Welcome back to the Community Corner!

Earlier this week, we launched Operation: Haloween which features Survive the Undead—a new playlist experience made by The Forge Falcons. Naturally, it only seemed right that we sit down with the fine folks of that team: EliteFalcon, MaxBloodBath, Prim27, and Outlet.

Welcome (back!) and thank you for joining us today! Please introduce yourselves and tell us all about who The Forge Falcons are and where we can find you.

Thank you for having us (again!), for those who don't know, we are a team of Forgers who love Halo and its community. Since our inception, the goal with 'The Forge Falcons' was to make it function somewhat like a typical game studio—or what some might simply call, a Forge studio.

Across multiple teams (Forgers, Scripters, and Graphic Designers) we all work together to create the absolute best Forge experiences we possibly can. Each team has a lead to ensure we are always releasing quality content and renders. The best places to find us are Discord and Twitter.

How did your great journey with Halo start?

Individually, it has varied from the release of Halo: CE up to Halo: Reach. But our love for the franchise has grown ever since.

Our journey as a team started on November 1, 2022. How did this come to be? Well, we all really love making things and we of course love Halo and there was a clear opportunity for us to create a Forge based studio, and build a community around that and the content we make. But more importantly, we wanted to provide great experiences for the players and contribute to the franchise we love.

Let’s talk Forge. Tell us about your experience with Forge over the years. Did you begin with Halo 3 when the tool was more of a level editor, or did you jump into the mode in more recent years?

As a team, we obviously started with Halo Infinite's Forge, but individually, the majority of us started with Halo 3, while some of us started with Halo: Reach.

Forge has come a long way since the early days, especially in regards to what is actually possible with the experiences you can make—mainly because of the Node Graph in Halo Infinite and the ability to add Campaign AI. So, for players that might only be starting out with Halo Infinite, you genuinely have an almost infinite playground.

Do you remember what your first ever Forge creation was? Personally, I can vividly recall messing around on Last Resort in Halo 3 and finding out that throwing deployable cover into a gravity lift would make the large crate fly into the air while I was inside it.

The first experience we made as a team was Survive the Undead, which of course is why we're here today! But going all the way back to the days of Reach, many of us remember messing around with fusion coils—making it rain with fusion coils, making a battleship-type map with cannons that people can use... Back then, that was considered impressive. It was fourteen years ago to be fair, but we will always remember stuff like that.

How has it felt to have the Halo community playing your maps and experiences in matchmaking?

Having the community play our experiences we have spent thousands of hours on feels good, that's why you make things, right? For people to play them, and getting your maps into matchmaking is the best way to do that in Halo Infinite.

As it's an entirely new experience we're making, we never expected it to go into matchmaking. But for it to actually go in, get its own playlist, and do extremely well with the community... it's an extremely good feeling.

What’s the origin story for the Forge Falcons? How did this group come together and develop to not just encompass people passionate about Forge, but graphic designers as well?

When I originally created The Forge Falcons, I wanted to create exceptional experiences that required a well-coordinated, skilled, and passionate team.

If you look at anything we have made since our inception, it can't be made by any one person, at least in a reasonable amount of time. And I guess I wasn't aware of just how many people had that same mindset, about wanting to create amazing things with a team that follows a studio-like structure.

Unsurprisingly, we found folks with graphic design skills  that are just as passionate and skilled as the Fforgers, so now we have an incredible team that all work well with each other and understand the vision of the studio.

Where do you begin when looking to design a map—whether that’s a functional multiplayer arena or more of a specific experience?

We have had many meetings and discussions about what experiences we should make, so the process really starts at the concept phase. What do players want, what would do well with players, and most importantly what are we most passionate about?

From there, the team leads take that concept, talk with their teams, and get a plan together for what direction they want to take it. Then the blockout gets made before anything to make sure we're happy with it and that it is budget friendly. After that, we get the scripts done, tested, and then it's onto art. Sometimes in odd cases, like with Helljumpers, there will be crossover with blockout, scripts and art all at once if it's best for the direction we're taking it and the deadlines we're aiming to hit.

Do you have a favorite map or experience that you’ve created as a team?

