Halo Infinite was the latest game in the Halo franchise released by 343 Industries in December 2021. It released with a solo campaign mode along with a free-to-play multiplayer experience. There were only a few months left before release when I joined the team, which meant most of my work was supporting post-release, live-ops, multiplayer portions. During my time at 343 Industries, I contributed in many areas of the UI. I had the pleasure of working with multiple teams including audio, game modes, monetization, and more.

Some of my responsibilities included bug fixing, updating seasonal content, implementing new features, and more. I worked on visual updates like career rank, store redesign, and free-to-play and seasonal visual updates. And I worked on content updates for game scoreboards, and the bandit rifle's scope and reticle.

My work began with simple bug fixes, implementing the data-driven animations for the battle rifle, and connecting data files with bindings for UI content files. As I became more confident with the Slipspace Engine, I started taking on more complex work including two large reworks of the storefront and the free-to-play experience, which included the main menu and every screen related to battle passes. These included visual updates and optimization tweaks.

Redesigning the main menu and free-to-play menus meant I was making edits to numerous screens. The design was created by our UI Artists, and mockups existed for many of the animations and new screens. Some work was discovered as I began implementation, and once it was, I met with the UI Artists to ensure we had continued alignment during implementation. Due to the age of the engine, some seemingly simple edits like specific blend modes and pixel perfect gradient matching weren’t possible, or difficult to achieve. Whenever aspects could not be perfectly matched in the engine, I would bring various options to the artists to determine the best path forward.

The storefront rework was a massive overhaul taken largely in part by our UX Developers. They laid the foundation works of scrolling implementation and connecting back-end data to the content (UI) files. The new visual design, focused on accessibility and legibility while unifying the visuals to make it easier to parse and allow for larger images to be displayed. It needed to remain configurable from a text editable JSON file, as this allowed monetization designers to easily create new storefronts and quickly update various flags or sale offerings. My main focus was editing previous data-oriented visual states and creating new visual as new features were introduced. This allowed for a responsive UI as states included the size and shape of the store item and could be easily visualized with a tool for the designers. Some states were defined in code (the rarity of the item and if it was already owned - bother were pulled from the data) and other, states could be set by designers (a new or returning item, or putting the item on sale).