Universal Truths of Game Design #3

I wanted the Halo weapons to have depth, so I began thinking about all the guns that were in the matrix. I needed to understand what they were, and how they fit into the design.

The Human weapons were easy to understand. I’m a Human, and I know what we use guns for. But the weapons used by the aliens of the Covenant were another matter. The easiest place to start would be to simply say that the alien guns were simply analogs to the Human weapons on the matrix. The pistols, assault rifles etc. could be basically the same, only with different visual presentation. Easy, yes. But that seemed like a huge missed opportunity to add depth and richness to the game. So I started thinking why would the Covenant choose these particular weapons in the first place?

Humans have guns. And once guns were developed, Humans developed systems to protect people from bullets (bullet proof vests, riot shields etc.) And then in the relentless march of progress, people invented ways to kill other people inside of their body armor (armor piercing bullets etc.) Remember that at the time there wasn’t a lot of settled “lore” about the game story. I decided that in my model, Human Spartan armor was created as a desperate response to the Covenant attacks. It had similar functions, like a personal shield, but was based on different technology.

So how about the Covenant?


Clearly they had guns. And they had an equivalent to our body armor – personal energy shields. I could imagine Covenant warriors facing off against enemies across the universe with their plasma weapons blazing. Or more specifically, their Plasma Rifles. As an poor man’s analog to the Human pistol, the Plasma Pistol was a pretty dull thing, only useful as a desperation choice for one of the two gun slots you were limited to. I stared at the various data fields in the Halo toolset for quite a while, trying to imagine what to do with the Plasma Pistol to make it cool. And then a question occurred to me: What if the Covenant had to fight an enemy with shields like their own? Or what if they had to fight themselves? They’d need their own armor-piercing capability.

In the Halo tools, every projectile had a “shield damage” value. Most were set so that they would damage shields at a rate that matched the damage that their bullets would do to the player’s health bar. None of the projectiles were really aggressively balanced against shields. And you know how I feel about data balance in a matrix! I started to experiment with making Plasma Pistol bullets designed to specifically shred shields. It was a snap to make a projectile that blew them off quickly, but then it seemed overpowered to also make those bullets do good levels of “body” damage as well. Then it occurred to me: maybe the shield-shredding effect could be assigned to a different bullet. The one assigned to the secondary fire-mode for the gun – the overcharge.

This proved to be very fun. In my early playtests, I’d grab the Plasma Pistol and use the overcharge specifically to blow up the shields on enemies that I ran across. But it was frustrating when I missed the overcharged shot (full disclosure: I am a much better designer than I am a player) So to compensate, I gave the shield-busting projectile a terrifying amount of magnetism so that it would track towards whatever I shot it at. I loved it – I could overcharge the Plasma Pistol and let the shot fly, and it would whip around corners and blast targets, stripping off their shields just as I came running in behind and mowed ‘em down!

In the short term, I won a lot of playtest games. Unfortunately, once this tactic became known to other players, battles essentially started with “overcharged salvos” of tracking shots whipping across the battlefield. The only thing you could do was hunker down in cover and wait as the first round of supercharged shots came whipping overhead before you started moving. It was interesting to see how these data adjustments changed player behavior during our playtests, but a bunch of auto-tracking missiles wasn’t very true to the spirit of the Halo combat model which rewards player skill, fire and movement. So alas, the “super tracker” overcharged shots had to go. But I did keep some tracking, to help reduce the frustration of a player using the overcharge trick but missing the shot entirely.

So my mental model of bullets/armor/armor piercing was working to create fun combat. But what else could it do for the game?

I thought more about the Covenant weapons. Since they were the “bad guy” guns, I really didn’t want them to overshadow the heroic Human weapons . I wanted the Human guns to make the player feel like a badass space marine, putting the smack down on alien scum. The Covenant weapons needed a different mental model.

Jason Jones had (reluctantly) allowed me to include powerups in the multiplayer maps. I’d always loved the powerups in Quake, and how they factored in to the player awareness of the map and the timing of their respawns. (someday, if folks are curious, I’ll talk about the level designs for the Halo multiplayer maps) The Active Camo powerup in particular seemed interesting, especially once the single player designers started to add them to their campaign maps. I reasoned that Covenant troops might use Active Camouflage technology as they were walking into battle, kind of like thePredator. Covenant troops would rely on stealth to position themselves and then unleash hell on their enemies. So instead of the stand-up butt-kicking mental model of the Space Marine guns, the Covenant weapons could be built around ambush.