This has to go to Survive the Undead. This experience has come a really long way since it was originally released, from its origin leveraging bots to now with fully realized campaign AI and bosses. We've always had fun working on Survive the Undead and that probably shows in the amount of maps we have created for it. If players love it in matchmaking and it has its own playlist like it currently does, then we will be more than willing to make new maps and even mode variants down the line to really beef the playlist up.

On the graphic design front, where do you begin when putting together the amazing imagery for these maps and experiences?

From the beginning, it was always about supporting the talent that the Forgers pour into their creations. At the same time, since we are based in Halo Infinite, we want to adhere to designs that 343 established so everything feels cohesive.

To do that consistently, I draw up a creative brief that gives direction for our other artists and allows for some consistency, regardless of who is making what. Aside from that, artists have creative freedom to do what they think best amplifies the work done by the Forgers. Most often, that involves finding noteworthy spots in their maps that we would want to showcase front and center.

Do you have a favorite piece you’ve made for a Forge Falcons experience? Why that particular piece?

It's really tough to pick just one. The thumbnails for Survive the Undead were some of the first things I made for The Forge Falcons before we onboarded other artists, so those were fun in the sense that we didn't have an overall tone set in place, and we were exploring what that would eventually be. But my favorite might just be the content for Helljumpers that was recently shown off at the 2024 Halo World Championship event!

What advice would you give to folks who are interested in trying out Forge but might feel unsure of where to start? What are some of the fundamental things you think those people should know?

For anyone wanting to learn Forge, always start out small and don't commit to something you know you can't do yet. Build up slowly, build confidence in your work and your workflow, and take it from there.

One thing every Forger should keep in mind is performance. Forge can get very unoptimized at times and it's down to the Forger to manage that; cut back in places that aren't as noticeable and really make sure players have a good experience before anything else.

If you could issue a challenge to the community, what’s something you’d like to see people make in Forge?

If we could challenge the community to make something, it would be more experiences like Warzone, Invasion, Rush (Battlefield), and any crazy stuff like that. We do know that Okom and co are working on a Warzone experience and the HaloFunTime folks are cooking up Forge World. So that's always awesome to see.

Who are some of the Forgers out there that have inspired you?

Forgers that inspired us would be people like: Nightavenger01, InfiniteForges, Paimon and RedNomster. Incredible artists and creatives, if anyone reading this hasn't checked them out, please do.

Forge has come a long way—both over the years as a whole and also as it has continued to be supported in Halo Infinite. As Forgers, are there any further wishlist items you have for what you’d like to see implemented into this mode in the future?

Forge has certainly come a long way, but there are for sure some features we'd love to see added that would take the tool to the next level. Most notably is a Saving Device or something of the sort (allow the players to save their progress across multiple games via the cloud), and of course, a real landscape tool that allows us to make fully custom terrain.

Those two features would effectively take Forge from an advanced player tool to a full-on dev tool at that point.

Do you have any hints about cool maps and experiences you might be looking to build in the future?

Aside from maps we'd be willing to make for Survive the Undead in matchmaking, the biggest one we're working on—and one people would have got a good look at during our Forge Panel at HaloWC earlier this month—is none other than Helljumpers. It is by far our biggest and most ambitious experience and we cannot wait for people to finally play it on October 25.

Outside of Forge, do you have any other areas of the franchise that you really gravitate towards—whether that’s the campaign and fiction, multiplayer, and so on?

We all love Halo, from the games to the books, and beyond. Campaign is of course a favorite, for the majority of us it's a big draw to Halo. Whenever any of us pick up a new Halo game at launch, the first thing we are doing is playing through the campaign before anything else.

Thank you very much for joining us for this issue of the Community Corner! Do you have any parting words to share?

Thank you for having us (again!), we really enjoyed answering all of these questions and giving people even more insight into what we do and who we are.

We want to thank the Halo community for supporting us through all of our projects, it means the world to us, truly. And we want to thank 343 for their close collaboration with our team to put on an awesome panel and to get Survive the Undead into a really solid state.

Working with 343 has been a pleasure and we hope we can do it again in the future to bring more of our experiences to matchmaking!

Don't forget you can join the Discord group for The Forge Falcons, and follow them on Twitter!