Destiny 2

Season of the Wish (Season 23)

Released: November 2023

My Contributions:

• Feature owner & primary IC for the seasonal Ritual Loop feature which included:

  • Design & implementation of core reward loop and seasonal reward distribution plans

  • Setup of seasonal vendor, vendor progression, progression rewards, weekly vendor & activity challenges, and vendor rewards

  • Design & implementation of seasonal bonuses (upgrades that affect things like reward loop efficiency, available vendor rewards, & similar metagame systems)

  • Design & implementation of seasonal bounties (short-form gameplay pursuits that drive engagement in seasonal activities, using seasonal weapons, utilizing seasonal meta weapons & subclasses, etc., that provide XP and vendor reputation for the season)

  • Worked w/ partner teams on seasonal armor set bonuses and premium season pass rewards

• Investment owner for Riven’s Lair & The Coil seasonal activities

  • Designed & implemented in-activity currency collection & buff purchase loop for gameplay-enhancing buffs in The Coil, a 3-player activity with escalating difficulty inspired by roguelikes and dungeon crawlers

  • Designed & implemented a new reward methodology for The Coil activity, giving players a reward payout after each successfully completed pathway through the “lair,” ensuring that even runs that ultimately did not reach the final pathway still paid players out based on their level of completion

  • Designed & implemented activity rewards for our Riven’s Lair playlist activity and story mission variants (the same overall activity as The Coil but condensed down to a single pathway run without the currency & buff loop)

• Other

  • Provided ongoing mentorship of associate-level designers on the team, especially whose work related to objective-based systems such as triumphs and seasonal challenges as those had heavy overlap with ritual loop content

  • Took on additional investment work to help load-balance other designers with tasks such as implementation of triumphs and assistance setting up quest components for the seasonal campaign

What I’m most proud of:

My biggest point of pride with Season of the Wish is my work on The Coil. Alongside incredible partners from activity design and input from other systems designers on our central rewards & economy teams, we crafted what has quickly become an immensely popular, fan-favorite seasonal activity.

In addition to the currency & buffs loop, the players’ overall team score provides them with the ability to earn additional rewards. Players collect “Wishing Glass Shards” to earn score throughout each pathway by breaking open pots and defeating enemies. Reaching specific score thresholds unlocks secret rooms with reward chests full of loot and additional pots full of shards. Reaching the Platinum score threshold and successfully completing all four pathways gives players entry into the Chamber of Wishes, a room flush with reward chests that shower players with tons of loot including seasonal gear, high-end materials, a ton of seasonal vendor reputation, and more.

Season of the Deep (Season 21)

Released: May 2023

My Contributions:

• Feature owner & primary IC for the Seasonal Upkeep feature which included:

  • Design & implementation of objective-based content meant to provide additional extrinsic motivation for engaging in seasonal content, including:

    • Seasonal Triumphs (analagous to achievements or trophies)

    • Seasonal Title (which players can equip to display under their name once unlocked, requires completion of a selection of seasonal triumphs)

    • Seasonal Challenges (challenges that roll out week-over-week, they are the largest source of seasonal XP, providing the fastest progress through the Season Pass)

    • Seasonal Lore Books (supplemental short-form narrative earned page-by-page via triumph completions)

    • Seasonal Metrics (tracked stats that we define connected to seasonal activities that players can choose to display on their nameplate visible to other players)

  • Implementation of in-game player messaging related to seasonal content (messaging served to players upon login or after completion of specific criteria to alert them to new content unlocked, new rewards unlocked, new content available, etc.)

• Investment (systems) owner for sunsetting Destiny 2 Year 5 content alongside Lightfall’s Launch

  • During the start of Season of the Deep development I was one of two designers responsible for “sunsetting” the previous years’ seasonal content as part of Destiny 2’s ongoing annual sunsetting model

• Other

  • Introduced the concept of having unique triumphs required to earn the title to better allow us to tune title earn-rates and surface objective requirements to players without shortcutting our typical triumph suite objectives

  • Introduced a new model for delivering seasonal upgrades to players, streamlining our traditional approach by conferring upgrades directly from completion of unique Seasonal Challenges (called Seasonal Bonuses)

  • Completely overhauled the Destiny team-wide framework for Seasonal Challenges, re-defining how we utilize them, best practices, things to avoid, etc. based on nearly two years’ worth of data and feedback, Season of the Deep was the first season to utilize the updated framework as a result

