>>718038064
"It started back in 2002, [then Bungie programmer] Chris Butcher and I were working on a GDC talk called 'The Illusion of Intelligence: The Integration of AI and Level Design in Halo.' The premise was that he was the AI programmer and I was the designer working on characters and we were going to explain where we overlapped on Halo. To do that, we talked about how the AI handles all the decisions on the 30-second timescale; where to stand, when to shoot, when to dive away from a grenade. And the Mission Designers handle what happens on the 3-minute timescale; when to send reinforcements, when to retreat, encounter tactics. But in between, design and programming had to work together to come up with behaviors and a combat loop that would serve as the bridge between the 30-second AI and the 3-minute mission script. So that's where the idea of a short, repeated segment of gameplay first showed up."
Griesemer left Bungie in 2010, saying goodbye to his unintended "half-minute fun evangelist" role, and several nebulously bordered areas of expertise. "You've got so many people working on a game, making contributions; it's impossible to separate out who did what," he says. "Like, on Halo 1 my credit was 'Designer' and on Halo 3 my credit was 'Gameplay Design Lead,' but I did virtually the same thing on both projects. Weapons, vehicles, characters, AI, controls, camera, balanced multiplayer, tuned the difficulty, all the stuff we called 'sandbox gameplay.' And obviously I didn't do anything by myself; designers are very dependent on other people to get anything done."
