New Activity For A Free To Play Event

Six player spooky themed chaotic horde arcade style activity for Destiny 2’s Festival Of The Lost event

Players constructed defenses to hold off waves of enemies emerging from an increasing number of altars, while gathering enough ‘treats’ from their corpses to summon and defeat a pumpkin headed monster

Owned the design of the activity from concept to completion, creating design documents, coordinating resources from external teams such as world art, and driving iteration in response to feedback from design leadership

Lead a small team of activity designers in the design and implementation of this activity

Stepping Up To Lead

In 2025, Destiny 2 went through a huge transition, and this revolution included a major revival and expansion of the Events Team. In this new paradigm for Destiny, a major focus was given to increasing the offering for free players, and continuously releasing new content and changes to the game as often as possible, often every week. The Events Team was at the forefront of making that goal a reality, and I had been put right back on it as an events team veteran. The team had expanded, with a new crop of designer recruits, and for the first time, we were working on adding new events, not just revamping the ones that had always been part of destiny 2. The pace and scope had increased, and Events Team leadership was feeling the pressure of keeping up the pace. So when I was assigned to a brand new activity being planned for Festival of the Lost 2025, Destiny’s Halloween themed event, I was given essentially one sentence of direction ‘Were going to update the Altars of Sorrow activity on the moon, but make it Spooky!” and a barely begun document, which was not a workable plan to immediately begin production on an activity. I didn’t blame Events team leadership for this at all, they had so many plates spinning with trying to maintain and update the existing events while creating a plethora of new events large and small and a release schedule that had accelerated to almost week to week instead of season to season. In fact I had been asking for them to delegate me more responsibility so I could help take the weight off their shoulders. I’d had to essentially step into a leadership role on the Rushdown activity and do the work of two designers working on the Guardian Games event the previous year, so I knew I was ready and they needed my help. So I chose to seize the opportunity and began preproduction on the activity in earnest. I delegated laying the groundwork of the activity to my fellow designer, asking him to do the well understood and necessary work of creating a copy of the map to set our new activity in and porting the original activity that we were going to be basing our new activity off of into it. This would give us a canvas to work with once the design for the new activity was ready to move into production by giving us a version of the activity we could chop up to save what we needed and remove what we didn’t while also removing all the other content set in that map that would have ate up our memory budget since the original was set in the Destiny open world. Meanwhile I set about preproduction on the activity in earnest, creating a design document for the activity, setting design goals for the rework and planning out what we were going to build.

The Original

Having worked on many other event activities at this point, I had a good idea of what the goals should be for the Haunted Altars Of Sorrow. It needed to be wide funnel, accessible to the widest possible swathe of the destiny community, its mechanics needed to be simple enough that any player could succeed, and it needed to be enjoyable on repeat plays. It was also meant to be a rework of the original Altars Of Sorrow activity. That activity was an at this point quite old destiny activity that existed in the open world explore location on the moon. The activity took place at the steps of the great crimson keep that dominated the skyline of the Destiny 2 Moon map. Distributed throughout the arena were a series of circular altars, and during the activity a pair of them would be active at a time, shooting a great beam of energy to the sky. Waves of enemies would spawn at one altar and make their way to other, with ‘nightmare’ minibosses punctuating every few waves. Players’ task was to defend the enemies’ goal altar, attempting to kill a target number of the minibosses before a timer ran out. If they were successful, a new pair of altars would activate and spawn even tougher enemies, and players would make their way there to defend. As soon as players approached an altar, a timer would begin ticking down, resulting in event failure if it reached zero. every enemy killed added time, while letting enemies make it all the way to the defense altar subtracted time. My task was to evolve this activity into something fresh that felt halloween-ey. As I set about documenting my plan for the activity, I started the enjoyable process of brainstorming a series of possible mechanics and evolutions for the activity, just trying to find the fun and search for ideas I was passionate about. Once I had some exciting ideas to work with, I set about refining them into a plan for an actual activity, organizing the brainstormed mechanics by how critical they were to the overall design, nailing down and clearly describing the specifics, and then including a breakdown of design risks and support from external teams that would be necessary in order to pull each idea off. The goal with this process was to create a modular design that was ready to recieve cuts and iterations, and to make it as easy as possible to prioritize where resources needed to be invested to make the activity successful. Since each mechanic was described and analyzed in this way separately, it was easy to cut them out or modify them if we had to, gave us plenty of stretch goal runway if we progressed faster than expected and wanted to do more, and made the activity easy to break down hand components off to different designers on the team.

