Halo 3 comic

Recently, I talked about creating a Halo comic. Unfortunately, this is going to be a lot harder than I thought.

You may recall that I was going to do my first comic based on the Halo 3 storyline. However, the problem is that the story part of the game mainly occurs during cutscenes - which aren't recorded by the game. Unfortunately, I don't have a capture card so I can't capture the video to my PC either.

This means that all of the exposition explaining the story will somehow have to be ported into the game engine. And not just ported into the game engine but during the limited control that I have during the campaign.

So what problems does this actually create?

Firstly, unlike the Red vs Blue machinima, I am limited to 1 person. Which means that I can only control 1 person. Which means that it is very hard to setup the scene so that I have people talking to each other.

Secondly, as I'm creating a comic of the story portion of the game, it means that I will have to take screenshots from the campaign mode. Which makes it even harder for me to setup the scene. In case you don't understand why - you have to remember that while I'm positioning my guy for the best shot or best pose etc, I'm also being attacked by the AI covenant forces!

Even if I can get around all these, due to the requirement to put all the cutscene scripts into the comic, it means that I am going to have to spend a lot of time storyboarding the comic so I know what it is I'm trying to do. And all this is before I even start playing the video looking for screenshots!

Which leads me to the last and also possibly biggest hurdle. The camera in the campaign save games isn't as good as in the multiplayer games. Although I can control the camera placement, I can't rewind. This means that if I accidentally move past the shot I'm looking for, I have to exit the video and reload it from the beginning. Which is a huge pain in the ass when you consider that the first level took me 51 minutes to complete (which also means I have a 51 minute video to review!).

All in all, a lot of problems. Having said that, it might still be doable. However, I think I will need a lot more experience with storyboarding and graphic layout before I can tackle making a comic of the Halo 3 campaign. Which is why I have gone back to the idea of creating a comic based on one of my multiplayer games. Anyway, not sure how long it will take me - but I will let you know if there are any significant developments.