Game Info

The latest iteration of the 20 year old Forza franchise, Forza Motorsport (2023) was built with the goal of becoming the ultimate AAA live-service racing game, celebrating the vast world of Motorsport and the authentic competitive nature of real-world racing.

  • Genre: Competitive Racing

  • Role(s): Live Game Designer, Game Designer

  • Studio: Turn 10 Studios

  • Engine: ForzaTech (Internal)

  • Tools: Confluence, Pegasus (Internal CMS), Xbox Development Kit (GDK), MS Office, Perforce, Adobe Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator), Miro, Figma

  • Platform(s): Xbox Series X|S, PC

  • Release Date: 10/10/2023

Areas of Experience

Gameplay Systems & Feature Design

  • Developed, prototyped, and iterated upon key competitive multiplayer features and systems, including an entirely new scheduled race system and gameplay format that drove the core moment-to-moment player experience

  • Led dozens of key features and tools requests through the end-to-end design process, authoring documentation, running reviews, and adapting each based on internal and external feedback, budget constraints, and development milestones

  • Crafted a variety of highly engaging PvP and PvE activities with a focus on authenticity, competition, quality, and player delight

  • Mentored and trained up other designers, engineers, and teams on tooling and best practices for building and optimizing live content

  • Diagnosed and resolved various pacing, flow, and UX issues in the core gameplay loop, reviewing current UI/UX industry standards and consulting with professional SMEs to deliver the industry’s most inclusive racing game with award-winning accessibility features

Seasonal Content Design & Implementation

  • Championed the design and implementation of seasonal content experiences across a variety of features and game modes in a live service title with 100k+ DAUs, successfully driving player engagement, acquisition, and retention across all platforms

  • Designed, iterated, and shipped multiple new systems and features as part of the live program, including Multi-class Racing, Challenge Hub, and Meetups, expanding our capabilities of building more varied and engaging content for subsequent updates

  • Authored more than 1,000+ in-game events, activities, and challenges across 20+ monthly content updates

  • Established design templates and processes for authoring, playtesting, and releasing seasonal content updates, ensuring consistency, familiarity, and quality with each and every release

  • Leveraged telemetry dashboards, heatmaps, and community insights to analyze, track, and tune a variety of balance, reward, and progression systems, reducing player churn and addressing player feedback, improving review scores by nearly 20% from launch

Details about some of our most popular Seasonal Content updates can be found at the links below:

Streamlining of Live Design Tools

  • Oversaw the inclusion and adaptation of custom design tools into our workflow, creating training materials, and enabling our design team to build, tune, and rapidly test new content and features, while also reducing overhead and improving iteration time by 30%

  • Served as the go-to implementor for discussion and implementation of complex CMS content, stretching the capability of existing systems and tools across a variety of single-player and multiplayer features and modes

  • Streamlined the design team’s tooling and workflow by prioritizing scalability and incorporating automation into our content creation process, tripling the design team’s authoring capabilities and monthly content output

Areas of Ownership

  • Featured Multiplayer

    Contributions: Competitive Multiplayer Systems, Seasonal Content Design, UI/UX Design, Player Onboarding, Tools

    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 new scheduled event system, optimizing for player concurrency, motorsport authenticity, and seasonal event variety.

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  • Challenge Hub

    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 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.

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  • Welcome Center / 'What's New' Menu

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

    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.

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  • Meetups

    Contributions: Social Multiplayer Systems, Seasonal Content Design, Tools

    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.

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  • Rivals

    Contributions: Seasonal Content Design, Tools

    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).

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  • Career

    Contributions: Seasonal Content Design

    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.

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