343 Industries

Web developer, 2012-2015

Green and brown Spartan in a futuristic sci-fi setting

About

Halo Waypoint is the official site for the Halo universe, Microsoft’s best-selling game franchise. As well as a marketing site, it displays player statistics from all Halo games, facilitates player-to-player messaging, forums, and allows for clan creation.

Halo 4

I was brought on in August of 2012 to redesign the YAF.NET forum to match the new site design in anticipation of Halo 4’s release in November. The timeline was tight, but we were successful at cleaning up the styles and exposing features the moderation team desired, such as forum-wide notifications.

Halo Waypoint was updated throughout Halo 4’s lifetime. We were careful to make sure every page, every dropdown, every site element was visible and usable on every device. The Career menu in particular was a challenge to fit on a circa 2012 mobile phone.

Halo 5

After the launch of Halo 4, the Windows Phone’s website team took over the project and decided to rewrite the site from scratch on Microsoft Azure. We also committed to writing an entirely new forum engine using Azure Table storage.

I worked with a front-end engineer responsible for Microsoft.com on the new website, tackling complex cross-browser challenges and localization issues. I worked with localization teams across 27 languages, researching and creating an age check whose month, day, and year elements moved depending on the user’s culture. The website was held to a high standard of polish and had to work across all desktop browsers, Android phones and tablets, and Windows Phone 8 devices.

The Service Record page showed users their stats from Halo 5: Guardians, Halo: The Master Chief Collection, all the way back to Halo 2. As it was difficult to use open source libraries at Microsoft, we wrote most of the charting functionality ourselves. I made the angled bar and torus graphs and tweaked the responsive layout until it flowed properly.

Mjolnir Powered Assault Armor Modeling Career

Occasionally the web team was permitted to test unreleased Halo content, which is how I got to be the brown Spartan in this official screenshot of Halo 4: Spartan Ops Episode 8.