The latest entry in the 20 year old Forza franchise, Forza Motorsport (2023) was built from the ground up as the ultimate AAA live-service racing game, celebrating the vast world of Motorsport and the authentic, competitive nature of real-world racing.
As a Game Designer on the project, I collaborated with engineers, artists and producers to design, build, and ship a number of key systems and gameplay features. From prototyping and tuning new multiplayer game modes, to pitching, implementing, and evaluating monthly seasonal content, I was a top contributor to the moment-to-moment gameplay experience as well as a critical component in establishing a rhythm of monthly seasonal content. Additionally I helped maintain and streamline the design tools that enabled us to ship and support a AAA live service title in a scalable manner.
Genre: Racing
Studio: Turn 10 Studios
Role(s): Live Designer (2021-2025), Systems Designer (2019-2021)
Engine / Tools: ForzaTech (Proprietary), Confluence, Pegasus (Proprietary), Xbox Development Kit, MS Office, Perforce, Adobe Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator), Miro, Figma
Platform(s): Xbox Series X|S, PC
Release Date: 10/10/2023
Accolades:
Winner of Best Sports/Racing Game and Innovation in Accessibility - The Game Awards, 2023
Winner of Racing Game of the Year - D.I.C.E Awards, 2023
Nominee for Best Multiplayer - BAFTA Game Awards, 2024
Nominee for Ultimate Game of the Year - Golden Joystick Awards, 2023
Areas of Experience
Gameplay Systems & Feature Design
Designed, prototyped, and iterated upon key competitive multiplayer features and systems, driving the core moment-to-moment player experience
Led dozens of key features and tools requests through the end-to-end design process, authoring documentation, running reviews, and adapting each based on internal and external feedback, budget constraints, and development milestones
Crafted a variety of highly engaging PvP and PvE modes and activities with a focus on authenticity, competition, quality, and player delight
Mentored and trained up other designers, engineers, and teams on tooling and best practices for building and optimizing live content
Collaborated with an external co-development studio, regularly communicating feature requirements, giving design direction, and driving build reviews with a global team spread across multiple time zones.
Seasonal Content Design & Implementation
Championed the design and implementation of seasonal content experiences across a variety of features and game modes in a live service title with 100k+ DAUs, successfully driving player engagement, acquisition, and retention across all platforms
§ Designed, tuned, and shipped multiple new features and modes, including Challenge Hub and Meetups, in addition to implementing 50+ monthly in-game activities, such as seasonal events, challenges, and high-profile partnerships.
Established seasonal content guidelines, templates, and processes for designing, playtesting, and releasing live updates, which improved cross-team efficiencies and ensured quality, consistency, and visibility across the studio.
Balanced and iterated on multiple gameplay, economy, and reward systems, leveraging telemetry and player insights to address community feedback, contributing to a +24% (PC) / +13% (Console) increase to customer review scores.
Streamlining of Live Design Tools
Oversaw the inclusion and adaptation of custom design tools into our workflow, creating training materials, and enabling our design team to build, tune, and rapidly test new content and features, while also reducing overhead and improving iteration time by 30%
Served as the go-to implementor for discussion and implementation of complex CMS content, stretching the capability of existing systems and tools across a variety of single-player and multiplayer features and modes
Streamlined proprietary design tools and workflows through automation and scripting, collaborating with engineers to reduce design implementation time by 150%, even while seasonal content tripled in scale over a 2-year period.
Enhanced the proprietary design toolset with critical functionality, including an Event Generator and DB integration, which reduced overhead by 3x and formed the long-term foundations for shipping and supporting a live-service title.
Areas of Ownership
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Featured Multiplayer
Contributions: Gameplay Design, Competitive Multiplayer Systems, Matchmaking/Ratings, Seasonal Content Design, UI/UX Design, Player Onboarding, Tools
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 new scheduled event system, optimizing for player concurrency, motorsport authenticity, and seasonal content variety.
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Challenge Hub
Contributions: Systems Design, Seasonal Content Design, UI/UX Design, Tools
The Challenge Hub in Forza Motorsport is where players can complete a variety of rotating challenges in order to unlock cars, driver suits, liveries, and more. This feature was a great way to funnel players into what we thought might be some of our most engaging and enticing content, while also rewarding them for their play time by building challenges that aligned with the theme of our monthly content.
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Welcome Center
Contributions: Systems Design, Seasonal Content Design, UI/UX Design, Tools
Welcome Center is the front page of Forza Motorsport. This dynamic menu keeps players informed of seasonal content happening each week and directs players into events effortlessly through dynamic display tiles and deep-linking functionality.
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Meetups
Contributions: Gameplay Design, Social Multiplayer Systems, Seasonal Content Design, Tools
Meetups is a multiplayer feature that allows players to join an open lobby on-track with a number of other players. Players are free to utilize whatever car they want and can vote to change tracks at any time. There are two core Meetup types - Drift Meetups, in which Drift scoring is enabled, and Track Day Meetups in which normal laptime scoring is in effect.
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Rivals
Contributions: Seasonal Content Design, Tools
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).
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In-Game Store
Contributions: Systems Design, Seasonal Content Design, Monetization, Tools
I designed Forza Motorsport’s In-Game Store to be extremely dynamic and flexible to support our live service vision, while ensuring this critical feature stayed within development budget and shipped on-time by adapting UI code from Welcome Center and collaborating closely with Engineering and Platform teams.
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Career
Contributions: Seasonal Content Design
Forza Motorsport’s Career mode manifested in the form of Tours, each of which contained of a number of distinct racing series, unified by an overarching theme. Each Series was populated with a number of individual race events.
Tours typically consisted of ~20 total race events. By completing all events within a Tour, Players would receive a special reward car, that could not be acquired anywhere else in the game.