I asked Adrian Perez (assigned to support gameplay code for the multiplayer team) if he could extend the “shield damage“ system and give me some control over how bullets affected the active camouflage powerup. Adrian was more than up to the task, and had it running quickly.

My goal was to make different types of bullets react differently to invisibility. I reasoned that because the Covenant put a premium on ambush tactics, their weapons wouldn’t disrupt the invisibility shield as much. I adjusted the data so that Covenant weapons could repeatedly fire from invisible, and the player would barely fade into view just as the weapon was reaching it’s overheat threshold. And when they stopped firing, they would quickly disappear again as the weapon cooled.

This worked spectacularly well. The only problem was that initiating an attack from stealth wasn’t as effective as I’d hoped. Because of their lower firepower, Covenant plasma weapons lacked the punch to take out an enemy fast, even if you got the drop on them using camouflage. I avoided adding damage, and instead tried to address this by adding a little bit of “hit stun” to Plasma weapon shots. Hit Stun is a value that freezes the target for a little bit of time with each bullet that hits them. It’s a very useful tool in the hands of AI bad guys, because it can make even the weakest bad guy threat something that the player has to pay attention to, if only because of the annoyance of the freeze from their shots. But it must be used sparingly. My initial data adjustments made Plasma Rifle shots freeze the target so much that, if somebody started to shoot you with it, you were basically helpless and could only stand still and take it while they fired their gun to overload. Needless to say, that was extremely frustrating to players on the receiving end of the attack.. I got pushback from the playtesters to remove the mechanic entirely, but I had faith in the mental model that I had developed and tried to find a level of “hit stun” that gave a Plasma weapon enough of an advantage so that using the “Covenant ambush” approach would be valuable but not overpowering.



With those aspects of the model coming together, I started to think more about the Human guns. They already had an edge in damage, and I didn’t want to enhance them with the same benefits from Active Camouflage. In fact in my mental model, they should behave just the opposite. I figured that Covenant Plasma weapons were “tuned” to interface with the camouflage so that the shielded warrior could fade back to invisible more quickly. So then it made sense that Human physical bullets would disrupt the energy field that surrounded a body using Active Camo. To get that effect I adjusted the invisibility “ping rates” for the Human weapons to be very high. The bigger the bullet, the faster it would make the target become visible. After playing with the numbers, I was able to adjust the Assault Rifle so that the shooter would become visible after just a few shots. Adrian’s changes to the code also allowed me to adjust how quickly the shooter would become invisible again when shooting from camouflage, so I was able to add a satisfying delay to the invisibility after the Assault Rifle was fired. Finally, I decided that the numbers for the Rocket Launcher would be the biggest disruptor to the “energy bubble” of active camouflage. Firing a single Rocket from stealth made the user immediately visible, and left the Active Camo field disrupted for several seconds afterwards, leaving the shooter fully visible until it slowly re-formed.

Jason Jones had designed the Human pistol to be the weapon of choice for players at medium/long range. The accuracy, high damage and the limited sniper zoom on the pistol made it a powerful choice for dropping enemies right at the edge of their “AI awareness” bubble, enabling players to pick off one or two targets as the enemies startled into their alert state and then came charging into battle. Frankly, it was too strong for multiplayer. I toyed with damage settings that made the multiplayer pistol weaker than it’s single player counterpart. But to be honest, once it was “nerfed” it became a pale shadow of it’s single player cousin and using the pistol became a lot less fun. Still, I felt that turning the full power of the pistol loose on the Halo multiplayer “sandbox” unaltered would be opening the door to endless criticism, so I decided to made a subtle change. The single player version of the pistol is “autofire” – meaning that if you hold the trigger down the weapon will repeatedly fire at the precise point you’re aiming at. But… that’s not true with the multiplayer version of the pistol. I wanted to at least challenge the skill level of players a little more. So the multiplayer version of the Pistol has shot spread. What that means is that, if you simply hold the trigger down and let the pistol automatically fire over and over, each bullet will deviate from the point that you’re aiming at. And the amount of deviation will increase with every bullet. I wanted to make it so that players could still use the pistol and it could retain the fun feeling that it had in single the single player game, but only if the player could master the technique of actually pulling the trigger with each individual shot. I still believe that this was a “righteous fix” – meaning that it was justified and the solution was elegant within the restrictions of the established game play. Unfortunately, I lost my nerve a little bit. After all, this was a huge change from the behavior of the single player version of the Pistol. I was worried that players might have to re-train themselves to use the multiplayer version of the gun, which again might lead to huge volumes of outrage from players. So I didn’t make the pistol deviate enough while auto-firing. The shots will spread if you hold the trigger down but not so much that you won't get the head shot that you were aiming at. To this day, not adjusting the spread rate of auto-fire on the multiplayer pistol is one of my regrets. I wasn’t aggressive enough!

