Seamless Co-Development on Bungie’s First-Person Extraction Shooter
Acting as a seamless extension of Bungie’s in-house team, Pipeworks scaled quickly from a small support role to owning key gameplay features across multiple disciplines. This deep multidisciplinary integration ensured tight collaboration across art, design, engineering, UI/UX, QA, and production, delivering a cohesive and highly polished game experience.
- Served as Bungie’s primary co-dev partner, scaling from under 10 to over 60 developers at peak
- Closely integrated with Bungie, acting as a true extension of their internal team across all modes and disciplines
- Designed engaging gameplay systems including activities, objectives, progression loops, and achievements
- Delivered compelling environment and UI art assets spanning maps, props, and 2D/3D user interface elements
- Built UX wireframes and core development tools to streamline iterative workflows and empower design evolution
- Conducted extensive QA, bug reporting, and playtesting to refine gameplay balance, build stability, and feature polish
- Virtuos Chengdu and Glass Egg – a Virtuos Studio created high-quality character models based on detailed concepts and briefs
The close-knit collaboration between Pipeworks and Bungie facilitated seamless communication and agile development cycles, allowing rapid prototyping, testing, and iteration.
This co-development partnership enabled the teams to more quickly respond to gameplay feedback, balancing competitive mechanics and progression systems while maintaining the high production values expected of Bungie titles. The shared ownership of core game features fostered a unified vision that ensured consistent quality across the game.
Pipeworks’ engineering team played a crucial role in developing toolsets and UX wireframes that enhanced Bungie’s development pipeline.
By optimizing workflows and creating custom tools, they empowered the art and design teams to iterate faster and with greater precision. This investment in tooling amplified productivity and contributed to the smooth integration of complex gameplay features, fueling the ongoing evolution of Marathon.
Virtuos Chengdu and Glass Egg – a Virtuos Studio also provided support, crafting character models for Marathon. Working closely with Bungie’s art team, our teams transformed concept art into detailed, lifelike game models that seamlessly blend into the game’s environments.
Virtuos is proud to continue a growing partnership with Bungie, combining our global studio expertise and cutting-edge development practices to help support Marathon’s success.
