Hey everybody, welcome back to ForgeHub! Today we have another brand new episode of Creators Spotlight for you; today's episode is with a relatively new forger that some of you may have seen around the community Anvil Prime 52! As usual, this article will be everything divulged during the interview, from behind-the-scenes stuff that we cut out to unabridged dialogs. Our next episode will be quite the special one, no spoilers, just wanted to tease y'all ;P. Without further ado, let's jump right into this episode of Creators Spotlight!

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Crush (C): Hey everybody and welcome back to Creators Spotlight! Today we have Samuel/Anvil Prime52 as you may know him, he's been an up-and-coming forger in Halo 5, and he's also got some MCC stuff too, so without further ado, Sam introduce yourself!

Anvil Prime 52(A): Hi! I'm Sam! I like to Forge and, well, that's probably all you know me for so we're just going to go with that haha.

C: Joining me today is a fellow staff member, Bacon Media! He primarily helps out with our video production and editing for the videos and stuff, so Bacon if you'd like to introduce yourself!

Bacon Media (B): Howdy howdy, this is pretty much my first time doing one of these interviews, otherwise I'm typically behind the scenes cutting and editing, it's really fun to be able to join in and we'll see how this goes!

C: One Hundred Percent! Well, let's start this off right here and now! Sam, how long have you been in the community for? Whether that be for Forge or for Halo.

A: That's kinda a good question as it's kinda difficult for me to pinpoint, I'd say a lot of people would know me back to probably 2018 or 2019 is when I really started interacting with the community at least and started posting my maps and stuff, doing all that. I've always been on the outside of the community since around 2014 or 2015, just on Twitter learning from all the big content creators, but honestly, it was only recently, 2019ish that I've really started to put myself out there in the community.

C: Nice! How long have you been in the general Halo community?

A: Proper since Halo 5, but I've been around forging for fun and friends since Halo 3, up until Halo 5 where I've been building on my skills as a forger and been more public.

B: What're the types of maps that you're focused on making, this could be anything from the type of map to the aesthetics on said maps?

A: The types of maps that I've probably put out the most are 4v4 Maps, and that's what I enjoy forging, red vs blue; I've done a little bit with infection and I haven't done much with minigames but I have a few of those under my belt too. Red Vs Blue is mostly what I do though, among those 4v4 is predominantly what I put out but that's more been more of just a necessity, as I haven't been able to get big lobbies to test big team maps, which I'd really like to do as I enjoy those too. I haven't made a lot of big teams because of the pragmatics of the player count currently.

C: Just because of Halo 5's low player count mainly?

A: Yeah, as much as I can hope for is usually around 6-8 players, I think I've only a handful of times gotten to a point where I can put one of my maps into a 16 player lobby, so for the most part just those 4v4s. In Infinite I am trying to branch out more than that, emphasize myself into the big team, try to do some minigame stuff as well, and play with that a little bit.



C: Speaking of Infinite, one of the ways I've come across your content and came to know you actually is your Infinite remakes. Seeing them on Twitter and then also you joining up on the custom game lobbies. You remade Behemoth in H5!

A: Yea, that's one of my more popular maps people seem to know, I rebuilt Behemoth in Halo 5 with just the info that was shown to us at E3, which I had maybe 4 good angles to work with and I just had to get creative with the parts of the map we couldn't see, and from my own estimations and of course from what we've now played in Infinite I think I got pretty close with those creative liberties. The only things I didn't really get right on my first attempt were Top Mid, Bottom Mid, and the outskirts of the map. I'm really happy how it turned out overall, especially after I got to finish the job with the flights and the full release of the game influencing the final designs of the remake.

B: That kinda brings up a very interesting question, granted Halo 5 has had a lot of classic playlists, created by forgers that went into matchmaking, and the flights that happened for Halo Infinite up to that point, those classic playlists had a metric for each map coming over and their conversion, some people used crates, some people used hill zones to be even more precise to transfer those measurements to be workable in Halo 5, my question for you in all of this is, what was your measure of metric to gauge and scale maps from Infinite to Halo 5, when they haven't even been released yet?

A: Going from Inifinite back to Halo 5?

B: Yeah!

A: So one of the things I decided to use for the Behemoth remake was the warthog because there was a warthog on Behemoth, the map, and I was actually able to use that as a measuring stick for one of the more specific proportions that I wanted to get right (like vehicle paths, time to each point via the hog, etc). I don't know if the Halo Infinite warthog is the same length as the one in Halo 5, but I used them both as a measuring stick as I figured that they'd be pretty close, I also went and timed the time it took for me to sprint across the map in Halo Infinite and then tried to get that as close as I could back in Halo 5. So those were the two things that were able to help me scale, at least the second remake, of course, the first version was based entirely off of E3 footage, which made the scale a little bit bigger than the actual map, but I digress.

C: What would you say your biggest challenge in that was, like would it just be comparing and contrasting the speeds and everything, or would it just be going off the footage you had?

