As this past year came to a close, I’ve been reminiscing on my accomplishments for 2021, and building a plan for this years projects, and GuardianForge is near the top of that list. Its hard to imagine even a year ago, Forge wasn’t even a thought! Before I dive into whats coming, I want to celebrate with a few stats I pulled from the platform.

View the full post here.

Looking Back Through 2021

Well the obvious one is the site to begin with. I started building Forge in early 2021 with the goal of creating a platform that allows players to share snapshots of their Guardian builds using a simple link that can be viewed on any device. After about 4 months, I finished an MVP sometime in June.

Shortly after I got my first few users, Matt Jarret (creator of destinyinsights.com & the @DestinyInsights bot on Twitter) send me a DM about Forge offering to share it out to his nearly 70k followers. I was some combination of shocked, excited, and appreciative for this act of kindness. It’s at that point I consider Forge to be launched.

Since then, there have been a number of new features that have been added:

  • User Profiles
  • Upvoting
  • Searching
  • Private Builds
  • Various Build Enhancements
  • Documentation
  • A Blog

Along with these features, there have been multiple times where the app has been rearchitected for performance and scalability.

Whats Coming in 2022

Shortly after launching, I laid out a list of features I had planned to build into Forge over time:

A number of these features have been added over the last 6 months, and I’ve been working on alot behind the scenes to get many more of these done. I can easily say that 2022 is going to be a big year for Forge. Lets take a look at some things actively in the works.

Destiny Data Utils

Est Release: Q1 2022

As a developer, I often use tools & libraries by other developers to make my life easier. Building GuardianForge was no easy feat, it was definiltey one of the more challengeing projects I’ve undertaken in my 10+ years as a developer & IT professional. Without getting overly technical, I’m essentially building an open source library to allow other developers to more easily work with data from the game we love and cherish so much. Its my way of giving back to the developer community, and hopefully encourage others to build tools around Destiny. I’m also using this library myself to build the next feature thats coming in Q1.

Custom Build Crafter

Est Release: Q1 2022

My test bed for building the library above is a custom build crafter. Once this feature launches, you’ll no longer be required to setup your builds in-game before sharing them with the GuardianForge community. You’ll be able to import your inventory and easily add items to a build using what you have. You can either use an existing Guardian as a starting point or just jump in and start building from scratch.

Integration with DIM

Est Release: Q2 2022

Destiny Item Manager is probably the most notable third party tool in the Destiny community (hell, they even advertise it in the game). So something I’ve had on my radar for a while is a way to export builds from Forge into the DIM Loadout Optimizer, as well as sharing builds from DIM into Forge for sharing with others.

One challenge that comes with this is trying to match items from another user’s build with your own inventory, so I’ll be building a recommendation engine to try to rate which items might be the most similar in your own inventory when importing another user’s build.

Fireteam Builds/Build Collections

Est Release: Q2 2022

Endgame activities usually require more than just one fireteam member to have specific items equipped to make those actives easier to run. This is where Build Collections will help. Users will be able to add multiple builds into a collection and specify some of the metadata on the collection level instead of the build.

Imagine wanting to run a Grandmaster with two members who are new to the activity. Simply share a build collection with those members to help manage who should run what equipment before dropping into an activity.

Guardian Monitor

Est Release: Q3 2022

GuardianForge currently reads data from the game to show you what a Guardian has equipped, but if the equipment changes after the page is loaded, you don’t see the most current items equipped to that character. Guardian Monitor will let you load up to 6 Guardians and Forge will automatically refresh the build as users change their equipment.

Clan Features

Est Release: Q3 2022

There are a number of clan-based features I’ll be looking to build in the coming year. I’ll be enabling a special area for clan admins to add builds from the community to build collections that are automatically shared with members of that clan. When a clan member signs in, they will be able to access these build collections to help streamline setting up for various activities. This will also help with carries through endgame content.

Thanks!

Again, I wanted to thank everyone for taking the time to explore GuardianForge. Lots of new stuff is coming this year and I cant wait to get it all released! If you have any other suggestions, DM @GuardianForge on Twitter and I’ll see if it fits. See you around the Tower!