Destiny 2 — Ambient Life

I joined Bungie in 2015 as a QA tester on Destiny: The Taken King and moved into a Test Engineer role in 2017. Alongside the QA work, I took on a 3D generalist project: designing, modeling, rigging, and animating ambient life characters for Destiny 2. These are the background characters that populate social spaces and environment areas — not gameplay-critical, but meaningful to the sense that the world is inhabited.

Shipped Characters

Two characters shipped: the owls in the Farm social space, and the sea monster visible from the Titan environment. Both went through the full character pipeline — concept reference, modeling, UV layout, rigging, skinning, and animation — and shipped in Destiny 2 at launch.

The owls needed to feel like real birds in a space that players would visit repeatedly, so the idle animations had to hold up to extended observation without reading as loops. The sea monster needed to feel massive and distant — the animation had to read clearly at the scale it was viewed from, on a creature that players would never get close to.

Prototype Work

Beyond the shipped characters, the project included two prototype pieces that didn't make the final game: a reactive NPC with custom animations and VFX that responded to player proximity, and an interactive beehive obstacle designed for a demo environment. The beehive had destruction states, a swarm VFX response, and gameplay-driven behavior hooks.

QA Engineering Work

The rest of my time at Bungie was as a QA and test engineer — mapping content workflows to find systemic failure points, analyzing runtime memory in high-risk areas, and building tools for the QA team. The debug config tool I built during this period let testers trigger public event completion at any reward tier on demand, enabling reward and audio testing that had previously been too time-consuming. The audio team picked it up independently; it was a pattern I'd see repeated later at Epic.