D2 Years 7 to 9

Widely considered Destiny's best expansion, The Final Shape was the culmination of learnings and growth from an absolute powerhouse of a team.

My contribution to this project spanned over two years: I was involved in some of the earliest concepting meetings and helped guide the goals, structure, fantasy, and themes of the release alongside the amazing expansion leadership team. In particular, I helped establish the linear spatial flow through the massive Pale Heart destination, that helped sell the journey-like tone of the highly-praised campaign.

Once again, I guided the Player Journey team as a hands-on creative lead as well as a mentor and guide. I assisted in establishing goals, as well as experiential themes and moment-to-moment  decisions. I still took learnings from our past projects to ensure the team felt empowered to make decisions and maintain momentum when I was stretched too thin to directly assist, but I made myself consistently available for important priorities throughout the project. Having learned from Lightfall, I made sure to directly drive improvements to the project quality when I saw anything that felt lacking.

This was the first project where I was semi-embedded in the expansion leadership team and had direct conversations frequently with the project lead and game director. This helped ensure their vision and priorities matched those of the folks building the content, and vice-versa. This approach was built off of mutual respect and paid dividends in the health of the team, as well as in the quality of the project throughout its development.

As in the past, I maintained a hand in assisting with IC work, especially around big milestones and during project closing. I was praised for my technical aptitude, ability to take on work from any corner of the game and rapidly fix/close it, and my ability to quickly prioritize and ensure the right work was getting done first.

After The Final Shape, the D2 team went through a massive re-org that saw the dissolution of the Player Journey area I'd created, helped grow, and led for almost half a decade. That was difficult for me, and for many other members of the team.

I shifted into a more IC-focused lead role, where I had a direct hand in planning and building the content. Unfortunately, this project had difficulties forming a coherent fantasy and content plan that could translate into the Destiny 2 ecosystem. This led to a rocky start to development, and multiple changes to the fundamental design of this content pack.

I had a hand in most of the systemic features of this project; pretty much everything except the campaign itself. I helped with planning and implementation of the new npc text-based performance system. I drove the design and implementation of the "Map Guide" system, which surfaced upgrades and currencies directly on the map. This was later used in the Renegades content pack as well. I drove the implementation of the "ability chests" spread across the map, as well as a full rework of the entire Kepler destination reward ecosystem late in the project. I built a slate of repeatable and aspirational rewards systems surfaced through the Altar of Relativity vendor.

My largest contribution to this project was focused for months on an ill-fated systemic feature, where players used a unique crafting-lite system to seek out a spread of reagents in order to access different dimensional-pockets with unique gameplay experiences. I rapidly prototyped and built out a complex system that could randomize, lay out in UI, and track the player's reagent requirements each time they did a loop. This system ultimately got cut during one of the development pivots.

The final content release of D2. We had roughly two months of development time for this project.

I provided the pitch for what would become the Distortions system. From there, I established the needs for the feature, and guided a cross-disciplinary strike team to rapidly build and start testing a vertical slice of the idea.

The Distortions system was a dream for me and many other devs (and players): a return of the heart of Destiny, its public spaces. Where you could run into other players and work together on small challenges, or just wave and move on. This part of the game had been neglected, with no new publicly-matchmade destinations since Lightfall, almost three years prior. So Distortions was built as a rejuvenation of the open world, a love letter to one of Destiny's biggest strengths.

On this team, I held the creative vision, working with an amazing art director to rapidly guide decisions and provide strong guidance to team members on goals and priorities. Due to the tight timeline, I was much more hands-on with decision making than I had been in the past. But I balanced this by listening closely with the experts building the content, and always having direct conversations whenever possible.

Alongside driving this Distortions feature, I also worked with another team of developers on revisiting the base rewards experience across all destinations. This was an area of expertise I'd built up, working on the destinations of every D2 release, and it paid dividends in my ability to guide and implement massive reworks and broad applications of new tiered weapons and armor across huge portions of the game in the matter of days.

This project was a high point in my career. I worked with top talent, a team who was passionate and efficient and just plain fun. We were given free reign to create something magical, and we cut out processes and requirements that had hampered us in the past. This allowed us to create an astounding amount of content across seven different destinations on an absurdly short timeline.

I worked with the Community team on the majority of the player-facing info about the Distortions system. It made me so proud to see that effort come full circle in the unbridled joy and enthusiasm of players. First when they learned about the system in a preview article, and later when they got their hands on the game update and took to the internet to praise it. This team was incredible and our sendoff to the game was everything I could've hoped for, and more.