One of the things that I’m proudest of is how my mental model for Human and Covenant technologies had profound impacts on the single-player game. For example, the high camouflage ping rate of the Human weapons meant that, even late in the campaign, Human guns were ideal for exposing Covenant bad guys that were cloaked in Active Camouflage shields. A second impact was on the AI development of the game. When the mighty Chris Butcher (AI programmer for Oni and Halo) saw the changes to the Plasma Pistol, it gave him the idea to have the Jackals use the Plasma Pistol in it’s overcharged mode, along with their shields, to greatly differentiate them from the Grunts wielding Plasma Pistols and grenades.

My game design process has evolved to be very fluid and organic. I start with some clearly stated intentions as to what I want to accomplish with a design, and then start to build it. But along the way, I watch the design evolve and continually evaluate that process. As things happen I’m constantly deciding, “How is thing coming together? Are we going in the right direction, or should we be going another way?” So my paper specs get me started, but beyond that my mental model is constantly evolving. I once read a quote from Tim Schaffer, that I’m going to have to paraphrase heavily because I can’t seem to find the original quote. He described the process of making a video game as building a puzzle out of pieces falling in slow motion. But the pieces fall at different speeds and the shape of the puzzle changes, depending on which pieces you get, and which fit. That is a very poetic and accurate description of what my process looks like: I like to toss the pieces up, and every day take a look to see what’s coming together, what’s falling behind and what shape the final form is going to take.

Was quick camo intentional? Yes, entirely intentional. All of the camouflage behaviors are a product of my mental model for Human and Covenant weapons, and my desire to add depth to the gameplay model for players to discover and exploit.

Did it work? As I said before: often players will never know all the details included to add depth to a game. The fact that a person on Twitter was asking about that feature proves that, although my mental model was thorough and effective, it wasn’t so intuitive that players completely understood it, even after a decade of playing the game.

SOURCE: HARDY LEBEL

IMO this is the GOAT Halo article. And GOAT Halo blog. Got some great insights into H1

Hardy LeBel is one smart dude. Thanks god he didn't let anyone talk him out things like plasma stun and the camo mechanics. Those details are part of what make the game so great.

Universal Truth Number One (part 1) by Hardy LeBel

I’m going to reveal the Number One Universal Truth of Game Design.
And by doing that, I’m going to help you identify the most powerful design technique in your arsenal.

Ok, here goes:

Subtraction is the second-most-powerful tool you have at your command.

If you’re an experienced creative pro, you’re probably looking at that statement and nodding your head. “Yep. That’s the key, alright. Subtraction. Nothin’s better than deep, healthy cuts. And cuttin’ stuff is about the best feelin’ in the world.”

(I am assuming you sound like a backwoods Mainer when I write this)

But let’s pretend that you’re not a long-time veteran of the game development industry. Or for that matter, of any creative industry. Instead you’re a new designer, starting out on your road to awesome. I’d bet that the last thing you’d pick as the second most powerful tool in your bag of tricks is subtraction. You’d probably pick stuff like… oh I dunno, creativity maybe? Perhaps innovation or iteration. You might lean towards thinking outside the box, or emerging technologies. Or maybe you’re super tech-savvy and you gravitate towards stuff like synergy or even sync.

All of those things are good, but as “mental tools”, none of them are 100% reliable. There are situations when they simply won’t apply to the problem you’re dealing with. When you’re thinking about your core “mental tools”, you need techniques that you can always rely on. Techniques that will enable you to grapple with any design issue you’re wrestling with.

And Subtraction is definitely the number-two tool.

Why? Put simply, less is more. Deciding that you’re going to have “less” of anything means that, by definition, whatever you choose to keep will automatically have more prominence. And not just in terms of appearance or presentation. More prominence can affect the application of resources, the overall focus of a task, the iterative process, the design culture you’re working in – you name it. Subtraction can change all those things in one mighty blow.

