I care about character and setting and the way the two feed into one another; my default setting as a writer is character-driven science fiction that takes the time to explore how that plot with those characters could only have emerged from that particular world.
My latest work is on Destiny 2. I work on every seasonal release instead of focusing on a single one at a time, which means the volume of my work is scattered across more releases than most!
Samples available on request.
Destiny: Rising
I was on Rising between January of 2021 and March of 2023, first as a NetEase employee and then with Bungie. I worked on pieces of narrative spread all over the game: cinematics, mission and activity flow, character briefs, and barks, among other things.
Destiny 2: Episode: Revenant
On Revenant my main focus was the Vesper's Host dungeon activity. I was embedded with its design team through the full dev cycle, which meant we had the resources to go deeper on narrative than usual. I got to pitch a new voiced character: Vesper Central/Astraea, an AI who isn't pleased with her current circumstances or her creator.
- Dungeon playthrough video: This video goes through the questline's introductory monologue, the activity dialogue, the secrets that take the player through a character arc with Astraea, and finally the epilogue version of the activity dialogue that unlocks after completing the questline and the secret puzzles.
- Spacewalk suit lore tabs: A five-part look into the backstory of the dungeon's combatants. It's a scifi haunted house story in miniature.
- VS Tech Sledge lore tab: Our one look at Astraea when her station was populated. I'm always interested in seeing how oblique I can get with writing, so I had fun with this small story of Astraea trying to take care of her people in the only ways she's able.
Destiny 2: Episode: Echoes
Episode: Echoes launched alongside The Final Shape. I was one of two NDs assigned to the Breach Executable arena activity, filled in gaps in the seasonal and activity storytelling, and worked on Destiny's set of holiday events.
- Sightline Survey lore tab: A story exploring the edges of Destiny's world, with combatants from two different factions discussing their new alliance and the changing world state. It also indulges my own taste for putting wizards and monsters into mundane workplace situations.
- Ikora's radio message: The NPC Ikora Rey sends the player character a message at the close of the episode's story, drawing a line under the theme of grief running through The Final Shape and Echoes.
Destiny 2: Into the Light
Into the Light served as a free interim release between Season of the Wish and The Final Shape. During its dev period, I had several focuses, including the yearly Guardian Games event with its new Skimmer player vehicle type, and Pantheon: a new boss rush activity asking players to coordinate to fight an increasingly long chain of Raid boss encounters in a row. A restriction on Pantheon was that we couldn't record new voice lines, so instead we repurposed lines from Lord Shaxx, the fan-favourite PVP announcer.
- Lore tabs for Elsie's Rifle and Hung Jury SR4: The lore for Into the Light focused on the residents of the world in the lead-up to the world-threatening stakes of The Final Shape. In the Elsie's Rifle tab, two established characters discuss fortifying their city to prevent it facing the same destruction it underwent in an alternate timeline. The Hung Jury SR4 tab gives us a taste of civilian life in Destiny's setting with a folk tale along the lines of a fantasy Paul Bunyan.
Destiny 2: Season of the Wish
I joined the Destiny team partway through Wish's dev cycle. As I was getting up to speed on Destiny 2's processes, I took on the ND work for the yearly holiday events, and pieces of Wish's writing ad-hoc as other writers needed bandwidth freed up.
- Gifts and Bargains lore book: A chaptered short story exploring the internality of Destiny's wish-granting dragons, the Ahamkara, through the love story of the Ahamkara antagonist Riven and her mate Taranis.
- Final Words mini-mission: I wrote the dialogue for this brief mission where the player makes the wish they were prevented from completing at the beginning of this season. Riven gives her goodbyes to the player, who has been a thorn in her side since the Forsaken expansion.
Aspect lore book for Destiny 2: Shadowkeep
I wrote the Aspect lore book for Destiny 2: Shadowkeep as a freelancer in 2019. It was my first foray into game writing before I started on Destiny: Rising full time in 2021.
