New Driver Challenges and other Seasonal Content (Rocket League)

Working on Psyonix’s Rocket League has been an absolute blast!

I’ve handled Rocket Passes, technical level design, game modes, limited-time-events, and gameplay tuning.  Each release contains something I’ve worked on, from the game feel of several of the newly released cars, to the Re-Fueled Event that

I was the key designer behind Summer Road Trip 2025, which gave players the opportunity to earn the Corvette ZR1 in both Rocket League AND Fortnite, and it saw very high engagement as well. I’ve contributed to several limited time events beyond that one, including the upcoming Frosty Fest 2025, which has a special Rivalry mechanic.

A major highlight of my time, however, is the launch of the revamped New Driver Challenges!

This was an initiative borne of our desire to adjust player expectations for the future of Rocket League, and uncouple access to Ranked playlists from the acquisition of level XP, which had many modifiers and bonus sources (like double XP weekends, rate bonuses via the Rocket Pass, and immediate rewards via Limited Time Challenges) that “uncompetitive” players could take advantage of to boost burner accounts.

Moreover, Season 20 was going to launch with massively increased XP gains, which would accelerate this problem even further. We accomplished the change via an analysis of the number of matches and wins that it took for the average player to reach level 20, and reduced that value significantly, so new players would see a reduction in their time-to-ranked, but players taking advantage of XP boosters would have consistent barriers that we could adjust in real time via several different levers if additional problems occurred.

Once players have completed all four stages (a process that takes around 40 total matches), they’ll be able to access Ranked Playlists, and Rocket League will also have a pretty solid idea of how skilled they are at playing.

Read more about this cool feature that I designed here.

Re-Fueled and other Designs

In 2026, Rocket League Season 23 launched 3 features I am very proud to have developed as the primary designer: the Re-Fueled experience, Demo Spawn Select, and the Luxury Collections.

Rocket League: Re-Fueled was an initiative to entice lapsed players and celebrate their return to the fold via XP boosts and access to rewards they had “missed” by not participating in previous seasons. We selected a cohort that had not played in the previous 2 seasons, filled the challenge slate with the juiciest rewards from prior events, and doled out generous amounts of XP in addition to the rewards they would be receiving if they had been consistently active players for the prior seasons.

The design was rewarded with excellent player participation metrics on our Year-over-Year reports, and as of August, we significantly outpaced last year’s numbers.

Demo Spawn Select is a fairly straightforward design: remove one of the last bits of pure randomness to Rocket League’s gameplay via a player-controlled UI system that would appear after the player’s car had been destroyed.

The UI took multiple iterations, but it launched in a state that we were all very proud of, and high-level players appreciate the ability to make tactical decisions when they are demolished mid-match.

Luxury Collections are something I’ve been pushing to get to players for quite some time. Many current players have not participated in Rocket League for the full decade that it has been around, and thousands of items formerly only available via the Rocket Pass have been locked away from player access, even by some players that purchased the pass at the time.

Once the various approvals to redistribute content were gained, we built a loot crate system based on the existing Drops rewards, but with the benefit of a “knockout” mechanic. Of the 20 items available in each collection, players would only ever receive an item they did not already own.

The feature has gained significant hype within the community, and we’ve received excellent feedback on the contents of the currently-released Collections that will inform the Product team’s selection of rewards for next time.