Destiny Medals

Destiny Medals was built to be a lightweight way to view your multiplayer match history, stats, and a frictionless way to share games with your friends.

Discovery and definition

Destiny 2 was massively popular in 2017 when it released. It had a huge community, one of the largest subreddits, and its where I could find my friends on any given night.

During our late nights together I encountered a few issues:

I’ve written articles on this topic, released open source files on how to build your own tools, and did a live stream talk with some of the folks over at Figma in early 2021. In August of 2021, I was Figma's "Featured Creator" in the community newsletter.

• The multiplayer match history only went back one match, so if you wanted to review how you did, you had to login bungie.net on a computer.
• Being able to share a match witha a friend was hard. Most other services mixed in tons of stats or required an account.
• “Medals” were unique accolades based on performance, we’re oddly missing from the game’s UI and weren’t reviewable anywhere, even in the API.

Once I realized the game had a public API, I realized I could address these issues myself.

Frictionless match history on mobile

By just using your gamertag or username, I could fetch a players match history going back 25+ matches vs the game only allowing you to look at one. There was no login, no remembering passwords.

The match history took the form of a stack of cards, which showed the level you played on, whether you won or lost, along with some other valuable meta data. By storing this public data in the URL, sharing matches was easy as copy and pasting.

Filling in the missing data

As I was building Destiny Medals I came to realize that the API didn’t have a full list of medals (the accolades earned during multiplayer matches). Pieces of this information were there, but the full list was incomplete.

I joined a Discord community for the Destiny 2 API and together we put together a complete list and made it open source on Github.

This meant Destiny Medals, and other stat apps, now had a more feature complete way of viewing your performance than the actual game did!

Launch

In January of 2018 I launched Destiny Medals as an open source site to the community. It ran for over a year and had a few hundred monthly users. Destiny 2 has been releasing updates for several years now so eventually my webapp was redudant.

This project taught me a considerable amount about React, creating frictionless user experiences, and designing an interface around an API.