A: The biggest challenge was probably figuring out the map's geometry, I made a couple of posts back when I was working on it, just, sigh, that structure gave me a lot of head-scratch moments because a lot of those relationships in the geometry I wasn't able to achieve with the nice grid-scales of Halo 5, where you have to fit the correct combination of the blocks to properly have everything match up. Everything is connected in multiple different ways, such as the bridge in the middle of the map, that bridge connected to the different sides of the map, the death-pit, and all the other interconnected tunnels are challenging because if one proportion was incorrect then a certain portion of the map would more than likely feel overscaled or underscaled. I spent a lot of time redoing that whole area to get it as close as I could. It was probably the longest project I've worked on, that map took me over 24 hours of straight forging, whereas most of my maps will take me between 8-16 hours instead.

B: It's crazy to see those rough spit and glue tactics being employed still, especially in this day and age, it's cool to see that it's still being used, you can still find some way of measuring, like you said a warthog, a lot of people were using the 4x4 8x8 crates back in the day.

C: I remember Wyvren scaling her Sandtrap remake in Halo 5 based off that measurement of crates.

B: Yeah yeah, it'll be extremely interesting to see how everything will add up with remakes from old games as far as scaling goes, as going from Halo 3 to Halo 5, there was a multiple of, I believe, 10 as far as scaling goes from 1 object to another. So what would be considered a 10 Unit spread in Halo 3 is now 100 units in Halo 5. It'll be interesting to see what the people find the scaling differences between Halo 5, Halo Infinite, and all the other games now.

C: Bacon for any newer viewers listening/watching could you explain what a unit is?

B: Yeah, I'm no expert but my understanding is that these units are basically just world units that are used to measure out 1 square meter or unit of measurement that can be proprietary, the method to discover the unit is usually discovered by different methods with the most common one being game type zones. Let's say you're forging a map and you want to place objectives, those zones for the objectives can be used as a measuring tool to properly scale certain sections of the map with the units made into the game that you are currently working in. If you stack that up against older titles, sometimes you still find similarities and use those capture zones to properly measure out scaling from one map to the next. So if you're producing a map in an older game but you want to produce a said map in Halo 5, you'll find out what the discrepancy is in the scale and then build the room based on that math. Once you've figured that out you create an equation based of the discrepancy to find out the new scale on the new game to make the map more accurate.

C: Awesome! Sam! When it comes to map remakes, are you planning on remaking any maps when Infinite's Forge comes around? Or do you plan on remaking your own maps? What're your plans with Infinite's Forge?

A: I do plan on doing a lot of remakes, but I'm trying to temper myself, at least for the first dozen or so, that way I'm not doing just remakes, or I'm not doing enough of my own original maps that kind of thing. I'm going to try and get into a pattern, where I do a remake of my own, bringing something from Halo 5 or MCC, do a remake from a past Halo Game, and then do something completely unique and original; that way I can keep being creative and I'm not just going back and forth. The plan is to do that type of free rotation over and over for a little bit, but, we'll see what the demand is. Like if it's been an entire week and no one has done Gauridan yet, which I'd find very hard to believe haha, I might try to jump on that. Or if things get saturated quickly then I may try to lean more into my own maps, I don't know, honestly, it just all depends.




C: Awesome! When it comes to Infinite's Forge, of course we just got the roadmap a few days ago, we found out that we're finally going to get our hands on Forge in September, my next question for you would be; what're you hoping will be in that "Beta" for Forge?

A: I suppose, my bare minimum, sigh, expectation just feels like a bit of a toxic word to throw around, but the minimum that I'd like to see is everything that I can do in Halo 5, I'd like to be able to do from the get go. Primitives, simple and complex, texture swapping, just everything from Halo 5's Forge I would like to have right out of the gate. More stable scripting too. If we have all that then I think that the community will be able to build some great stuff. Going into more of the hopeful category the ability to create your own primitives or terrain sculpting would be great to see just to give us more creative freedom with our projects. Something I'm really hoping for is A.I. that way we can create our own firefight and campaign missions.

C: Believe it or not, you're the only person that we've interviewed that has requested the A.I. haha, either that or I'm misremembering as it has been a few months that this has been going on now. I definitely think that that's something a lot of people in the community have been wanting for a very long time and hopefully, we eventually get that.

A: Yep! Even if it's very basic like place A.I. and give him a behavior that'd be great too as even just that rudimentary addition changes the game exponentially! At least to start out with. I've got this little bit of a pipedream right now, but if the tools exist, one of my first projects would be to remake the entirety of Halo Combat Evolved in Halo Infinite.

C: Are the Brutes going to replace the elites or will the brutes just be absent haha?

A: I'll probably just keep the elites elites and do something with the brutes to mimic the flood or something, maybe use the berserker brutes as combat forms or something I don't know.

B: It's very interesting that you mentioned some of the bare minimum expectations for Infinite's Forge, I think one of the things people definitely expect is hopefully a similar control layout, hopefully, it doesn't change again too drastically, as it seems what was done in Halo 5, over time, was what was the most convenient for people and also a layout that most people were able to conform to and allowed you to make maps very quickly.

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