Call of Duty: Black Ops 2

A time-spanning, generation-spanning narrative, Call of Duty®: Black Ops 2 introduces players to an insidious villain named Raul Menendez who hijacks the US military infrastructure to further his own agenda. Harness the power of near-future technology and advanced robotics to pull the world back from the brink of annihilation.

I was primarily responsible for the level design of the 3rd Act of this level which contained a guided stealth event and what I like to call a Defensive Retreat sequence. I really enjoyed working on a battle that wasn’t a simple head on battle and was in fact a retreat that escalated in intensity. Each area in that sequence is viewed from two directions so it was important to take advantage of landmarking and visual language to give the player a sense of the direction they’re headed. By having the player follow a stream headed to shore allowed me to establish a compass with the added combination of smoke grenades signaling when it was time to move along with the audio cues. Jungle levels have a bad tradition of being visually noisy and confusing to navigate. I utilized constant landmarks and visual anchors such as having one side of the pathway being rocky and the other side being more forested. This in combination with the river I think gives the level a very good sense of directional grounded-ness

Celerium was the second part of a 1 two punch. In Pyrrhic Victory we emulated what was great about past Call of Duty games. Celerium was to show the player a new and exciting design unlike what they’ve seen before in past Call of Duty games. Every encounter in the outdoor area has a wide linearity, allowing players to choose their own path through the engagement. Making decisions on where and how they’d like to engage the enemy, be it hacking a drone’s weapon system and using its mini-gun or taking a back path through the ruins to flank shielded troops, each decision is valid and has its own unique play style flavor. Decoration and optimization in this map was a challenge. With the constant particles, vegetation and wet textures it was constant battle to keep the map at a high frame rate. I really enjoyed creating the ruins section and utilized it as a landmark that players can see and anchor themselves to giving a good sense of progress as they battle through the area.

Frost was an interesting change of pace from the other multiplayer levels I worked on. Instead of being a metropolitan area that was war torn and damaged this level was themed as an pristine European snow covered city that was calmly evacuated well before the battle began.  This gives the level a more peaceful feeling than the other city based maps in terms of the way we detailed it. I did a first decoration pass on most building exteriors including the Apartment buildings, Cheese store, Brewery, Windmill Bar, Coffee shop, and Hostel. I also worked on the design of the Canal and park areas. “Brouherij Dolkmes” the name of the brewery when run through Google translate actually reads “Bowie Knife Brewery” as a fun little personal easter egg.

Cove was a great exercise in working with natural formations and using them to create and maintain a tight design. Making the rock structures look natural while serving the gameplay needs was a fun challenge. The occluding they also needed to provide through portaling was tough to maintain with such varied organic shapes.  We created a story of a stranded fisherman to help theme the map, placing relics of his time on the island everywhere. Creating these story points are some of my favorite memories of this map, small subtle but with a sense of history. It was also fun to work with the juxtaposition between the immediate plane crash and the abandoned relics of the forgotten fisherman.

Uplink was a reimagining of the classic map Summit from Call of Duty: Black Ops but we really wanted to add more personality and update the story of the map as well as the presentation. We reimagined the map as a satellite uplink facility in Myanamar during the events of the single player campaign. I decorated the exterior areas in a similar fashion to Celerium while giving it a different flare. We themed the buildings appropriate to the facility and went about finding new ways to preserve the legacy of the original map while taking the opportunities to reimagine its presentation.

Magma was a fun change of pace to decorate. I was brought on the map to help push it to completion on the decoration front. I worked in the fish market, the bus stop area, back alleys, the hotel and post office building.

I worked on Vertigo as decoration support to push to level to completion. I worked on the center pit vista of the building, the CLAW statue room, adding various battle damage and detail work throughout the map.