Instead of making up an imaginary game like last time, our examination will focus on something that pretty much every team in existence has: a physical meeting space. (Yes, I am aware that some teams meet virtually. Shut up.)

Let’s pretend that we have a creative team of 10 people. For the purposes of this example, our fictitious team is situated in an average office and has an average conference room that can comfortably seat all 10 folks. There’s a whiteboard at one end, a table in the middle, eight assorted chairs and one battered-but-comfy loveseat.

In our imaginary scenario, team meetings have become a problem. They’re a humdrum affair. People drag their feet about arriving on time so meetings rarely start as scheduled. And the focus of meetings is often hazy; conversations tend to stray off-topic and little is definitively decided.

Cue the entrance of our heroic “experience designer”, who decides that she wants to do something to fix team meetings. She reaches into her virtual toolbox and, utilizing the powerful tool of subtraction, removes two of the chairs from the conference room. Then, at the very next meeting she announces the rule that the last two people to enter the room must stand. They are the designated note-takers and have to remain at the end of the room by the whiteboard. *

What would change in the current “lackluster” meeting model? Here’s a partial list:

• Suddenly people would be keen to get to meetings on time, or even before the start time so they are not forced to stand.
• Who got which seat would matter a lot – after all, some of the chairs would offer a better view of the whiteboard, while some might be obstructed by the note-takers’ butts.
• The note-takers would probably have a strong desire to keep meeting times short. And if the task of distributing meeting notes was left in their hands, they would take an interest in making sure that any conclusions were well understood and clearly documented.
• People attending “Meetings 2.0″ would become acutely aware of meeting length. If one ran long, no doubt someone would think to themselves “thank goodness I did’t get stuck as the note-taker!”

But what if the experience designer decided to push the chair subtraction design even further? She could try cutting the sittable-space down to only four chairs. Or maybe instead of keeping the chairs, she could keep two loveseats. As you can imagine, either of those choices would yield very different experiences for meeting attendees. And what happens to the social dynamics of the meetings with only four coveted spots to sit? I’d bet that a pecking order would assert itself. People with some kind of seniority might be tempted to “claim” chairs, whether they arrived at the meeting on time or not. Or perhaps the assembled team is kind-hearted and cedes the seats to their leaders out of deference. And what about meetings with outsiders? If a representative from outside the company comes calling, does the team stick by it’s limited seating arrangement? Do the outsiders sit, while the team stands?

* NOTE: I am not so naive as to believe that a team of professional adults would accept a change like that without serious push-back. But even the act of removing the chairs would spark a serious conversation about how and why meetings were not meeting expectations and what the team could do to address those issues. So we could logically add some more bullet points to our list of changes:

• The company would most certainly have a conversation about the role of meetings in the office and how they are conducted.
• The “experience designer” would definitely get feedback on the social dynamics of the office, and how this experiment was received. (fair warning – some of that feedback might even be a little harsh) For example, did the boss embrace the experiment, or reject it?
• If it was embraced, it might embolden others to try similar experiments in “culture design”, affecting how things were done around the office.

A lot of the changes above could be mandated without removing the chairs from the conference room. But in my experience, actual subtraction is the fastest route to dramatic transformation. And if a change like that is simply discussed, and then enacted there’s a very strong possibility of backsliding. For example the team could elect to designate note takers for meetings. But I have a prediction in that case: as long as there was potentially a chair for everyone, someone would eventually balk at being designated for the job. They would sit, over the objection of their peers and the situation could backslide towards entropy.

Interestingly, the “post chair-subtraction” meetings described above mirror my own experiences working for a large Japanese game developer. The company held a “division wide” meeting on Mondays and attendance was mandatory for every employee. The company managers sat in the scare chairs at the conference room table while the employees in their functional area (programming, design, art, test, production) stood clustered behind them, their backs pressed against the walls of the room. I’m not going to make a value judgment on whether that particular practice was good or bad, but it certainly put a lot of emphasis on the formality of the proceedings and created a very real perception of hierarchy in the studio.

I find it fascinating that all of the outcomes above are possible because of one simple, subtractive change. And making the change (and not just sitting around talking about making it, or debating the merits) forces powerful, cascading reactions throughout the organization.

