At 343 Industries, I was a campaign gameplay/level designer on Halo Infinite – the 7th main entry in the long-running sci-fi shooter franchise.

My role shifted on the title over the years. Originally, I was hired as a level designer, but as the needs of the project changed and grew, I transitioned roles to accommodate the new challenges that arose. As such, I had the opportunity to be level designer, gameplay designer, and primary point of contact on many spaces across the game. Some of my responsibilities include:

• Encounter design
• Level design and scripting
• Gameplay system design, scripting, and implementation.
• Technical/Design documentation
• Inter-disciplinary communication and organization
• Small-scale team leadership (~4-5 people)

While I finished out all 7 outposts for the ship of Halo Infinite, below are a few highlights from spaces upon which I served as designer and primary point of contact.

Ransom Keep & Fuel Silos

Likely to be one of, if not the first open world POI the player encounters (after the introductory FOB that is), Ransom Keep underwent extensive iteration. Progression, challenge, and duration were key focus areas, with Ransom Keep commanding an outsized share of development time, despite its relatively small footprint and simple objective framework.

A “fun” development fact: the fuel silos featured in Ransom Keep, among several other POIs (Points of Interest), are one of two-three dynamic, scriptable objects in the game that exist outside their parent activity kits. That is to say, the silos were placed within the open world itself, rather than alongside other associated outpost elements.

This is due to the sheer size of silos, requiring them to be loaded much sooner than the rest of the outpost to avoid pop in. Creating the scripting and framework that establishes a connection between these two load-staggered elements was among the more technically challenging tasks during development.

Despite the major pain in the keister that these silos caused, the same frameworks that I created to facilitate interaction between independently loaded assets went on to be employed not only in other silo use-cases, but other scenarios across the game as well (The dropship in Annex Ridge and the Beacons in Area 3 as a couple examples).

Forge of Teash & Reinforcement Logic

Forge of Teash, or “Outpost Gibbon” as it was known colloquially in development, was the spiritual successor of an earlier prototype known as “The Dry Dock”. While the Dry Dock faded alongside so many other experiments, I wanted to carry forward the theme of vehicle mayhem and destruction derby chaos present in that initial prototype.

This is an outpost that I had the good fortune to contribute much of the layout for, as well as being the overall gameplay designer. The roads form a rough figure eight in an attempt to keep mounted players in a constant state of motion. There ended up being a bit too many last minute art elements that would cause vehicles to flip, but I reckon it still holds up as a decent tear should players find themselves with a Warthog and a couple friends.

Teash also features probably the most involved reinforcement logic of any outpost. The outpost has an eye-watering, egregiously excessive seven objectives that the player could complete in any order, spread across the second largest outpost area by square footage. Players could, hypothetically, blow up a silo at one end of the outpost, run to the opposite end, sabotage a vehicle bay, and then start dispatching enemies at a completely different corner, and reinforcements would need to be able to respond in a timely fashion.

Deploying reinforcements based on player location was difficult and inefficient in the Infinite engine, resulting in the concoction of a weighted completion system wherein objectives would be granted a score based on their type and location. At set objective completion thresholds, several squads would be deployed to defend the remaining objectives – the strength of those squads dependent on the cumulative score of the completed objectives, with their location derived from the weighted importance of the remaining objective locations.

Ultimately, it was a lot of work for relatively little payoff, and I don’t think the majority of players could discern between this dynamic reinforcement system and, say, reinforcements spawned via informed guesswork.

Also, to any completionists out there, I’m really sorry about the placement of that one audio log. That… that was my bad.

Horn of Abolition & Windows

Coming off the back of Teash, Horn of Abolition is the smallest outpost by a good margin. This was another space where I worked on level design, alongside functioning as gameplay designer.

This outpost served to highlight some of the more significant inconveniences in the Banished building palette – specifically the lack of windows.

I had wanted a combination of interior and exterior combat, with the objective progression regularly bringing players in and out of Banished structures. Unfortunately, Banished buildings have no windows (excluding dig site), so conveying information to players as to what was going on outside while they were throwing hands indoors was difficult and required some custom/hacky solutions.

Horn of Abolition was far from the only victim of this self-inflicted palette wound (more on that later), but as far as the spaces that I worked on, I can very clearly recall the multitude of discussions on how best to design around it.

Riven Gate

Riven Gate is, hands down, the largest outpost in Halo Infinite. Looking back at it now, there are about a billion things I’d like to change in the layout. Yet, despite the multitude of flaws that chew at the back of my mind, I’d still probably list it as the outpost that came together the best among those I worked on.

This has to to mainly with the layout flow, mix of open/directed progression, and multitude of sandbox elements leveraged in the space. With its verticality and expansive scope, it’s designed around the generous use of the grapple shot, as well as the man cannons and banshee (comes included!)

I don’t really have a tangential anecdote for this one, so I’ll only say that the outpost art team kicked some serious ass all-in-all, and that they have my eternal gratitude for humoring my wonky schemes and wacky layout changes right up until build lock.

Command Spire Base Camp & POI States

A surprisingly complex little POI, the Base Camp serves as the portal into the final third of the game and, as such, has a bunch of additional objective logic set up to talk with external scripts.

Additionally, Base Camp bookends the Forerunner Tower objective, meaning that players will be going through it twice. This necessitated two different gameplay scenarios: Arrival and Return. Each scenario has its own scripting, encounters, and objectives, effectively requiring twice the design work than a conventional POI.

An aside: each POI in the game has a pre-complete and post-complete state i.e. what batch of assets/scripts are loaded when the POI is streamed in. Due to Periwin Base Camp having two scenarios, it ended up having four different states it could exist within.

Managing all four of those states and ensuring that assets and scripts were consistent between them, was an extensive exercise in organization and bug management.