The First Iteration: Destiny Tower Defense

My initial design’s goal was to provide a fresh take on this structure by turning it into a tower defense. In the previous year of destiny, a horde mode style activity called Onslaught had been created, and with it a suite of player purchasable automated defenses had been introduced, including auto turrets, freeze bomb equipped trip wires, and decoys to draw enemy attention, and the thought of leveraging in a new way was the inspiration for this tower defense design. Working on the events team, we shipped fast and made do with minimal support from other teams at the studio, which meant we rarely got provided with new assets like this. Fortunately for Bungie, I thrived in this environment, as one of my strengths is finding creative ways to use existing assets to create fresh experiences. While working at Bungie I was always keeping a close eye of what assets and mechanics were being built for other releases so I could potentially draw on them in the future to leverage or combine them in new ways to create exciting content without needing all new bespoke content from external teams. Learning to use and modify tech created by other teams for different purposes in this way really helped to spur on my picking up diverse design skills during my career at Bungie. Here’s how the activity actually worked. The activity would have a matchmade fireteam of 3 players. Instead of the altar players were defending moving each wave, ONE altar would be chosen at the start of the activity to be the defense point for the duration of the activity. This would mean that each run of the activity, players would have to defend a different area of the map, making each run unique and enhancing replayablility. This defense altar was themed to contain a dormant ‘monster’, and the players’ goal was to feed it ‘treats’ in order to summon it to the field and battle it. As players cleared waves, additonal altars would activate, forcing players to begin defending from multiple fronts simultaneously. Slain enemies during a wave would drop ‘treat’ pickups, which players could run over to collect, and then run them back to the central altar they were defending to dunk them in and feed the monster. Each wave would be completed once the players had dunked a certain threshold of treats. Enemies reaching the defense altar would ‘eat the monster’s treats’ and deduct from this total. I preserved the periodic miniboss spawning mechanic from the original altars, and had them deduct a much larger portion of treats from the tally if they managed to reach the altar. A time limit counting down until the monster ‘starved to death’ would be present during a wave as well, and players could buy themselves precious seconds by dunking in more treats. During the wave, players could interact with a console near the defense altar to enter a build mode, which would activate a series of points along each defense lane where players could spend treats out of their stockpile to create defenses. If players were able to successfully clear each wave and build their stockpile big enough, the boss would be summoned to a stage near the back of the field, and players could defeat it to win and recieve rewards! if they ran out of time, they would lose, and receive reduced rewards based on how far they got. We also added several new enemy factions to the defense waves, giving the altars an increasing chance at the start of a wave to begin spawning Taken or Dread faction enemies instead of the usual Hive.

The Refined Iteration: Absolute Arcade Mayhem

My little team and I built a prototype of the design laid out above in order to be shown off to Destiny design leadership during a major milestone playtest, and we received some great feedback that we’d use to refine it into a mature activity. I directed my teammate to focus on adapting the original activity’s wave structure and flow into our new design, as well as adding in the new factions and boss fight while I focused on the more technically tricky and unique elements of the design. He was all to happy to let me figure out how to implement the defenses and the treat system. I devised a system that determined which altar was chosen to be the defense altar and only spawned defenses near lanes that were actually going to be used during that run, placed defenses ALL over the map in tactically effective places to slow the enemy advance, implemented the system that allowed players to trigger the build mode, created the treat pickups and and rigged the enemies to drop them on death, implemented the tech to allow players to collect the treat pickups and dunk them at the central altar, and most complicated of all, the economy system that allowed players to spend dunked treats to actually purchase the defenses.