Home // Other Skills // Functional Prototypes
Sometimes, you have to just test drive a design. Sometimes, you learn the most when you let others test drive a design and observe. Sometimes there are issues that can only be discovered when you have something in your hands and it responds to your input. Depending on the need and circumstance, I have created functional prototypes using a variety of tools - Adobe XD, web, PowerPoint, Flash, sometimes even in our own game engine. While it would be great to have all of the samples embedded below in their original interactive state, some of these require specialized configurations or plugins that would be a barrier to viewing. Please enjoy these captures of some functional, interactive prototypes I worked on.
Destiny of Fighters: Super Turbo
Once a year, Bungie has a tradition called Carnival, where all employees stop their scheduled work for one week and organically form teams with people across the studio to create something that interests them. In January 2018 I teamed up with a group of 8 talented people that wanted to see if we could build a functional but cheesey, over-the-top, retro style fighting game in the Destiny engine. It had a lot of rough edges, but considering we built something like this in 4 days, and showed it off on the 5th is remarkable. It was also a blast. I designed, illustrated, built and animated all the UI and HUD elements you see here.
Halo 2 Postgame Carnage Prototype
Back in 2003, I built this prototype in Adobe Shockwave to see how the data and interactions flowed as players digested all the stats we wanted to display. Many of these features didn't make it into Halo 2, but eventually resurfaced when we had more time in shipping Halo 3 and Reach.
Emote Wheel prototype
This was another Carnival project from 2017. I led a small team that built a prototype in engine that allowed players to equip and play up to 8 emotes with a single control. It was important to me that the emotes fired instantaneously, rather than requiring a selection mechanism that could kill the timing of a moment of an appropriate reaction. In this prototype, I got 8 working. Eventually this feature made it into the shipping game with four, as that was the most we could reliably support due to memory constraints in worst-case scenarios. As is usually the case with a Carnival project, the prototype had some rough edges, but considering we made it completely functional in 4 days, i was happy with the end result.