Flood (Halo) - Game Development

Game Development

The Flood were added early in the development of Halo: Combat Evolved, before the game had made its jump from the Macintosh platform to the Xbox. A design for one Flood form appeared as early as 1997. Commenting upon the inception of the Flood, Bungie staff member Chris Butcher noted that "the idea behind the Flood as the forgotten peril that ended a galaxy-spanning empire is a pretty fundamental tenet of good sci-fi. Yeah, and bad sci-fi too." Another inspiration was Christopher Rowley's The Vang series. The early design for the Flood was done by Bungie artist and writer Robert McLees, who considers himself "the architect" of the Flood; the Flood's roots are reflected in concept art of a "fungal zombie" that McLees did for the earlier Bungie game Marathon 2: Durandal. McLees also did all the early concept art for the Flood.

Based on the behavior of viruses and certain bacteria, the Flood were intended to be "disgusting and nasty". The creatures were constructed from the corpses and bodies of former combatants, so the artists had to make sure the Flood soldiers were recognizable enough while changing their silhouette enough to differentiate them from the uninfected. Many concepts and ideas were discarded due to time constraints—initially, the Flood were intended to convert any species of the alien Covenant into soldiers. "We didn’t have the resources to make it happen," McLees recalled, so they modified the game's fiction to suggest that some Covenant were too small or too frail to be combat troops. At one point, the ringworld Halo featured dinosaur-like terrestrial creatures, but these were dropped due to gameplay constraints. An additional consideration was that Bungie felt the presence of other native species would dilute the impact and surprise of the Flood.

For Halo 3, it was decided a new visual language for the Flood was needed. The task of developing the new Flood forms, organic Flood terrain, and other miscellaneous changes fell to Vic DeLeon, Bungie's Senior Environment Artist. With the addition of mutable forms in Halo 3, the only fictional constraint on the designer's imaginations was that the Flood altered the DNA of its victims by digesting.

Early concepts of what became "pure forms" featured the creatures wielding an array of weapons via tendrils, while forms like the Flood Infector and Flood Transport concepts never made it into the final game. Flood-infested structures were designed as angular to counterbalance Flood biomass, as well as provide surfaces for the game's artificial intelligence to exploit and move on. New additions were designed to be multi-purpose; exploding "growth pods" that spew Flood forms were added to the game to adjust pacing, provide instant action, and add to the visuals. Endoscopic pictures provided further inspiration. Bungie used Halo 3's improved capacity for graphics to make a host's sudden transformation into Flood form more dramatic; two different character models and skeletons were fused and swapped in real-time.