Overview

Contributions: Systems Design, Quest Design, Seasonal Content Design, UI/UX Design, Tools

The Challenge Hub in Forza Motorsport is where players can complete a variety of rotating challenges in order to unlock cars, driver suits, liveries, and more. This feature was a great way to funnel players into our most engaging and enticing content, while also rewarding them for their play time by building challenges that aligned with the theme of our monthly content.

Design Goals

• Reward Players for their Time - Reward players for engaging with the game (regardless of game mode or preferred play-style)

• No Forced Behaviors - Keep Challenge designs general enough so that players don’t feel ‘forced’ into playing in a certain mode

• Not all Rewards are Equal - Cars are the most prized reward type in the game and also the most expensive in terms of development costs, so earning a car should take a certain amount of time

UI/UX Design

Working directly with our UI team, I implemented and iterated on the UI for the Challenge Hub menu, ensuring legibility and flexibility in its implementation. Challenges needed to be dynamic by supporting 1 OR 2 different completion criteria, track progress on the challenge, display the reward for completion, and denote how much time remained on the challenge before it ended, in cases where it was a limited time challenge.

Seasonal Content Authoring

As a Live Designer, I designed, implemented, and tested each challenge that shipped as part of each monthly update. Typically, we shipped ~30 challenges per update. These challenges were designed to align with the seasonal theme, wherever possible, and also had to match the underlying reward’s inherent value. (i.e certain car rewards might equate to an hour or two of normal playtime to earn, whereas something like a driver suit or Credits could be rewarded for completing a challenge in 5-15 minutes).

Expanded Tooling Features

I worked in tandem w/ our engineers to implement new stats, which is how we created new types of challenges and tracked player progress for a specific type of action. Once our engineers implemented a new stat, it was up to myself and any other designer to utilize that base stat to create interesting and fun challenges.