I joined Bungie as an intern in May of 2021 and became a full time Gameplay Engineer in January of 2022. During my time at Bungie, I had the privilege of working on the Destiny 2 project. While I am not at liberty to publicize every contribution I made to Destiny 2, there are a few features I worked on that you can see in game for yourself which I am allowed to discuss.

I joined Bungie in the summer of 2021 to help finish the development of cross-play in Destiny 2. One of the major components to cross-play was updating the text chat system to use the new Bungie accounts to allow players on console and PC to use it to communicate with each other. This required reworking the existing text chat commands to use Bungie names instead of platform names. To do this, I had to learn how the text chat system processed user input and how auto complete functioned for player and command names.

I also created three new text chat commands: report, block, and unblock. These commands were a bit special because we needed to send data from the text chat system to UI elements that would appear when using them. The unblock command was actually my own idea that I proposed to the team. I felt it would be a good addition because while you could block anyone from inside the game, there wasn't anyway to unblock someone without having to go to their account settings on the Bungie website.

Along with my work on text chat, I had the opportunity to work on some other critical features. For example: many of the system messages you see when using text chat are from me! So whenever you see them, know that I am the one speaking directly to you...

...okay maybe I'm not literally talking to you, but I did write those messages. Another contribution of mine was writing code to make sure that a player could always be blocked immediately even if a user's block list was full on our servers.

Much of my work on cross-play and text chat was also used for Marathon.

I took on the task of learning the activity tooltip system in order to deliver the ability to add multiple strings for a single tooltip that could be swapped through script control. I ended up needing to rewrite most of the system in order to achieve this since it was not originally designed in a way to support more than one string. This also gave me the chance to optimize its performance and improve the error messaging for designers using these tooltips.

The feedback I received from designers after finishing the rewrite of the system made me realize that there wasn't enough tooling around activity tooltips to help someone who wasn't an engineer debug them. This led me to take my work here one step further and build a dedicated debug view for activity tooltips to help designers better understand their visibility state.

Unfortunately, I am not able to publicly showcase this, but the debug view did include the list of all tooltips loaded in the map, the current setting of each tooltip, their current visibility status, the reason they were not visible, and the radius at which they would be visible to the player.

For the Renegades expansion in Destiny 2, project leadership wanted to experiment with a new PvEvP game mode. The idea was to have one team of up to 3 players play through a typical PvE activity, but in the middle of this activity a 4th player could invade them to hunt them down in PvP gameplay.

I was tasked with driving the implementation of the technical side of invasions. My work involved updating activity systems for the PvEvP framework of the activity, configuring and updating matchmaking systems to support a unique matchmaking setup, and working directly with the design team to advise them on their content setups and identify what they needed from engineering.

The setup for invasions had 2 invadable queues where one would rotate every 24 hours and the other would rotate every 15 minutes. This led to concerns from design about players who may try to dodge being invaded by waiting to select a queue until right before the rotation time. Engineering also still had some remaining worries about the 15 minute rotation being too short such that it would split the matchmaking population and put invaders at risk of not finding games. To resolve these fears, I wrote a new matchmaking feature in our engine that performs a smart queue selection for players entering matchmaking based on the current population of available games in each queue.

When invasions went live to the public with the launch of the Renegades expansion, we saw a very healthy success rate of matchmaking for invading players. We also saw almost all sessions on the PvE side were being matched onto by an invader.

You can view a showcase of the feature from the live game here: