While working as a Production Tester on site at Treyarch I got to talk with many of the employees there. Someone who was instrumental in introducing me to the staff was Thaddeus Sasser who had been my floor lead year prior on Soldier of Fortune 2 when we were in test. Through him I got to meet great people like Mike Denny and Jeremy Luyties. Near the end of my time as a tester on Call of Duty: Big Red One I was given an opportunity to take the design test. After three weeks my test level was reviewed and I had done well enough to be offered a position as a Junior Designer at Treyarch.
My first assignment was to work under Michael Lin and Jared Dickinson as a scripter on Call of Duty 3. We designed the fifth level Falaise Road, based on the Canadian armor convoy that moved through France. I was responsible for the first half of the level made up of a rail sequence moving down the road, a surprise moment when the convoy was ambushed and the player’s vehicle ran off the road, an on foot rush against a machine gun nest, and a moment where the player used explosives to clear a bridge so the group could take out a hill side indirect-fire German emplacement.
One of the hardest FPS game play objectives to make is a rail sequence, and I had one as my first endeavor. These can be difficult because you take away the primary interaction a player has with shooters, being able to move around. Instead you are fixed in a single spot and only allowed to rotate and shoot. I had to make sure there was always something active on the screen to keep the player’s attention. Through the use of AI, destructible prefabs, other vehicles (both friendly and enemy), non playable area FXs and models, and explosions we were able to make it captivating while getting it to work on current gen (Xbox & PS2) and next gen (Xbox 360 & PS3). I went through many iteration of this sequence before we shipped.
The second objective where the player’s vehicle is disabled and runs in to a potato field was almost cut. We went through many versions of it and right before Production put the brakes on it I was able to get a version that felt good to everyone. The main difficulty here was setting up the AI on the machine gun to make it deadly to just run through. Many days of tweaking on the node and AI finally got it in to the ballpark and I was allowed to polish it up.
The third objective was a moment for the story to develop, firing off AI dialog while making the AI squad place an explosive on a disabled vehicle blocking off the bridge, then handing over control of the AI squad to Lin. This proved to be harder than the rail sequence because our excellent testers found many ways to get the squad AI to do unexpected things.