It all started with a small project built by five people in a week during the first Bungie Carnival (a week dedicated to self-directed projects that we aim to have annually) in January 2017, just to show what’s possible. Here’s how I pulled it off:
Its solution was a remarkably complex problem. Summarizing was easy: we want to give players a way to play with one set of characters on all the platforms they use. Naively, it looks like we should give players a platform dropdown and a button to make this account primary and cross-platform. Here’s what that looked like in the carnival version:
But there were several things to consider – what are the side effects of mutual saving? What happens to the characters in the accounts I can’t access anymore? What if I buy silver on those accounts? What if I buy different expansions on different platforms? What if I haven’t migrated my Blizzard account to Steam yet? Can this system be exploited? Are there any platform-specific features?
We wanted to build something that seemed easy to use but also took into account all these concerns players might have, which is a gruesome task, and it took many iterations of designs between dozens of small teams and hundreds of hours of individual gameplay testing to get it. truly. We were doing something with few or no reference examples (at the time we were designing it), and it should have worked smoothly on day one, especially because to solve some of our requirements, players picked a fundamental bug that the account wouldn’t be able to fix for 90 days.
After the project ended, we met for a post-mortem autopsy with everyone involved, to record the successes and failures and what we would like to continue doing or change in the future. We talked about a lot of things, but I think the main reason the group worked so well together was because we were all so invested in the idea that we were basically building something emerging, a new spark of authenticity in our corner of the universe. There was a kind of magic that got us all on the same page, with the same goals, and working as a unit to make this thing that was really new, that would make an impact in the universe, and I think we made it.”
Jake Lauer, 2013-
“Writer. Friendly troublemaker. Lifelong food junkie. Professional beer evangelist.”