guardian tank hud & reticle

I built and animated the HUD for the Guardian Tank vehicle which was new for Destiny 2. This included implementation and motion graphics for quick-fire reticle, as well as expanded missile targeting, and weapons HUD for the vehicle.

In addition to the new lock-on missile functionality, we needed to show the different states for the basic tank shells as well as the new targeted missiles. We landed on a combination ammo display utilizing the existing weapon HUD, alongside a new pip-based visual to show missile count and recharge status — something that would be unobtrusive, but easily seen and understood in peripheral vision.

Vault update

In Destiny 2, the engineering team was able to increase storage capacity for player vaults by 250%, which was a major quality of life update players had been requesting for some time. Although the UI work was initially set to be punted to a future DLC release, I built the revamped Vault screen with new pagination, categorization, and sorting functionalities, as well as the motion graphics and input updates.

Lore Panel

Another feature originally set to be cut from vanilla Destiny 2, I built the expandable Lore panel feature for item and subclass details, which provided an in-game space for additional narrative outside of the main campaign missions — which was previously relegated to the Grimoire on the Bungie website. I implemented and animated the slide-out panel, built to showcase art while providing nigh-unlimited character limits for the writing team. This was the first time we would feature a scroll bar in the Destiny UI outside of the settings screens, and I built the feature to include logic for scaling and easing scroll speeds based on distance and gamepad input.

Bow weapon hud

I worked alongside combat and weapon designers as well as art to build the new HUD and motion graphics animation for the bow, iterating to ensure that the functionality was properly communicated to players in terms of draw state, distance, and targeting, while also feeling snappy and not overloading players with UI elements or information.

Tools & prototypes

On top of my work for release features, I spent a lot of time working on UI, controls, and feedback for gameplay prototypes. I worked with gameplay designers to get their features built out with UI and feedback for proof-of-concept pitches to leadership as well as for playtesting, allowing the gameplay team to experiment on new designs.

In particular, this work has led to features such as new melee weapons, the close-range finisher and grapple moves for the Titan subclass, and most notably the all-vehicle PvP battle mode finally released as a limited-time event under the ‘Heavy Metal’ moniker.

On the tools side, I worked to create automation which saved hundreds of man-hours across multiple disciplines as well as to revamp and give quality-of-life updates to a number of Bungie’s proprietary development tools. I worked in C# using MVVM and async methods to craft new interfaces and functionality, and spearheaded the creation of a tool to automatically convert all of the existing UI content from Destiny and early Destiny 2 development to the correct format for the new engine API, saving months of tedious integration work for the UI team which allowed us to spend that much more on development and polish of additional game features.