Story Time: United Offensive

Standing on top of that second story unfinished wall with the only support from falling from 2 stories up being the truss that I was tasked with walking across, I would have to repeat this several times until we had all the trusses installed, this makes my gut wrench to this day. Those fancy multi-floor foyer's were a nightmare with that forward facing wall. Framing houses was a competitive business and it was always a race. In 2-3 weeks, my brothers framing business was to pretty much completely build a houses framework. I had been employed by my brother for maybe two months making a fraction of what I would make doing level design. I wasn't in it for the money. I found manual labor in itself to be the payment. With a desk-job you almost have to do supplemental physical activity. This kind of work, is good for the soul..

Some days were so cold we'd have to work around the boards splintering when shooting them with a nail gun due to being frozen. When I got the phone call, it was one of those days. 'Would you be interested in doing some contract work?' The thought of the warmth of my inside desk, the extra cash, at that moment in time.. I did not hesitate. YES please! He couldn't have called on a better day. Had I been working in the summer time I might at least given him a "let me think about it".

The contract was to work with Gray Matter on a vehicle heavy level.. sure sounds like fun!

Sicily Escape

For the Sicily Escape mission I would get to do a bunch of new things. A Side-car motorcycle, a boat, and probably the most on-foot I had done in Call Of Duty. These facade buildings are all made out of terrain, Terrain texture mapping made it so that I could simply fit once and rotate them freely without having to then fit them again. I did a lot of geometry for this, the cliffs and sidewalls were courtesy of the prior mission so I can't say %100 geometry but I had do do a lot of details in there.

I got to fly out and sit and talk with the team there, they had a pretty good layout and plan for the level. These contract jobs had me flying around a lot. It was pre-covid times where Work From home on Level Design felt like a new thing and I was constantly trying to figure it out. There's not much of a substitution for being in-person when it comes to getting the nuances of the game right. I wasn't in the position to complain about how it was, I just had to work extra hard to make sure "Because I was working from home" wasn't an excuse for a lack of quality. I was fighting to continue to have the privilege of working from wherever. It's hard to do, and I think post-covid everyone has a better appreciation for it and things are better now.

I had an early taste of How much engineering effort the Gray Matter team was putting into the tools. The .map format that we had was thrown out, they had changed the format to .xml added a fancy Layering system (Like Photoshop layers). I also got to, unfortunately spend a good deal of time with their engineering team trying to figure out why this .xml file kept becoming corrupt. We found out it had nothing to do with the tool, and everything to do with the VPN software we were using at the time. This outside perspective made me think a lot about the differences in culture, Many of the early Radiant (iw map editor) features were actually created by us Level Designers where at other studio's they actually had engineers devoted to working on tools. Hmm.. (I'm tools engineer now)

I don't remember much else about this, pretty straight forward action packed Call of Duty stuff. Here's a video:

mp_arnhem:

The first time I touched mp was with this map, I was called on to help work the portals on this map. Without Portals this map was struggling in the framerate department. I can't remember with certainty but I think they were considering cutting this map. Had I not been there to help get it running well, this might not have made it!

I think this is it for United Offensive work, after I finished this I continued to do various hobby works ( see other story-time ). Stay tuned for my return to IW as a contractor for Call Of Duty 2.