After 9 years–fully half of my adult life–I was let go from Bungie this morning, along with MANY other amazing folks.
Getting to work on a game like this, where I made and helped make experiences that are enjoyed by millions of people, was a huge privilege.
But I don’t want to leave this off with a simple “it was a privilege, thank you Bungie”.
I’m angry, and sad. I think I’m amazing at my job, and so was everyone else laid off today. This was the result of missteps and gambles far above our stations.
I’m lucky to have a partner who can support me and numerous friends reaching out to check on me. I will be fine.
Those of you who were also hit today: I believe you’ll land on your feet, too. I was surrounded by incredible, inspiring people. You were one of them.
I’m mostly taking it in stride because the Bungie I really loved ended late last year with the first round of layoffs. I’d already done a lot of grieving for what we had had.
But things were starting to turn around. Exciting possibilities. I’m sad to see those in peril, too.
I’ve been meaning to leave Bungie for a few years now, to pursue projects more in line with what I wanted to be making. I kept putting it off.
Maybe getting kicked out of my rut by an external force will be a blessing in the end. I hope so.
Silver lining: I can now brag about the AMAZING STUFF I GOT TO DO.
There was an policy of not publicly taking credit too much, since everything was the work of many.
I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game. I did some really cool shit!
Infinite Forest
The Infinite Forest was a procedural generation system we released in Curse of Osiris back in 2017.
My job title was still Production Engineer, not Designer, but all the designers were busy, so I was assigned the job of… designing the Infinite Forest!
I was not the original designer of the bones of the system, but that guy was the creative director for the release, so they needed an in-the-trenches feature lead and implementing designer.
(This was the only time I’ve ever had multiple engineers dedicated to making my designs, that power goes right to your head. They moved mountains for the feature)
I’m super proud of that one. Our engine was not at ALL designed for what we were doing with it. We were understaffed. But we did it! We made procedurally-laid out maps with procedurally-selected combat encounters.
*Sidenote: They don’t have “level designers” at Bungie. The environment artists basically do double duty: they design our spaces AND make them look good. In that sense, I was working with two environment artists who did spatial design, and you could call me the system designer.
Training Vicarious Visions
My role for the first few years I was at Bungie was “Production Engineer” (and later, Production Engineer Lead). You can think of Production Engineers as general-purpose problem solvers. I was basically a technical designer whose main job was to support, train, or unblock others.
Some of the Activision studios were assigned to help Bungie make Destiny 2 expansion content. High Moon Studios was already helping to work on the expansion that would become Forsaken. Vicarious Visions was being spun up to help make Warmind.
So what does “spinning up an external studio” look like in practice? Business trips up the wazoo!
I ended up writing a TON of training documentation for brand new designers and artists in our workflows specifically for VV. Then they sent me out to spend 3 weeks in Albany NY.
Technically it was a 1-week trip then a 2-week trip, but whatevs. I had an absolute blast. Stayed in a hotel, ate lavishly on business expense budgets, and got to go to another cool studio and see how they worked.
I got to play the Crash Bandicoot remake they were doing. I played most of the way through Persona 4 on my PS Vita in the evenings. And I spent all day every day teaching a huge group of designers how to make stuff in our engine. EXHAUSTING but very fun.
So yes, indeed, that does mean that I got to design the big back-of-the-box bullet point feature for DLC 1, and ALSO trained the folks who made a lot of DLC 2. My hands were all over those early D2 releases.
Leading the <redacted> Team
#3: Designing the workflows, training, hiring, and leading a huge team of technical designers to convert content for an engine upgrade.
I can’t get toooo into the details here, but at one point we had a big engine upgrade that required manually converting a LOT of content from the old version to the new version.
I was a Production Engineering Lead at the time, but I wanted to move to design. I was approached and asked if I could spearhead this effort. I said no, because I was currently applying to other game companies and I wouldn’t want to leave them hanging.
A couple months passed. I was approached AGAIN, and told that I was the ONLY available person who had the right combination of technical skills, workflow UX skills, and leadership skills, so they wanted me to do it even if I was applying elsewhere.
You know what that sounds like: leverage.
I told them I’d do it and stay at the company if they converted me to a Technical Designer role. They agreed.
I spent ~3 months embedded with a tools engineering team as they polished the tools upgrades for this engine upgrade. I tried to make content with the tools, gave them feedback, repeat. I must have logged hundreds of tools feedback bugs.
At the same time I got busy writing documentation. I wrote a TON of documentation, maybe a hundred pages total, for helping people who were used to the old version of the tools learn the new versions.
Then I got to work on NEW HIRE TRAINING. I wrote a whole suite of “bootcamps”, practical exercises in our tools. It was about 2 weeks worth of training material; by the end of it a new Activity Designer hire would have built a a fully functional environment and mission.
That was years ago. My training material is still used today to on-ramp new hires. Every activity designer hired at Bungie for many years now is trained with my material.
We had the tools ready. We had the training material . I worked with producers, but at this point I was responsible for hiring the team. I was hiring manager for TWENTY entry-level contract technical designer roles.
For comparison, Breath of the Wild had 20 credited designers.
Anyways this is getting long. Suffice to say I hired and trained these 20 folks. For the actual project after all that I was one of a few design leads, along with producers and testers.
The impact of our work was largely invisible, but it was the largest-scale effort I ever led.
I am pleased to say that a BUNCH of the folks I hired got hired full-time afterwards, and a bunch more went onto cool roles at other companies.
One of them told me that I was the best first manager they could have ever had. I’m so glad I got to play that role for them.
//node.ovrd.AVALON//
#4: Feature Lead and primary Activity Designer for mission //node.ovrd.AVALON//, aka the Vexcalibur exotic mission, in the Season of Defiance.
I’ve been an activity designer for a few years now. Of the (publicly released) activities I’ve built, this is my proudest achievement.
A LOT of people were involved with it, including other activity designers.
The creative director gave me the high-level concept: the characters involved, the story we wanted to tell, the kind of environment it had to be, the way it unrolled over the course of the season, and the fact that it would reward a vex-themed exotic weapon.
Early on I was the designer for all of the encounters, the general flow, the big “hacking” puzzle mechanic, and the secrets. Ultimately, another designer carried the boss fight over the finish line, while a third implemented the secrets.
Since players would be playing this multiple times for different rewards, and we would be rewarding an exotic weapon after the first completion, I REALLY wanted to have elements of the mission that played differently if you had the exotic weapon equipped.
I came up with some pitches for mechanics that the exotic weapon could interact with. I approached the sandbox designer who owned it, and gave her my pitches, and suggested that we should look to Supergiant’s amazing game Transistor for weapon design inspiration.
She and the artists did amazing work, ultimately creating Vexcalibur. I worked with technical designers to build the special mechanics in the mission that it could interact with.
It also, of course, was a cool-ass weapon in normal Destiny contexts.
Oh, and this was a secret mission. I also got to do a bunch of the design for the “secret start”, the experience where players discovered it for the first time. Another designer helped take that over the finish line.
It was super well-recieved by players, and I was super proud of what I and the team I worked with built.
My only regret is not getting checkpoints built for players who had to stop or failed mid-mission, it was VERY HARD and also quite long.
(In case anyone is wondering why I’m not naming the people I’m mentioning, it’s because I don’t want to do so without their permission first. They deserve all the credit in the world but also the attention of the internet is not always desirable)