Forza Motorsport’s Career mode manifested in the form of Tours, each of which contained of a number of distinct racing series, unified by an overarching theme. Each Series was populated with a number of individual race events.

Tours typically consisted of ~20 total race events. By completing all events within a Tour, Players would receive a special reward car, that could not be acquired anywhere else in the game.

My Role(s)

Content Authoring

As a Live Game Designer, one of my main focuses was shipping a new high-quality ‘Featured Tour’ each and every month. These Tours were only available for a limited time (duration of ~6 weeks) and were built to drive month-over-month player engagement.

The process of shipping a new Tour entailed many steps played out over multiple phases of development:

1. Design (3-5 days) - Pitched, discussed & determined the overarching theme for the Tour as well as the individual Series within. Selected appropriate cars to ‘spotlight’ for each Series.

2. Pre-Production (1-2 days) - Prototyped the Tour, figured out the order of Series, eligible cars, as well as worked alongside our Concept, UI, Audio & Cinematics teams to generate any assets that were needed. Communicated with our licensing teams to ensure that everything we shipped met the guidelines and restrictions provided by our many different partners.

3. Production / Playtesting (3-5 days) - Built the Tour and each individual Series. Finalized track selections. Configured the details of each race event, including factors like time of day & weather forecasts. Configured rewards and unlock criteria. Fixed bugs found by the QA team. Playtested and received final feedback / polish.

4. Release & Review Feedback (1-2 days) - Once an update was released to players, I worked with the Community team to monitor player feedback, sentiment, as well as any issues that may have arisen, to evaluate whether any hotfixes were needed, while also taking community feedback into consideration for future updates.

Forza Motorsport’s multiplayer was a shift for the series in that it introduced all of the key elements of a real life race weekend (Practice, Qualifying, Race) into a compact scheduled event system. Scheduled events meant that races started at specific times and players around the world all matched into the same active events at once.

My Role(s)

Feature Design

As the main designer for the Featured Multiplayer scheduled race format / systems, I collaborated with engineers, artists, QA, and many other teams to deliver the best Multiplayer experience in a Forza Motorsport yet.

UI/UX Design

I played a large role in the UI/UX for the feature as a whole, from event select to in-race game flows, ensuring that players could quickly get the info they needed and get into events with a minimal amount of button presses.

Tuning/Balancing

The tuning to get the event schedule in Featured Multiplayer optimized for a good player experience took significant effort prior to launch, but paid off as it turned out to be an incredibly powerful system for optimizing player concurrency and matchmaking in the long run.

Additionally, I worked with engineering and members of the community to help tune and balance individual cars within some of our more competitive events, ensuring that players of all skill levels had a more even playing field while out on the track.

Content Authoring

During our live service period, I oversaw and implemented the multiplayer event schedule for each monthly release - ensuring that it provided event variety and tied into our monthly theme, where possible, while also analyzing telemetry dashboards and perusing forums to gauge what players were most excited about and engaged with in prior updates.

Tooling Optimization / Automation

Similar to events in Career mode, along with a dedicated engineer, we were able to build automation tools that helped randomize event configuration settings (lap count, time of day, and weather) and automate event scheduling to help ensure scalability, and also to ensure event variety.

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 what we thought might be some of 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.

My Role(s)

Feature Design

Similar to Featured Multiplayer, I acted as the Design Lead / owner for this feature in that I created & maintained all design documentation and oversaw the implementation process from start to finish.

Content Authoring

Additionally, 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 had to be designed around the underlying reward’s inherent value. (i.e certain car rewards might equate to an hour of play-time 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.

Rivals are solo ‘hot-lapping’ Events, where players compete in order to earn the top spot on the leaderboard. In a Rivals event, players race asynchronously against ‘ghosts’ (recordings of each player’s best completed lap time), which acts as a visual representation of the lap time the Player needs to beat in order climb the leaderboard. This visualization allows Players to see moment-to-moment how they are doing in comparison to the next best Player on the leaderboard (or Player of their choice).

My Role(s)

Content Authoring

Simiiar to our other game modes, my role for Rivals events consisted largely of planning, designing, and building each individual Rivals Event that we shipped as part of our live program.

Rivals was one of the lightest touch game modes we had in each of our updates, as it largely just entailed picking a great car & track combination, configuring weather and time of day, and the rest was largely templatized in a way that required minimal design effort each month.

New Categories of Events

I was directly responsible in the growth and expansion of the Rivals game mode with the addition of Spec Division Rivals and Open Division Rivals, both of which combined nearly doubled the amount of Rivals events active at any given time, giving our players lots of Rivals content to enjoy and greatly expanding the engagement of the overall feature.

Partnership Team Oversight

We had an internal partnership team that worked with external partners (i.e Logitech, Mobil 1, Red Bull, etc.) to build Rivals events, and I played a key role in reviewing the work done by the partnership team to ensure feasibility of any requests design quality of the content.

Public Meetups is a multiplayer feature that allows players to join an open lobby on-track with a number of other players. Players are free to utilize whatever car they want and can vote to change tracks at any time. There are two core Meetup types - Drift Meetups, in which Drift scoring is enabled, and Track Day Meetups in which normal laptime scoring is in effect.

My Role(s)

Feature Designer / Content Authoring

As the sole Designer for the Meetups feature, it was not only my responsibility to document the feature, but also to design and build the individual Meetups / track playlists themselves, determining what Meetup themes players would find most interesting and engaging.

Welcome Center is the front page of Forza Motorsport. Each week when players launch the game, the first thing they see after the splash screen is the Welcome Center. This screen helps keep players informed of what is going on each week and helps players get into events effortlessly.

My Role(s)

Design Direction / Content Authoring

My role for Welcome Center largely came down to design direction & implementation of all text & imagery, as provided by other teams. I also configured all of the deeplinks, which ensured that when players selected a specific tile, it took them to the correct event or area of the game.

Naturally this area of the game required a great deal of collaboration with the Community Team to ensure that our messaging in-game and across social channels was in alignment.

This is also where we had upsells for any DLC content, which dynamically displayed depending on whether or not players owned the content already. This meant that Welcome Center had to be designed and implemented in a manner that considered all possible player scenarios.

Showroom is where players can view and purchase cars using in-game currency (credits).

My Role(s)

Content Authoring

Each release, I was responsible for configuring the sales & discounts that players would see in the Showroom. This encompassed game-wide weekly discounts that would appear for all players, as well as exclusive monthly discounts for VIP players.

Additionally, part of Showroom management included configuring the reward cars so that they did not appear for purchase in the Showroom and could only be unlocked by completing the correct in-game challenges.