Content Design
The content design page lists notable examples of my work building activities, missions, levels, and other bespoke experiences. These highlights are from my time as a Senior Activity Designer for Destiny 2.
Destiny 2:
“Avalon” Exotic Mission
Release: The Season of Defiance, 2023
My Role: Feature Lead and Activity Designer
Key Creative Goals:
Fantasy: Hacking into an unknown cyberspace that shouldn't exist
Emotions: Curiosity, surprise, and anticipation
Content: Should include content that rolls out over repeat plays
Avalon was is a secret 1-3 player mission. As the feature lead, I shepherded the feature from the first concept specification until it was in customers’ hands. This included the mission and the surrounding features related to it, such as the rewards, quests, achievements, and even consulting on the merchandise for it.
As the activity designer, I was responsible for designing the flow of the activity, the initial design for all encounters, the secrets, and the unique "hacking" mechanic featured throughout the activity. I used our internal scripting language and world editor tools to implement most of these elements myself.
The first completion of the activity rewarded players with a special "exotic" weapon, Vexcalibur. I wanted this weapon to act as the key that would unlock new experiences upon repeat play-throughs, so I worked with our Sandbox and Technical Design teams to build gating mechanics that could only be bypassed with the special abilities of the weapon.
One example was that I wanted a “wall clip” ability that would lean thematically on the cyberspace theme. Initially I requested that sandbox give it a teleport ability, but when I learned that it would be a type of weapon that had a shielding action built into it, I decided to lean on that shield as a modal state for the player. While the shield was active, players could clip through special barriers, enabling faster traversal, access to secrets, and more maneuverability in combat.
Through this and similar methods, we were able to extend player interest and replayability over several weeks.
Destiny 2:
"Way of the Witch" Mission
Release: The Season of the Witch, 2023
Role: Feature Lead and Activity Designer
Key Creative Goals:
Product: Upsell players on the season
Thematic: Introduce players to the themes of the season
Tutorialization: Teach players the mechanics of the season
Emotions: Anticipation, with an awe-inspiring grand reveal at the end
Way of the Witch is a short 1-3 player intro mission that players were auto-launched into when they first logged in after the release of the season. It was my job to ensure the mission would leave the players wanting more, ultimately convincing them to purchase the season pass. It was important to feature our new mechanics within the mission as well, and provide an avenue for players to learn about how to use them before moving onto our match-made activities.
I needed to align very closely with the teams creating the rest of the season’s content. This meant working heavily with the owners of the seasonal mechanics throughout the release to readjust my plans to match their mechanical designs. Since my mission's design heavily relied on the story the narrative team was creating, I had to work closely with them to ensure that my mission met the timing and emotional flow they were working to achieve.
Finally, the mission had to end with a dramatic environment art reveal that led into a cinematic, so I closely collaborated with the environment, lighting, VFX, and cinematic artists to satisfy all of their requirements.
Destiny 2:
“Sunder” Mission
Release: The Season of the Witch, 2023
Role: Feature Lead and Activity Designer
Key Creative Goals:
Fantasy: Defend against an overwhelming demonic army using the hive magic you've learned over the season.
Emotions: Focus and desperation in the face of difficult combat. Leave players feeling triumphant and anticipatory.
Sunder was a single-encounter final boss mission, the finale of the season. After completing the mission, the boss encounter was unlocked as a random boss fight in the season’s replayable boss-rush activity.
This meant that I had dual goals that were sometimes in tension. I had to make a satisfying, climactic encounter with appropriate gravitas, with timing that allowed for dialog. I also had to provide a short replayable encounter of a higher difficulty for the boss rush.
A major production requirement was to avoid branching copies of the same content for these two use-cases, because doing so would greatly increase the test cost and add overhead to my own work. The campaign and boss rush versions of the fight had to be built from the same files and scripts.
I achieved this by slicing the content into modular chunks, one for each phase or objective of the boss, and built them so that they could be activated in any order. This allowed me to include more phases in the campaign version with downbeats for narrative content. With a subset of the same content I could provide a more streamlined, shorter version of the encounter for the boss rush activity.
I designed the encounter around a key moment I had in mind from the start: the players summoning a magical circle that would be their only protection against an unstoppable bombardment from enemy ships. Triggering this mid-fight allowed me to dramatically shift the combat fronts and combatant composition of the encounter, and provide a bombastic moment unlike anything we’d had before.
Finally, our narrative was that this boss was a general. I felt that our game had a lot of untapped potential to portray a boss as an imposing back-row commander. To achieve this, I did the following:
Worked closely with our environment artists to build a large space that had walkways that a big boss could fit on, so that I could have him move around to accentuate the flow of the fight.
Used canned animations to a greater extent than we typically did, timed to changes in objectives or flow.
Paid very close attention to how the presence of objectives and dangerous enemy units, combined with the location of the combat fronts, was directing the player’s attention and camera around the arena. It was important that players witnessed the boss “taking action” to direct his troops.
Destiny 2:
"Breach Executable" Arena
Release: Episode 1: Echoes, 2024
Role: Activity Designer
Key Creative Goals:
Fantasy: A high stakes data-gathering expedition.
Replayable: High variety and systems that acknowledge mastery.
Theme: Make players feel like they are investigating the changes in the planet.
Breach Executable was the flagship replayable activity for the first act of the Echoes Episode. Players were matched into groups of 3. It was a “fail forward” mission, where encounters had time limits and a point system, and instead of restarting encounters on failure, players would finish them with partial credit. This meant that player progress wouldn’t stall even with a low-performing team, allowing us to have more complex mechanics.
I designed and implemented one of the three possible boss fights, as well as two of the six possible random encounters leading up to it.
For my boss fight, my goal was to create a low-light encounter that felt like being trapped in a room with a monster. I wanted the following:
Battlefield information to be obscured by darkness
For players to have moments where they’d catch glimpses of the boss at a distance, as it weaved in and out of sight
For players to have moments of surprise where the boss would appear behind them.
I chose a melee combatant, worked with environment art to have vertical line-of-sight blinds, and custom scripted a teleport behavior where the boss would teleport to locations that were not in line-of-sight for any player.
Hitting the right balance with the lighting in the combat arena was a difficult challenge. The experience called for darkness, but if it got too dark we were concerned about photosensitivity and players’ ability to to navigate the space. I had many working sessions together with my lighting artist before we were both satisfied. We were able to mitigate the photosensitivity concerns by building a new setup that reduced the VFX brightness from player and combatant abilities.
For this season I was also responsible for two of our seasonal mechanics: a new spawn object for one of our combatant factions, and a special weapon that had a ricocheting laser that we could drop into our activities for use in puzzles. One of my encounters was designed around showcasing these mechanics. I built a system where there was a grid of special targets in the air; shooting them with the laser would connect them together with energy tethers. Connecting certain ones would spawn special enemies using the new spawn objects. The overall effect was that I was able to direct player attention with the lasers as they progressed through the encounter.
My second encounter was added late in production, when all of the available arenas in the map were already used. My goal became figuring out how to make a compelling encounter that utilized spaces, like platforms above a chasm, that weren’t originally designed for combat. I landed on a very physical encounter that involved moving forward through space on temporary floating platforms and throwing physics objects at special targets. Because the space wasn’t designed for combatants to navigate, I leaned on flying enemies that are a bit difficult to setup, so they aren’t used often. The impact of all these choices was an encounter far outside the norm for Destiny, giving players a novel experience.
