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

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.

Forza Motorsport’s Career mode is manifested in the form of “Tours”. Each Tour consists of 4 distinct series, unified by an overarching Tour theme. Each of these series is then populated with 4-5 individual race events, meaning each Tour consists of roughly 20 total race events. By completing all events within a Tour, Players receive a special reward car, that cannot be acquired anywhere else.

My Role

One of my main focuses was shipping a new high-quality “Featured Tour” each and every month. These Featured Tours were limited time affairs (each one lasting ~6 weeks) and were largely meant to drive engagement and give players a reason to jump back into the game each and every month.

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

-Design-

Pitched, discussed & determined the overarching theme for the Tour itself as well as the individual Series. Selected appropriate cars to ‘spotlight’ for each Series.

-Pre-Production-

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.

-Production-

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 the unlock mechanics to ensure that players received the reward car by completing the Tour.

-Playtest & Fix Bugs-

Playtest our shipping content and get feedback from others on the team who have not yet seen or played the new content.

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

When it came to Multiplayer, I oversaw and implemented the series schedule for each monthly release - ensuring that it provided variety and tied into our monthly theme, where possible, while also paying attention to what players were most engaged with in prior releases.

Similar to Events in Career mode, we had to configure each individual event in every multiplayer series. Unlike Career mode, in Multiplayer we relied heavily on automation tools, where possible, to help randomize event configuration settings like lap count, time of day, and weather to help ensure that even when the same track appeared multiple times in the Series schedule, it didn’t always play out the same way.

In addition to the event schedule implementation, I also played a large role in the UI/UX experience for the screen as a whole, ensuring that players could get the info they needed and get into events quickly.

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.

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

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.

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

My Role

Each release, I was responsible for configuring the weekly sales & discounts that players would see in the Showroom, as well as configuring the reward cars to ensure that they did not appear for purchase in the Showroom and could be unlocked by completing the correct in-game content.