  • Overhauled the Destiny team-wide framework for design of Exotic Missions, using the existing framework as a loose set of guidelines to build upon and layering in nearly two years’ worth of learnings from data, feedback, and successful examples such as the Exotic Missions Presage and Operation: Seraph’s Shield

  • Worked closely with our Product team to continue our work on improving our in-game messaging development pipeline, seeing firsthand the results of previous efforts in that area including delegating implementation tasks for specific messaging requests to be handled by the team making the requests if they had the appropriate personnel, thereby reducing the reliance of other teams on the seasonal content team and freeing up overhead on our teams

What I’m most proud of:

With seasonal upkeep’s content types being largely “known quantities” for seasonal releases, it opens up a good amount of headroom for more senior staff owning the feature to contribute in meaningful capacities in other areas. To that end, I saw my work overhauling content frameworks used by the entire Destiny team and my ongoing contributions to the in-game messaging pipeline to be the most impactful contributions that I made during the season since they are much more far-reaching. While it gives me less to point to in the game when people ask what I did for the season, I know that behind the scenes my efforts in conjunction with my colleagues on partner teams was in service of creating more sustainable development patterns, freeing up our people to really focus on craft instead of cruft.

Season of the Seraph (Season 19)

Released: December 2022

My Contributions:

• Took over feature ownership & primary IC duties for the seasonal Ritual Loop after a studio departure which included:

  • Finalizing design & implementation of the core reward loop and seasonal reward distribution plans

  • Finalizing implementation of seasonal vendor, vendor progression, progression rewards, weekly vendor & activity challenges, and vendor rewards

  • Finalizing implementation of seasonal upgrades and their integration into seasonal activities

• Took over investment ownership for seasonal Heist Battleground activities after a studio departure which included:

  • Investment support for activity modifiers and how they are presented to players

  • Investment support for activity rewards

• Feature owner & primary IC for the “Seasonal Upkeep” feature which included:

  • Design & implementation of objective-based content meant to provide additional extrinsic motivation for engaging in seasonal content, including:

    • Seasonal Triumphs

    • Seasonal Title

    • Seasonal Challenges

    • Seasonal Lore Books

    • Seasonal Metrics

  • Implementation of in-game player messaging related to seasonal content

• Feature owner & primary IC for Moments of Triumph 2022 which included:

  • Determining which triumphs to showcase from the previous year’s content including the Witch Queen expansion, four seasons, two raids, and two dungeons

  • Design & implementation of a selection of new triumphs meant to ensure that players would have some amount of new content to engage in to work toward earning Moments of Triumph rewards both in and out of game (Bungie Rewards become purchasable on the Bungie Store for players who meet specific criteria in-game)

  • Worked with our Raids & Dungeons team to create a unique series of RAD content challenge triumphs that rewarded a unique out of game Bungie Reward

• Other

  • Served as a “late-closer” for the season, rolling off later than most other designers in order to provide additional support tackling bugs and late-breaking issues before launch

  • Built an automation script in XML that automates creation of the triumph category, triumph collections, and presentation structure for the seasonal triumph suite, allowing the designer to get straight to the task of implementing the triumphs themselves, skipping all of the tedium of setting up the category, subscreens, etc.

  • Worked closely with our Product team to explore improvements to our in-game messaging development pipeline, streamlining the request and implementation process and reducing implementation overhead by introducing a requirement to requestors to include first-draft copy for their messages, and advocating that teams with appropriate personnel begin to implement their own messages to reduce overhead on the seasonal content teams

What I’m most proud of:

My work on Season of the Seraph started out light, working primarily on upkeep work as I expected to be pulled away to start sunsetting the year’s content, which ended up happening during the development cycle of Season of the Deep instead. This initial light load gave me the ability to build out the automation script for stubbing in seasonal triumphs, greatly reducing the time it takes to spin up that work by letting designers get straight into the meat of implementation rather than going through the tedium of setting up the supporting structures.

Additionally the season was a great opportunity for me to strengthen and showcase my ability to effectively handle and drive alignment across multiple features as I took over the feature duties of another designer who departed the studio mid-cycle. This created a somewhat unique scenario in which I had a good deal of interconnected feature ownership between the ritual loop and upkeep suite as well as with the activities I helped to support, which let me effectively work simultaneously in those areas without too much loss of efficiency through context-switching.

At the end of it all, Season of the Seraph became one of my all-time favorite seasons both to work on and play once it launched. I think the team nailed the fantasy and created the quintessential Destiny 2 season up to that point. Plus, seriously, that key art!? Incredible.