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Treyarch
My first industry job! A series of whirlwinds making new friends and learning all sorts of lessons and being thrilled to actually get paid to make games.
Level Designer
Call of Duty: Big Red One (2005)
Single Player
An Easy Detail - My first game was Call of Duty 2: Big Red One. It was a chaotic 9-month whirlwind crash course that taught me some valuable lessons (like what an assert is), and some questionable lessons (like that you can skip all asserts). I met some amazing people, one of whom was a scripter I teamed up with to make our first-ever shipped level.
Call of Duty 3 (2006)
Single Player
The Island - Next came a typhoon of whirlwinds. We moved onto 5 platforms with the same dev cycle for CoD3. I wrote my first level pitch (developer tip: if you've written 35 pages for a level pitch, you’ve written too much). I relearned valuable things about cutting and scope, and learned the basics of composition and framing (which I’ve found invaluable over the years).
Call of Duty: World at War (2007-2008)
Single Player
Hard Landing - WaW was a different kind of whirlwind, and SP (with 4 player co-op supported) was my home for a big chunk of it. I was again paired with a great scripter, and we eventually shipped a pretty epic level. Parts of that level made cameos elsewhere in the game, which was a nice lesson in efficient reuse.
Multiplayer
Castle & Airfield - The last chunk of my time on the project was in the land of MP. This was my first time stumbling through something somewhat leadership adjacent and a pretty good lesson in re-purposing existing content.
I even made a couple of levels! Airfield relied on a fair amount of reuse, but Castle was almost wholly unique, and I look back on it very fondly — a fun level to make and a great opportunity to combine design and a strong visual style.
Zombies
Nacht der Untoten - It was pretty neat to be just a few doors down from the inception of zombies. Aside from the fun of seeing early prototypes and playtesting, I was also lucky enough to be nearby when a first level was needed. Some familiar bunker geo seemed like just the ticket and I was happy to lend a hand with shipping that first ever zombies level.
