This is the 2nd part to a 4 part article, be sure to check it out the first part first! Part 1 C: Nice. Hopefully, you will be able to work that into H2A and some of the other other games too. 'cause Reach DEFINITELY has a lot more vehicles to work with, but it would be cool to have it do that in H2A. Especially if we could like make the Spectre that way, since technically we still don't have the Spectrein H2A. T: Duck, where's our Spectre, Duck? How are we gonna have H2Ainvasion without a Spectre driving around haha C: It is the only game with this Spector is in, please add it Duck! But Speaking of the H2A invasion stuff, I know that you made, I forget if it's Uplift Reserve or if it's called something else... Lost platoon! That is what it is called. You made a Lost Platooninvasion map on H2A. Have you been working on any other invasion maps on H2A? T: I have made another map called uhm, the listener, which is just a big like communications dish that the covenant are assaulting, trying to take offline. Uh, and I have plans to work on a map that's going to be basically like Cairo station from Halo 2. It is gonna be on that space canvas. There is gonna be an outdoor section with low gravity you are going to be planting a bomb that will blow out the windows and the entire station becomes low gravity, it is going to be cool. C: Hopefully those all turn out great! When it comes to people that are just coming into the community 'cause, of course, we have talked about a lot of your stuff and you have also been here for quite some time, not only in the Forge community but the Halo community in general. What would be some advice that you would have for people coming in when it comes to whether that be just starting forging or getting their creations out there, getting themselves more known, what would some of your advice be for those newer forgers coming into coming into the scene? T: Patience. Yeah, you are not gonna figure it out with your first forge map, you are not gonna figure it out with your second forge map. You know when I joined the invasion community... you know, back in 2018 I was like, hey, I've made an invasion map. Take a look at this, we played it and they were like, “all right, this sucks, it needs work” you know, you have to try to not become too attached to your creations. You know, there are, there are two maps I made for invasion, one was called I think we just simply called Skyscraper, so it's like basically taking place on rooftops like that, that old Call of Duty map with the same name. C: High Rise? T: Yes High Rise! And there's another one called Lightbridge, which is based on sort of that little, you know, underground section from Halo CombatEvolve's second mission where you go across the Lightbridge...well, it turns out a light bridge and a rooftop is not very good for Invasion gameplay C: It's very flat. T: Yeah exactly and, you know, then you are with the same problem with both maps, where you have just these chasms everywhere and players falling into chasms, or you are fighting around chasms and you know that can be good for maybe a 4v4 map or a gimmick map, but it ends up not being very fun from an invasion perspective, you know? So those maps I think I've rebuilt both of those maps three or four times each, they just never worked out. SoI had to eventually say, “all right, I am going to move on and try something else.” Yeah, so that's, uh, the key is to not get too attached to your creations and be willing to use the Y button delete, delete, delete. C: Needs more deletion haha. Yeah, that's definitely some really good, good advice, I mean, a lot of people have already definitely said that and that just hammers it in more, which is really good because that is one of the hardest things to start doing, I guess, in your Forging career and like well, it might sound very basic or very like kind of like I don't know, immature? That is not really the right word, but you will kind of get what I am saying when I am done saying this, while it's not that word, or while it's kind of...sigh...I don’t know the proper word haha, more or less a lot of people will think that, “Oh yeah, so like, that's not something that really will affect me” Idon'tthink it will affect me type of thing, but uh a lot of people will get really attached to layout 'cause they will either starting arting it up just a little bit just to give it a little bit of flare, or someone will just really like this layout because they put so much time into it already they do not want to restart or whatever, when sometimes restarting it actually does give you the best of both worlds, the best that your map can be or even sometimes like it can make it so you can come up with a better design in general that might not even be anywhere close to what you were working with previously, but yeah, that that is really good advice overall, and II bet a lot of people will definitely appreciate that. When it comes to like sharing people creations or like making more friends in the community, where would you say...what would you say would be the best way to do that?Just inviting in people from matchmaking and ask people to come check out their maps? Try to go and like join like established discords, whether that be ForgeHub, The Anvil, The Foundry, etc? What