Jason Bender: Hi, I'm Jason Bender lead designer of Command & Conquer 4. Today, I'm going to talking about offense crawler. The major game play of element of C & C 4 is that you're playing on the team. It wasn’t long before you realize that having a 150 buildings on the field that we’re getting blown up a variety of players and not concern at people out of the match is going to be a problem.

So we realized we needed something that could be a compact base, something back into game with very quickly and something that really represented you on the battle field. That’s what's born in the crawler, it’s your base, it’s your radar, it’s your war factory, it’s a heavy combat vehicle, it’s your identity on the battle field that represents a lot of different things.

Leon Gor: Well, I'm the 3D artist. I was responsible for the look and design the GDI nod crawlers. And here is a harvest model of offensive crawler it was since they had formula functions, it was important to get them to transform accurately. When they were in vehicle mode, I want them to like a tank that walk and then whey they turn to their structure mode, it is important for me for—to me, it looked like a building and not a part vehicle.

Kich Ma: I have to make two models and put in one texture and I will receive a concept which just the 3D models, shape of it. So the challenge for me is to come up with the texture just like the skin on that models.

Umberto Bossi: My task on the crawler was to make it come alive, so it was a little bit challenging. My task was to take the crawler after modeling and make sure it could actually transform from unit to structure and vise versa. And also the procedural destruction that you see featured in the game was working correctly. In C & C 4, we wanted to introduce a deeper degree of destruction and try go give to the player a good satisfaction feeling when they manage to destroy one of the larger units.

And we wanted to portrait the unit being literally destroyed little by little and see the inside of the unit as you destroy. So we do the larger unit like the crawler. As the player hits the unit, the unit gets literally eviscerate, eviscerated or destroyed and you can actually see the part coming off and see the inside of the unit and all the guts.

Aram Granger: Hi, my name is Arm Granger and I blow stuff up on C & C 4. Really, our direction with the crawler, our art drafter Chris Tamburino said, “Make it look different.” And so, I said, “Okay,” and we needed to have some more kind of interior detail to the explosion on this, we heeded to have sort of inside roiling of the smoke whereas kind of before another C & C games, you would see particle sprites just kind of disappear when the particle ended an I wanted to get some sort of movement in between the particles birth and its death.

The crawler itself is such a big unit, because every time that hits on the crawler system, you get a different explosion coming out of different debris and it will go through its death, stated as a whole another death animation that—did and then its final explosion, final death. And so that’s kind of the big deal about the crawler.

Jason Bender: So the crawler function is not only your base of operations, a large vehicle, but also your war factory and your personality on the field. It’s a rally point for everything you do.