Lightfall

G'day. Let's talk changes for Lightfall!

Now, I was going to make a fancy and impressively long list of all the changes I've made to Braytech since Lightfall's release a month ago but that'd be way more effort than it's worth to either of us so you should instead just trust me and be impressed. Impressed? That's right!

In lieu of an exhaustive list, I'll outline what I'm most proud of...

Maps

Man, Maps are a slog. It's not necessarily hard work, but it's exhaustive, repetitive, and at times, requires a lot of focus. Braytech started out as a checklist site so a stellar mapping and checklist experience has always been a pillar and I try to uphold a rigorous standard in everything I do for it. For example, for each collectible, I need to find it in-game and take the perfect screenshot: I want to show context of its location so its easily recognisable where it lives and I want to remove unnecessary distractions and maintain some sort of consistency between all screenshots. This means no enemy combatants (living or deceased), no corpses, no ammo bricks, no  chests, and no debris of any other kind. That's exhausting - some enemies just don't stop coming and Neomuna patrol is hard.

The thing about a feature like Maps is that you kind of only really update/work on them once a year with expansion content as that's generally the only time collectibles and checklists are added and updated. This means the standard of my code and my skills as a programmer are snapshots in time. Needless to say, I've basically rebuilt maps and how I store and handle maps data. This is actually kind of a fun part though because I can add cool stuff and improve integration with other Braytech features.

Weeklies

Weeklies is Braytech's default view. It's usually the first thing anyone sees after selecting a character. Generally speaking, you want the first thing someone sees to look and work good. Weeklies has always been a thorn in my side, I've never been able to get it to where I want it. I tried "user customisation" for a few years and while it had its advantages, it was ultimately pointless. The markup for it was messy and the drag and drop library it depended on was a lot of bloat for a feature that wasn't as discoverable as it needed to be to justify itself. So I murdered it and rewrote most of the "modules" in the Weeklies view. I did, of course, make improvements to the contents along the way, as well as making some cool additions. 

Moving forward, I think more of this view's content should summarise content from other features, linking to it. For example, the active Ascendant Challange is listed and links to its entry portal in the Maps view. I think integration between features increases the value greatly.

Journey & Commendations

I hesitate to attempt to describe what either of these Destiny features are as I lack confidence in my own understanding of them (beyond the obvious). That said, they do of course have views on Braytech.

When I first started building Braytech, I made a choice to make it character-focused. The most obvious example of this is the page header:

Most Braytech features are built around this character-focused concept. Design-wise, this has always challenged me when building anything account-focused like "Journey" and "Commendations" as showing account stuff in a character-focused context could be misleading and then the user is like is this character-specific or nah what's going I dunno man help this is what it would like with the character header though:

I just think this is better for account-focused features:

Here are some more examples of account-focused features:

The only challenge I have with not using a character header is that it doubles as core navigation... That said, there are many other ways to browse Braytech including keyboard shortcuts.

Anyway, when I get a chance, I'd like to expose guardian ranks in more places throughout the app. I made a whole font for it. I just haven't had the chance to implement anything.

Anyway, who wants to hear my thoughts on the game-- connection lost

I think Lightfall is a great expansion. I disliked the Strand interludes in the campaign. It wasn't bad, it's just not what I wanted. What do I want? A blockbuster cinematic... Which I got but there was all this time in between beautifully crafted CGI where I had to do shit like gees guys. I love Nimbus, he's great, albeit a little cringe here and there but I feel that suits the character (part-time himbo). I'm inable to have an opinion purely as a player, but as a player and a dev who builds maps for the game, the formula has now been used 3 times: penguin souvenirs, lucent moths, and collectible figurines. That said, the tasks required to collect the figurines were a cool and welcome change. There's a lot of spit and polish on the game in general which is nice, but naturally, newer additions need more time (Journey and Commendations). I'm still unsure about the way the UI is expressed in-game, but I think the rearranging of where things live (i.e. Lore moved to Collections) is good housekeeping for the game's future. Destiny continues to have some of the best UI in the industry and some players take that for granted.

All right, that's enough of me running my fingers for the time being