would you recommend people do to kind of I guess get more forge friends? Even like just starting with their own friends I guess they could do that too, but what would you recommend? T: Man, if it was four years ago. Your best bet would have been going to matchmaking and trying to DM somebody the no joke. So back 2018, The Anvil discord did not exist yet and I found...I don't even think it was on ForgeHub, it was like on like 4Chan or something...A post somebody made about H2A invasion, right? They were like trying to make it with Forge Scripts. SoI reached out to the person you know I think is back in 2017. His name is Nom Nom 321. Uh, you might have a heard heard of him, or played some of his invasion maps they are basically the best of the best from our group. And uh, I said, “Hey dude, I saw this post you made like four years ago, about H2A invasion. How did you do it? You want to talk about it?” And he said. Uh...not really, but I know that Reach PC is coming out in a couple months, you know, we can get together then and talk about it and talk about Reach invasion when that happens. And that was basically the birth of the Anvil discord and now The Anvil discord has a couple 1000 people on it today, and we just launched the Anvil website, you know, I think it was last week, and it's now there's just a huge community of MCC forgers that you can just hop in and ask questions, and we're all here to help, you know, we have new members coming in all the time and I'm always in there, you know, trying to help people out and give them advice on how to approach things or say, hey, come on down for a Friday game night and we'll test your map and see what we can do. C: Yeah, definitely 100%. And I definitely agree with that advice too, because honestly, discords, whether that be The Foundry, The Anvil, or even Forgehub, all of us have one thing in common and that's that we are all Forgers. We all love forge. We all want to see new creations. We all want to help each other out as much as we can, not like if someone is like it can, don't get me wrong, It can get annoying if someone constantly like DMingyou every single day, every 5 minutes asking you to check out their map, but you are busy or whatever; but when, when you reach out to us or whether that be going into a game night with us or something, and you ask if we can play test your map or give you some feedback, or even like help you out, like it is always something fun to do and always something great to do. T: Yeah, the to piggyback off of that, you know, it's not the developers that make the Halo community it is not the competitive kids, it is not the matchmaking kids, itis really us, the forgers that are the foundation for the Halo community, you know, without us creating new content for the game, you know you will end up with a situation like infinite where itis just super stale. You know? Why are people still playing MCC all these years later? I would argue it is because of Forge. C: I would definitely say a portion of it is nostalgia, though you can give MCC credit for that for like the nostalgia of going back to the games from your childhood type of thing. But Forge is definitely a big part of it as well, especially with all the mini games that have been created.I mean an analogy that I've been using kind of lately is “no one plays gmod to play...”, or “no one plays Counter Strike go to play gmod” when it's like kind of the same game and mechanics and systems and stuff, except like there is no buy system people play Gmodto play Gmod. Heck, I haven't ever lifted the steam chart numbers, butI'mactually curious if Gmod is actually more popular than CS-go. It would not surprise me, but who knowsCS-Go I know still has a big following for the competitive scene. When it comes to Infinite Forge, what are you looking forward to? Is there something that you would want to see in it? Is there something that you personally want to build in it? Like any ideas that you have? T: I am really curious about infinite forge, what are the capabilities to make covenant aesthetic stuff, not banish stuff, covenant stuff? You know the purples and the hexagons. I'm really interested to see how that would work. And of course, you know, I'm sure somebody is going to, uh, script invasion for Halo Infinite, which I might dabble, uhm, I am not super excited about it, 'cause once again, there's no playable elites, just spartans versus spartans. What are we doing here? We are just hanging out in war games, I guess. You know, that is the gist of the lore now for modern Halo multiplayer. C: I mean, hey you, you can still like come up with like a cool narrative I guess, by like making each side like a themed spawn or something especially like with some like the fractured events, whatever you could use like one of those fractured, fractured faction emblems or whatever, or fractured faction sides, I do not know, maybe it would be weird, but interesting. T: Oooh, yeah, maybe Spartans are traveling through time and space to take over our reality. C: That'd be kinda cool, but yeah, so hopefully, hopefully we are able to do that in Infinite’s Forge. It will be interesting to see how all that turns out overall. This was part 2 of a 4 Part Article, be sure to check out the rest of the article here! Part 3