First Person Shooter
The legendary Halo series returns. When all hope is lost and humanity’s fate hangs in the balance, the Master Chief is ready to confront the most ruthless foe he’s ever faced. Begin anew and step inside the armor of humanity’s greatest hero to experience an epic adventure and finally explore the scale of the Halo ring itself.
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The Work
From July 2020-November2022 I had been fortunate to work on Halo Infinite as a Technical UX Designer working with the UX/UI team. It's always a gift to work on a franchise you've been playing since it started.
I worked on various elements of the UI and implemented them in game. I worked with elements of the front end main menus that the player uses to navigate while not in match, the Heads Up Display for both Multiplayer and Campaign, as well as menus such as the pause menu that exist both in the front end and in game.
Because I joined the team later in development, most of the screens that needed to be created from scratch were already done so I took mostly a bug fixing and polish role. With most screens already made, that also means I didn't have ownership of very many areas so I've become one of the few Jack of All Trades, meaning I have been in many different types of screens while most others have areas they are responsible for. This means I can take on work on screens from almost anywhere in the game and help load balance for almost anyone on the team.
There were a couple particular screens that I did create from scratch or heavily update such as screens related to mission replay, customs browser and community tab.
Halo Infinite didn't ship with mission replay, and I was tasked with creating that flow and the screens for that feature. The only direction that was given was that it had to be launched from the Tacmap.
Making the mission's relaunchable from the Tacmap was initially just going to be done with a hotkey, like fast travel, or setting a waypoint. The issue however was that we were out of buttons on the controller, and there was no more room for hints on the bottom of the screen.
My solution was to change that fast travel indicator under the mission info, into an actual button (since it already kinda looked like a button) and then add the replay mission button there as well. Then that would allow me to free up the hotkey that was currently used for fast travel (R in the screenshot) to instead move control to those buttons.
I of course had to then also deal with the navigation and control allowing for you to d-pad between the mission info and the missions list when it was up as well.
One last thing that was important for me to add that I had to push for was the difficulty completed icons under mission info as well as in the mission replay screen. This is because for players to get the achievement for completing on a certain difficulty, all missions had to be completed on that difficulty, and difficulty could be changed mid campaign. This allowed players to find which missions hadn't been completed on their desired difficulty for achievements so they didn't have to just do them all over again.
The mission replay screen itself was heavily derived from the campaign setup/selection screen. The difficulty and skull selection were pulled almost exactly except for the difficulty completed portion above the difficulty description. Which mission collectibles you had found for this mission and the mission description/screenshot were also new elements compared to the campaign selection screen.
When preparing for the customs browser and adding the popular/recommended categories for User Generated Content (UGC) I felt it was necessary to do a redesign on how the screen was laid out. We had all this unused space on the right and I wanted to call out each type of UGC in its own file share section. I ended up getting art support to make that happen and now we have the community tab of today.
The Customs Browser itself used a similar layout as all our other query screens for all other content. On the surface it looks identical. But behind the scenes it has so much more going on. So many different types of ways it can be filtered/sorted, checks to see if you have friends in any of the games and bringing them to the front.
UX/UI was certainly not my specialty before joining this team and I feel like I've learned a lot. I have a better understanding of how screens are put together, how data is hooked up, good design, sample data, setting up animations, and even good ways to test all of this in game.
I've worked closely with the UI Art team to ensure we are on the same page, providing feedback on comps as well as ensuring the art is implemented properly within a given screen. I've added LUA to my list of scripting languages I'm familiar with and have learned the workflow of working on a AAA title.