A few months into 2025, I returned from paternity leave to find my team already knee-deep in rapid fire implementation of a brand new Limited Time Mode which would end up launching as Lego Fortnite Expeditions. There was a small team of designers, an engineer, and an AI designer all trying to stand up the user-flow of this new game mode. I jumped straight in, helping to implement objectives, side-missions, UI elements, rewards, objective markers, and anything else that didn't have an obvious owner. We were operating on a super aggressive timeline, so just making something fun and functional that could be replayed nearly endlessly was a major accomplishment.
For the Ninjago release in the second half of 2025, I spearheaded designing and implementing a suite of objectives called Chaos Challenges. The goal for this system was to author a handful of straightforward, understandable objectives that could be used at an open-ended number of POI's of different sizes, shapes, styles and in different biomes. Similarly, the difficulty of these challenges and the rewards they provide upon completion also needed to scale with the player as they progressed through the Ninjago narrative. This entire system was a tall task, but I feel the objectives I created were well liked and added a ton of value to the update.
For the NInjago release, the team received a helpful influx of designers who were new to the project. So a large percentage of my time was spent spinning them up on our encounter tools and supporting them in implementing a large number of combat focused encounters.
Additionally, I also designed and implemented Invasion Portals to summon a combat encounter around the player as an open-world encounter. The original design called for players building and placing a special device to close off the portals. Shortly after prototyping and playtesting that concept, we realized as a team we wanted a more active and dynamic method for players to close the portals. So we pivoted that to the method you see here where enemies drop these physics-enabled orbs (Chaos Embers) and have to pick them up and toss them into the portals to close them.