I won't be able to watch so let me know how it goes.

Are there any map design principles that you follow universally, or do you believe they can all be broken if taking appropriate counter-measures? If you believe the latter, please provide an example or multiple examples of how you've broken these principles successfully.

@purely fat - Here's a brief recap off the top of my head:
- Boarding Action was bad because it was originally designed for Spartans with jetpacks, which were cut from the final version of the game because it was too hard to incorporate into campaign.
- Function is more important than form, verticality is awesome, game design and leve;l design must be wholly supportive of one another.
- Maps were intentionally designed to be overly simple because they were testing sandbox items and movement mechanics.
- First make something cool, then make it balanced.
- Sword was in the game but cut at last minute
- Some terrible environment artist posted risky pictures of his girlfriend in a hidden room on boarding action. They were later found by Chris Carney and removed…

@purely fat Your question about why the maps were so bad was his favorite LOL


Also he's planning on doing this again!!! Yay!

I just feel like a douche. lol
I will have a better question next time.

that was a perfectly valid question though

It was really blunt though... I could have thought of a better way to phrase it.

Just going to leave this here...Hardy's talk combined with gameplay on his maps.

Surprise! Surprise! Hardy's coming back at us with another Level Design question and answer session.
He's still keeping an eye out for more questions, so ask away.
http://www.hardylebel.com/2015/02/453/




Round two of answering your questions on Halo: CE multiplayer level design and whatever else we can get to.

On Tuesday, February 10 at 6pm (PST) I will be holding a free 30 minute Google+ webinar to answer more of your questions.

I’ll try to get through the list that has already been submitted, but you’re welcome to post your questions in advance in the comments section below.

The good folks at Forge Hub have been very supportive of this process so I’ll also be collecting questions from their forums as well.

I hope you’ll join us!

OK now that the stream's over, somebasic highlights for people who missed it and would like a recap (I missed the first couple minutes btw)

-Hardy worked on socom and Far Cry

-The Jet Pack was only in CE for a short period of time; it was prototyped and removed, and left Boarding Action in an unsatisfactory state.

-Rat Race was Hardy's first time modeling. He just made tunnels, had them go up and down, and made sure they connected. He didn't expect it to become one of the more popular competitive maps (and I say "more popular competitive maps" with respect to Chiron and company).

-Damnation was originally a segment of Campaign that got scrapped. Hardy and Dave Dunn (the maker of Damnation as a single-player map) adapted the campaign segment for multiplayer.

-Nading weapons: The devs didn't specifically think about people throwing nades to get weapons to themselves. Instead the devs thought about denying the other team weapons, and figured it could potentially be interesting for weapons to have physics.


Also, another webinar next week!! yay!!

Youtube Rebroadcast