The last few weeks or so I've been keeping more tabs on Bungie since they just announced their latest intellectual property, Destiny. Now, the reason I keep tabs on Bungie is mostly because I've been a big fan for a very long time, since their rise to fame with the Halo franchise. Bungie is very well known to be quite open and active within their own community, often releasing tidbits of information here and there about their work (thesirchelios, 2013).
Last week, I found one of the most interesting tidbits I have ever come across from them; a ViDoc highlighting their presentation at the 2013 GDC (Gamespot, 2013. Youtube link). In this presentation, there was one particularly interesting and relevant section I would love to share with the rest of you!
Grognok.
In the 2013 GDC presentation video I just linked, Bungie demonstrates a custom-made proprietary game-environment building engine around 29:00.
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| Youtube screencap - Grognok logo |
The art director of Bungie pointed out that in the video game industry, there were multiple vectors of approach towards the concept of "creativity", and one of the biggest challenges in their sector of the creative industry was efficiently unifying multiple ideas of multiple forms from multiple people into a single, coherent, breathtaking and worthwhile product. They had searched high and low in their quest to find a tool that would aid them in such a large endeavor, but did not find any existing creative software suitable. So instead they made their own.
The most impressive demonstrated abilities of this environment-building engine appear to be rapid terrain generation and easy transition between two-dimensional and three-dimensional workspace.
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| Youtube screencap 29:39 - Rapid terrain generation |
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| Youtube screencap 30:02 - 2D~3D hybrid work technique. The developer is literally "painting" pebbles into the terrain. |
Of course I could go into endless speculation over what the Grognok development engine could be and make a completely uninformed article over such assumptions. In fact, there are several active forum threads right now still heatedly discussing the revelation of this privately-developed creative software, both in the Bungie.net forums and elsewhere (Multijirachi, 2013).
What I really just wanted to do was to share with you something amazing I found. Bungie's own little secret home-made game-development engine that was the result of a need in the industry that was not fulfilled by available commercial creative software products.
Just because a creative tool is popular and used by almost everyone doesn't necessarily mean it is the right tool for every job!
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