Destiny 2: Season of the Lost (season 15)
Season of the Lost (season 15) was released during the Beyond Light (year 4) expansion for Destiny 2.
Skills
Systems Design
Progressions
Economy
Rewards
Quests
Vanguard Investment Design Lead
Vanguard was the large team responsible for each seasonal release, producing 4x a year. Investment is the discipline of systems design responsible for progressions, economy, rewards, quests, crafting, social systems, and the like. In this role, I was responsible for the quality of all investment design features across all seasons actively in development, training ICs on investment design, managing staff, and developing craft.
Features
- Ritual Loop (game loop, rewards, progressions, vendors, quests, bounties)
- Festival of the Lost (in-game event)
- Exotic Quest: Ager’s Scepter
- Seasonal Reward System (reward agency, high value gear)
- Seasonal Challenges (weekly rollout of objectives)
- Seasonal Upkeep (a collection of small-scope features from PVP updates to seasonal achievements)
- Player Journey (season’s main quest)
For Season of the Lost, I was the feature lead for all systems design features overseeing them from concept to close while maintaining hands-on work where needed.
Ritual Loop
Role: Vanguard Investment Design Lead – feature lead
A ritual loop is a season’s game loop. It unifies the season’s theme, activities, and rewards through a multi-layered set of systems and content. Ritual loops drive player engagement through a suite of quests, progressions, upgrades, reward stories, and more.
Responsibilities
- Oversaw design and implementation of ritual loop
- Meticulously reviewed design specs giving feedback and direction for the highest quality experience including:
- Activity reward structure
- Vendor upgrades and reputation
- Bounties
- Vanity item reward stories
- Built and balanced seasonal economy
- Built systems to work with weekly rotating content on destinations and in activities
- Assisted activity designers with various integrations
Festival of the Lost (in-game event)
Role: Vanguard Investment Design Lead – feature lead
Festival of the Lost is Destiny’s Halloween themed in-game event. Player put on masks, collect candy, and defeat giant hive with jack-o-lanterns for heads.
Responsibilities
- Revamped Festival of the Lost for the first-time ever, giving it a new theme, new activity, and whole new event loop
- Performed major economy redesign, deprecated a previously available currency (chocolate), introduced a new currency (spectral pages) which transformed (into restored pages) from playing the new event activity
- Built new spreadsheets for better economy design controls and trained designers on them
- Developed new progression structure and loop for the event
- Created new reward structures to scale with player success in the event activity
- Mentored designers in developing their first loop, economies, and reward structures
- Pitched concept for event revamp to senior leadership
- Updated onramp quest introducing players to Festival of the Lost, its event loop, and how to earn rewards
- Designed secret quest to payoff delayed gratification from a previous iteration of the event’s side-quest which left an item players could keep for a year
Exotic Quest
Role: Vanguard Investment Design Lead – feature lead, feature owner
An exotic quest rewards players with an exotic weapon, and require more effort in the form of exploration, discovery, and perseverance.
Responsibilities
- Oversaw design and implementation of exotic quest from concept to close
- Provided feedback to feature owner on quest flow
- Picked up feature ownership from IC to help next season start pre-production on time
- Built logic for each individual pickup object’s visibility, weekly gating, and interaction availability
- Finished quest step content working with exotic mission feature owner to adapt to their updates
- Set up temporarily awarding players with the weapon so they could use it during the finale of the exotic mission
Seasonal Reward System
Role: Vanguard Investment Design Lead – feature lead, feature owner
The Seasonal Reward System was a method for players to focus umbral engrams into more specific rewards from a larger reward pool. It gave players a path to acquiring specific gear such as submachineguns or helmets. Each focusing option was unlocked through completing a unique objective.
Responsibilities
- Built objectives for players to unlock numerous tier II and tier III focusing options
- Integrated ritual loop with seasonal reward system for an easy to understand reward story
- Implemented quest to introduce players to gear focusing for the season
- Updated the seasonal reward system to utilize triumphs so players could track their progress to unlocking new focusing options and celebrate earning them
Seasonal Upkeep (various features)
Role: Vanguard Investment Design Lead – feature lead
Seasonal Upkeep covers a range of seasonally reoccurring feature work including PVP map rotation, seasonal weapon quests, achievements, and more.
Responsibilities
- Oversaw the development of:
- Iron Banner updates (quest, vendor rewards, collections, vanity reward stories)
- Trials & PVP updates (trials maps rotation, PVP maps rotation, trials intro pursuit, trials seasonal pursuit, collections)
- Ritual Weapon (vendor rank progression, weapon ornament progression)
- Triumphs (crucible, gambit, vanguard, seasonal gear, ritual loop, seasonal activities, exotic quest/mission, event)
- Seal/Title (objectives, difficulty tuning)
- Mentored new Designers through learning how to create a variety triumphs for each other feature in the season (ritual loop, player journey, exotic quest, etc.)
- Reviewed specs for each feature’s updates and gave feedback on how to accomplish our goals within time and at our quality bar
- Taught Designers about our objectives frameworks to ensure tasks we asked players to do was within intended duration and difficulty
Seasonal Challenges
Role: Vanguard Investment Design Lead – feature lead
Seasonal Challenges are objectives that rollout each week of a season. They highlight what content players should engage with, give large amounts of xp for progress on the season pass, and grant rewards for accomplishments within a season.
Responsibilities
- Mentored new Designers in learning how to build seasonal challenges
- Oversaw development, iteration, and closing of feature
- Reviewed feature owner’s content to reduce bug count