“My greatest reminiscence of one thing like that is the course of we went by way of once we constructed Cross Save. Each step of the manner, we had been difficult what we thought was attainable, what was anticipated, what was apparent. Our method was at all times, “Let’s throw out what we expect we all know, and make the expertise easy and nice.”

The entire thing began with a small undertaking constructed by 5 individuals in a week throughout Bungie’s first Carnival (a week devoted to self-directed initiatives that we purpose to have yearly) in January 2017, simply to point out what was attainable. Right here’s how I acquired roped into that:

It was a remarkably sophisticated drawback to resolve. Summarizing it was simple: we need to give gamers a solution to play utilizing one set of characters on all the platforms they use. Naively, it looks like we should always give gamers a dropdown field with a platform checklist, and a button to make that their major and cross-platform account. Right here’s what that appeared like in the Carnival model:

However there have been many extra issues to account for—what are the negative effects of cross saving? What occurs to present characters on the accounts that I can’t entry anymore? What if I purchased Silver on these accounts? What if I’ve bought completely different expansions on completely different platforms? What if I haven’t migrated my Blizzard account to Steam but? Can this method be exploited? Are there any options which are unique to sure platforms?

We needed to construct one thing that felt easy to make use of but additionally accounted for all of those issues gamers may need, which is a monstrous job, and one which took many iterations of designs between dozens of small groups and a whole lot of playtest person-hours to get proper. We had been doing one thing with few-to-no reference examples (at the time we had been designing it), and it needed to work easily on day-one, significantly as a result of to resolve for a few of our necessities, gamers who mistakenly selected the mistaken major account could be unable to repair it for 90 days.

After the undertaking was over, we met to do a postmortem with everybody concerned, to report the successes and failures and what we’d wish to hold doing or change in the future. We talked about a lot of issues, however I feel the most important cause that group labored so effectively collectively was that we had been all so invested in the concept that we had been constructing one thing essentially nascent, a new spark of originality in our nook of the universe. There was some form of magic that stored us all on the similar web page, with the similar targets, working as a unit to make this factor that was really new, that will truly put a dent in the universe, and I feel we succeeded.”
     Jake Lauer, 2013-