Story Time: Call Of Duty

After having parted ways with Medal Of Honor, we had to start something new. Once again I have a very vague recollection of how it settled into another WW2, It was likely just the easy safe pitch for InfinityWard's first game. It was my Idea to name it Call of Duty... Gotcha! Just kidding! (take that out of context internet search engine) I really don't remember much but standing around throwing around names.. Working with 20 year old memory it's hard to be accurate about things outside of what I worked on. My hope with all of this is that I provide context of who I am and what specifically I've had my hands in.

This team of 20 something people, had moved from a small 4 story office complex, to this giant golden building. We had a name for it, which escapes me. But it was huge and we were on the XXth(37th?) floor. It was all very exciting, We were happy to have a new set of lunch places within walking distance and all that. It felt fresh.

When I say fresh, I mean fresh in all senses. The office was as bare bones as it gets. The Tools and advancements that we had made to the Quake3 (in addition to Rituals Enhancements) were all Gone! We were given access to Return to Castle Wolfenstein as a base. There was a lot of things that we would miss, but on many fronts it was an opportunity to do-over the things that we wanted and skip on the things we didn't want. We birthed a new new Scripting language. We came up with new visibility setup that would hopefully handle us putting more details in open spaces. Lots of animation stuff, Asset Management was a new thing where assets were no longer text edited. The coolest thing we got was a WW2 themed texture set even though we'd have to come up with our own art it was something we could get quick prototypes that actually had texture.

We also settled on a really simple answer for the Terrain problems we had. All I needed was a curve patch where I could control the vertices specifically, This was far better than the "Manual bumpification" or wrestling with the intersections of terrain system and curves. Roads could bend and have a 1:1 connection with the terrain next to them.

I remember doing some early prototypes for outdoor area's, I wanted to challenge the new portal system, think "Favela" for MW2 but a lot more primitive. It was a work that would get thrown out. I think the priority with Portals was that while inside of a building, the windows and doors would be tight clips to the outside perspective, things drawing over each other would cost a lot. The portals ended up being quite tricky to leverage in large organic spaces, too many of them and performance would degrade. Buildings being largely demolished with non-square openings would also prove to be tricky. I became the resident expert on Optimizing levels with Portals. It was my thing.. Very boring, non-glamorous but necessary for elevating all the things that we wanted to do.

I was also beginning to become the special teams guy with vehicles in the game, something I would carry on to later titles. I wrote a lot of systemic vehicle animation script ( guys getting into, out of vehicles ).

We still had to do everything on the levels, but I think in this game we ended up playing to each others strengths a bit more and moving around. Sometimes we'd script each others geometry. I had strengths in both scripting and this new portal system. I could do some geometry too.

These tank missions, I did purposely on a sunny day, I wanted the blending of terrain, the river, the boundaries all to be seamless. Take a look at the video, I was really proud to be able to do these roads and geometry that didn't bubble around and morph to lower their detail. It was low as possible polygon count landscape with non of those "terrain system" artifacts. Even under the trees I added little patches of other texture to make the trees feel more connected (as opposed to a hard edge clipping with the solid white snow).

The scripting in this mission is intentionally simplistic, a whole game can be made about tank simulation, I wanted this mission to not outstay its welcome. It was meant to break up the First person shooting, Give you something different, and not break the bank. These tanks are orchestrated on a linear path, they have dynamic turrets that shoot you if you don't do anything. Nothing to it!

The next mission was a little more advanced, Driving in the city with destructible buildings. There were sneaky soldiers with RPG's and destructible buildings. I did all the Scripting and geometry for this mission. Again, short and sweet was my goal. Fun fact, we made games in ~18 months back then, with 20 something people. It was good to understand the limitation and work within reasonable self expectation. I knew my limitations and stand by the decisions to keep it simple. There were so many other, more important facets of the game that needed me!

Carride was another level I worked on, This is a place where I would exercise tricky portal placement and mastery of the new terrain system. In some sections we'd place a tree wall closer to the road to create a portal. It was a fun organic sprawl that we could race a car through. I only did geometry for this. The scripting was done by Chad Grenier . The new terrain system had support for overlapping geometry that we could create blends on, a grass going into dirt, etc. All of that can be seen in here with a keen eye!

Truckride is probably my favorite contribution to this Call of Duty, Outside of maybe Half-life's train ride intro, games didn't really do this so there was no frame of reference. It was challenging to get all those things to align. I would liken it to an uncut scene in a movie, you know where they go a minute with action and don't cut to a different camera. That guy that jumps from vehicle to vehicle really got to use the lerp function ( it doesn't always read well ).

I believe this map had a blockout when I got it, I did a lot of the texturing and those cool mountains in the background. I think we got an added gridspace in this game so we could do those things.

Airfield was another mission. I did all the geometry and Scripting for this. I had an "Ideal crash path" for different places on the path. If I could show you the in editor version, you'd see a really cool spider web of paths for the planes.

I loved doing those fish-tail truck turns. None of that is real physics and I'm basically an animator with a vehicle spline path. So are the crashes for the cars in truckride. I think Airfield might be the only place where I scripted an area with the player on his feet! though it would be brief, I made sure to get the dead guy falling off the balcony in there. =)

I think that's it for my main missions. I was often pulled in to help optimize levels and whenever you see AI's get in and out of vehicles there's a likely hood that I was involved with that ( some of my memory on which games is hazy as I would carry vehicle duties through several games ).

Here's some pictures of that time for kicks!

My desk is pretty boring.. Haha to the duct-tape.. The mouse bungee has stayed with me to this day with me to this day. Carl Glave is featured playing DDR.

There is way too much to unpack here, Enjoy! Thanks Mackey McCandlish for approval! Puyo-Pop!

Janice Bishop sat just behind me at the fancy reception desk.

Round table meeting room, sans round table. This is actually a really good idea. People shouldn't get too comfortable in the meeting room, get back to work.

That's all I have to say about my contributions to the startup of the great Call of Duty. I took a break for roundabout 1 year after Call of Duty.

What did I do for that year? Stay tuned! If any one else has photos from that time I'd love to see them.