully doesn’t make the process of summarizing this Podcast too difficult. [quote][b]10:30 – Beginning of the Sam Jones’ Section[/b][/quote]• Sam Jones is a Lead Environment Artist at Bungie and again is the primary architect of the Moon Destination. • He works on the Moon and is also the “High Level Proxy Overlord of Mars” and is currently working on finishing up World Art and making sure all the bugs get killed so the game can come out on time. • These Destinations are big enough to warrant their own individual teams. • What sort of spectrum are you dealing with, art, design, what does it take to get the moon off the drawing board and into the engine? • Sam is interfaced with a bunch of departments like Design. Concept, Audio, and other folks who get it in a bag completed for shipping. From inception though he is mainly working with design, they sit down with a mandate from above for a destination with some goals for that location, and they come up with a good concept like the Hellmouth from Mark (I don’t want to attempt to spell his last name from what I heard, but it sounded like Goldsburry), and that Concept Art becomes a picture postcard that sets the tone and vision for a lot of subsequent work. • These Postcards (which are detailed extensively in the [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ZiDbv7nftM8]GDC Presentation[/url] from earlier this year) are about one single thing and they’ll centralize a lot of their Destination Work on those concepts and they’ll make a 3D Concept. • The good thing about the Hellmouth is that is inherently has this sense of mystery completely right off the bat and it’s easy to extrapolate from that what the rest of the destination looks like. • What is the central mystery of the Moon? • “What is the Hellmouth?”, “Why is this Alien Race here, the Hive?”, “What happened to the humans who were on the moon prior?”, a bunch of themes that are all feeding into the same general concept. • You can see a lot of those themes come out in the Trailer for the Moon, the very familiar white suited astronaut with the cracked visor (The Tykonaut, is what Sam called him). You have a lot of human elements, you have the Hellmouth which begs a lot of questions like “What is that doing here, why are the Tectonic Plates cracking, what is that Miasma coming out, how deep does it go…?” • Really in that trailer you’re effectively looking at a Strike, it’s a single activity threadline; they haven’t really talked to us about Bubbles and how they presumably relate to Strikes (yes, he said Bubbles, Urk doesn’t quite elaborate what he technically means at this time). • Urk asks roughly what percentage of the Moon does the trailer represent? He’s always awed by the scale the stuff they work on, and while the postcards are very emblematic of the space they’re really like a thumbnail, there’s just so much more around it. How much more is out there on the Moon and how big is it compared to other Destinations and how do you guys go about building that much stuff? • According to Sam, from a pure numbers standpoint the Moon is actually smaller than any other destination, but from a physical real-estate and from an impact standpoint it’s very epic and it’s fairly large in terms of surface area. • The thing about the Strike (presumably talking about the “mission” shown in the trailer) is that it’s mainly depicting the interior, there’s a very small section where you are out on the surface, and in the rest of the destination in the other activities there’s far more to reveal on the surface of the moon. • This is important because they want to show players when they initially arrive on the moon regular very familiar lunar terrain and settings with all the pockmarks and craters, footprints in the dust and human architecture which serves to ground everything so then after that you can really hit players over the head with crazy alien architecture and other oddities. • The Moon trailer is a very fast burn through a very long strike, the trailer is somewhat misleading in that regard because players have only seen just a glimpse. • DeeJ shares an anecdote about how he was really intrigued by the concept art for the moon when he first came to Bungie and how mankind has always been interested by the moon and wanted to go there, and as developers they get to go there and mess the place up and fill it with surprises, he asks what that’s like to make a spinoff off of the familiar and make a new story in such a familiar setting? • When they had the original mandate of creating the moon, Sam thought in his head “Wow the Moon is a grey lifeless ball…” so from an art perspective he was worried about how it would turn out from a visual standpoint, fortunately Sam didn’t know anything about the moon and he did a ton of research and he found out that there’s a lot of interesting terrain features on the moon and it started becoming exciting to everyone and on top of that they added the magic of Destiny with the thin atmosphere, all the Hive machinations of evil and everything they do disrupting the surface of the moon, the human presence, and the proposed future human presence… all that together and a bunch of other stuff he’s not ready to talk about yet have been a wonderful creative release for the Team. • Working on Halo was a ton of fun but they were working on a pre-established franchise so there were plenty of limitations, whereas with Destiny they’ve created everything themselves from scratch so it’s really a great moment for expression. The Moon has become their canvas. • How much do you think about Story Queues or building mysteries into those spaces? How much of the world do you expect players want to explore beyond the main activity lines? People in the community ask “Is this place explorable? How much fiction will I find if I just wander?”, do you worry about that?