Call of Duty: Black Ops - Declassified

Senior Missions Designer - Nihilistic software

December 2011 - December 2012

This Call of Duty game was the last project at Nihilistic. We were so excited to be working on a CoD game as we were all such fans. Unfortunately, the Playstation Vita kind of hamstrung us in terms of controls. We did what we thought were great solutions and if a player actually took the time to understand how the controls worked, it was a lot of fun. But it was just too different for regular FPS players to adopt. Plus, why play an FPS on a very specific mobile device when you can play an excellent game on PC or console?

Duties

• Responsible for 2 Spec Ops style levels (10 total levels) and one multiplayer map.

• Supervised and mentored junior designers and design interns.

The video above shows a level that I'm particularly happy with. It has a lot of nice twists and turns in it to extend the gameplay with tons of hiding places for the enemy, a dramatic opening sequence where the helicopter the player-character is flying in crashes, and the heavily populated breech sequence at the end of the mission to cap it all off. 

This was our first fully working level and became our demo. A lot of trial and error came about from constantly iterating on the gameplay in this operation. What we discovered in this mission, we propagated across all levels. This included cover density, spawning behaviors and setups, pacing, and enemy density.

Part of the fun in making all of these levels was the large amount of scripting involved. Everything from the spawn triggers to more complicated breech scripts. 

Our levels had to have extremely small footprints if we wanted richly populated gameplay and enemies with tons of animations. So every encounter had to be tight and fun. Every inch of space had to count for some kind of action and fun. Including vertical space!

This is a full playthrough of Escort Service, “Operation 9.”

This is a full playthrough of Three Point Landing, Operation 5.

What CoD game would be complete without multiplayer? We were able to get in 16 players for 8 on 8 matches on the VIta! We had about 6 different multiplayer modes. The biggest challenge for mission design on this game were the draw calls and distances. So we had to create some really tight areas with some strategically created open spaces.