Subtraction can have a similar transformative effect on your designs. Try some of these mental exercises yourself:

• Write out your feature list. If you could only keep half of the features you’ve dreamed up, which ones are the most critical?
• What if you were to ruthlessly cut back to half as many levels in your game – what would change about the remaining levels? What would you do differently?
• Take a look at your list of enemies. What if you were to eliminate every other one? Would the gameplay you’re imagining still work? Would the remaining enemies benefit from additional development time and focus? Would they be more fun?

Next time I will relate some anecdotes about subtraction in my own game dev experiences. I’ll demonstrate how subtraction led to some very interesting breakthroughs in shipping products.

And stay tuned, because I still plan to use this process to illuminate the most powerful tool in your own “mental toolbox”!

http://www.hardylebel.com/2014/12/universal-truth-game-design-1/

Universal Truth Number One (part 2) by Hardy LeBel
I promised to talk about some interesting examples of subtraction from my own career, but I’m going to cheat a little bit; I’m also going to relate some stories that I witnessed first-hand, or that were described to me where subtraction had a profound impact on an evolving design.

My first anecdote came from my friend Zack Norman. Before he became a big time businessman in the mobile space (JAMDAT, textPlus), he was the Lead Designer on a PC title called Mechwarrior II. Following the massive success of that title, he went on to be the Writer and Lead Designer on Interstate ’76. If you know PC gaming, you’ll recognize them as two of the most unique and creatively inspired PC games of all time.



After the launch of Mechwarrior 2, I had an interesting chat with Zack about the game and he admitted that he was disappointed by the creative content. This stunned me, because I felt that it was one of the best game realizations of a “world IP” that had ever been made. It brought two of the mighty Mechwarrior armies to virtual space, complete with their insignias, call-signs, launch bays, interesting non-player characters and storylines – you name it. The game made me feel like I was inside a world that I’d previously only imagined through novels or tabletop gaming, and I said as much.

Zack’s response blew my mind. He said; “Yeah, we got two of the factions right but we had designs for six of the armies of the core worlds! It still bothers me that we couldn’t ship the game with all six of them.”

I never knew that they’d only shipped with a third of their planned content, so I told him; “As a player, it never felt that way to me.”

That’s one of the key lessons about subtraction: the end user will never know what features ended up on the cutting room floor. They won’t know what your big plans were. Their experiences with the game (or movie or what have you) are based on the shipping product. This fact is so important that it creates a corollary to Universal Rule #1. It should read something like this:

• Universal Rule #1: Subtraction is your second-most-powerful tool
• Corollary 1A: The user will never know what got cut

I’m not Hollywood screenwriter (yet), but I heard an interesting piece of anecdotal evidence that supports our new corollary. It came from Brad Bird, director of The Incredibles. Unfortunately it’s going to have to remain un-attributed because I can’t find a transcript of this story on the web. Thinking about it, it may have come from the director’s commentary version of the film on the DVD. If anyone reading this knows the source, please post it in the comments!



Anyway, Brad Bird was talking about the plot of the Incredibles and he mentioned that early versions of the script had an elaborate sub-plot involving Helen (Elastigirl) and an old pilot friend of hers. Apparently the scene were she calls and asks him for a favor and he lends her the lear jet was just a tiny fraction of the entire story sequence. Bird explained that there was a “story council” of folks at Pixar; internal storytelling gurus who regularly reviewed all of the scripts in production. After looking at early drafts of the movie, they all recommended that he cut the pilot sub-plot. Since I hadn’t written this blog yet, and he hadn’t yet had the chance to benefit from it’s timeless wisdom he refused and insisted on keeping those elements during development. But as the movie came together, the sub-plot turned out to be entirely superfluous and ended up on the cutting room floor.

What’s the lesson? Embrace cutting. Be ruthless in your willingness to subtract from your design, or your story. Whatever remains will benefit from the additional focus.

Which is a lovely segue to how the Halo series of games benefitted from ruthless subtraction.

If you’re here reading this blog, I am going to assume that you are at least aware of the Halo series of games. I worked on a couple of them. Some folks liked them. They made some money. But the origins of some of the design choices in Halo came from previous products that I worked on before Halo.

One game in particular: Oni, holds a very interesting “precursor” to Halo inventory design. If you never played Oni, we can’t be friends. Suffice to say that it was a third-person action game for PC that was a very fun blend of movement, hand-to-hand fighting and integrated gun combat set against the backdrop of a grand anime storyline.



