Call of Duty: Black Ops was a great project where I got to work on polishing my engagement skills and becoming familiar with designing and implementing systems. With work on campaign levels and the Zombies team I found myself gaining farther reaching experience.
Victor Charlie: Set in Vietnam, I worked on this level with scripter Alex Lui and builder Jared Dickinson. Mason is shot down near an enemy village with an AA gun, after clearing the village and destroying the gun Mason travels through the rat tunnels. With all the animations before the village fight I found timing to be one of the skills I gained more knowledge in. Either resizing a trigger or slightly tweaking a wait was something I was always performing.
WMD: Hudson infiltrates deep in to Russian territory in order to locate Steiner’s office at an old army base. This level was huge and took the efforts of Dan Laufer, Jun Park and myself in script with Ross Kaylor and Brian Glines building. After the jump Hudson moves in to the Russian facility and is contacted by Steiner. The base infiltration was good old combat fun, one of my favorite things to design, and a great ramp up to running from an avalanche.
Zombies: Design on Zombies was change from the normal linear set up found in campaign levels. With a multiplayer like environment with a common enemy to create a Co-op experience, Zombies showed that I’d be challenged like never before. I now had to focus on up to four players at a time and a full array of enemies. Systems were the corner stone and I had to learn all the tricks of the trade. I’ve had the pleasure of working on:
- The Awful Lawton’s “monkey-bolt.” This upgraded crossbow bolt attracts the zombies before exploding. Players can also hit their own teammates for interesting tactics.
- The Death Machine. New power up in Five where the player is given a super weapon for a set period. In Five this is a Minigun.
- The Gersch device. The special grenade in Ascension pulls all zombies in to a black hole and can teleport players around the map.
- A “modern day” box map. The box location is displayed as cycling pictures on a television close to every possible location.
- The first trap to be assembled in Zombies, the electric metal detector in Five.
- Controlling the frost overlay on the player when they are in the water in Coast.
- The Easter Egg scripting and flow for Call of the Dead, which behaved differently depending on how many players were in the game.
- Shangri-la’s quick movement system, the geysers.