NOTE: There was a port of the game onto Playstation 2, but the port was done by an external house and it was terribad. That version is DISAVOWED.

One challenge that came up in development was how to handle the player’s inventory. Oni had a very fluid feeling on mouse and keyboard, allowing the player to effortlessly flow between hand-to-hand combat and shooting. In that era, PC shooters used the number keys to give the player access to every weapon they picked up. This included grenades, which were often mapped to a number key at the end (one or zero) for quick access.

This created two problems for us. First, was the on-screen character model. If the player was carrying a small arsenal of guns, we had the challenge of somehow drawing them on the character’s body. Next there was the interface challenge. Forcing the player to fumble over the number keys to switch weapons didn’t feel smooth or elegant. It made the player release the controls, which left them un-able to move or fight as they could the rest of the time. This was especially problematic since shooting was designed to compliment the hand-to-hand fighting, not supplant it entirely. Not to mention that some of the guns were pistols and some were rifles. This distinction seemed to suggest that the player ought to have two categories of holster, and that they could swap out either their sidearm (pistol), or their primary weapon (rifle etc.)

We debated dozens of schemes to handle these complexities, with rules for how you would tell the game which holster you wanted to swap, and how we would manage how much ammo you were carrying for each gun etc. Finally we got sick of all that crap and in the last in a seemingly endless series of meetings about this topic, frustration eventually led to the idea of cutting a full weapon inventory and just letting the player have two weapons: one in their hands and one on their body. Instead of mapping each gun to a separate number on the keyboard, the player could use a single button to switch between the two weapons they were carrying, and they could use a single button to swap the weapon in their hands with a weapon they were standing over.

Given that this has become the default solution for most modern FPS games, it probably seems obvious. But at the time, it was scary-different. Nobody did it that way. Would PC players accept a change like that? Would it affect reviews or sales?

Making a change that big was a risk, but the advantages that subtraction offered our design were profound:

• We no longer had to balance every encounter in the game against every weapon. Instead we could simply drop the optimal weapon before a given fight and let the player make their own inventory choices.
• Subtracting every weapon choice from the player put a fascinating emphasis on the choices in front of them. If they had a gun they liked, they held on to it. But if it ran out of ammo, they either dropped it in favor of something else along the way, or dealt with only having one functional gun.
• The interface was infinitely cleaner. Needless to say, only having to manage swapping the active gun for the one on your back or one on the ground made the entire interface very simple and highly playable.

The combat model (mental model!) in Oni was based on the idea that the player should use guns to gain an advantage in a fight, but that hand-to-hand combat was the natural end for most encounters. I achieved this by balancing guns so that they had good damage, but limited ammo. The player could weaken multiple targets, or use multiple bullets to eliminate one or possibly two enemies before wading into hand-to-hand combat. The fluidity of the controls and the game balance created the feeling of an action hero in an anime or a Hong Kong action picture. Your fists were your reliable baseline, but you could grab and use any weapons you found along the way and then confidently toss them away.

Oni demonstrated how controls and game balance could create a set of intuitive choices for the player. Later the Oni model of “two-weapons/hand-to-hand” became the basis for the evolution of Halo’s “golden triangle” of player choices: “two-weapons/hand-to-hand/grenade”. The lesson? A beautifully simple interface, with all of the subtractive benefits that I described above made the Halo gameplay and control innovations possible.

So there you have it: three examples of subtraction from real creative development, and how they made huge positive impacts on the end products. Hopefully these are enough to sway you towards trying subtraction exercises yourself.

But even if you’re not sold on proactive subtraction, I promise there will come a time in your career when you’re forced to make savagely deep cuts in your design. When that panicky time is upon you, take a deep breath and remember:

• The audience will never see what got cut; they’ll only see the final product.
• Use the opportunity to focus on the core. What is absolutely essential to the heart of your project?
• How can cuts help you streamline, or even innovate? Use them as an opportunity to challenge old thinking.

In conclusion, we still have the matter of the most powerful tool available to you, personally. Tune in next time for the big reveal!

http://www.hardylebel.com/2014/12/universal-truth-number-one-part-2/

These blogs are amazing. It's great to get such a deep insight into the mind of the developer of one of my favorite games.

Wish they'd bring back some of these nuances to the sandbox. Especially the quick camo intricacies.