Call of Duty Black Ops 6 Zombies - Shattered Veil

Technical Designer

Shattered Veil is a map that takes place at Dr Richtofens mansion in the 1990s where players are trying to find and interrogate Richtofen. Beneath the mansion there is a secret Project Janus laboratory that was running experiments with Dark Aether which was lead by Dr Richtofen. When the players meet Richtofen he is trapped inside a pairing and instructs them to uncover the secrets of the previous owners who were all men of power that dabbled in unethical life and misused the Occult to their benefit. Players must capture the souls of 3 previous owners to free Richtofen and uncover the mysteries and ties between the mansion, Dark Aether, and Project Janus.

I worked with a team of 2 other Technical Designers, a single level designer and our director to make this maps quest line and core features in just under 10 months. It was my first time working on anything in the CoD Engine and as a long time Zombies fan it was an a rewarding experience. Previous games I worked on were always indie games from existing franchisees and the swap to AAA was fun and kept me engaged. It forced me to follow a more rigid timeline with a more structured Production team and QA cycle. With a well defined timeline for goals I grew as a designer by learning when to cut an idea and when to reach out to help better defined what the actual design issue was while minimizing refactors. My Technical side also grew as I had to use many existing systems some of witch dating back to the ps3/360 era. My team pushed me to think in the long term so any tools we made or gave fixes to could be used in the map we would make the following year.

  • GSC (Proprietary Scripting Language)

  • Radiant

 

    • Use the Narrative Document provided by Treyarch to get the most out of the POI to and make it stand out from anything similar previously used in the Zombies game type

    • Work with Audio, Tech Art, VFX, and Lighting to create a complete experience

    • Create and update Design Documents to help QA test the features

    • Save/Load using bit flags when needed to restore states for any quests I held ownership on

  • This is the last step before the player finishes the WW quest and gets the returning fan-favorite Ray Gun Mk2. It was a fun one to make since we got to hide the 2 keys to the puzzle across the map. The first one comes out of a dot matrix printer which gives a 4 letter word in all caps that the player must decipher using grouped letters on a blackboard in the nursery.
    A creative hack I did was using a spoofed smoke grenade to save VFX from having to simulate the decompression of the airlock as it opened as they already had too much on their plate and I didn’t want to deviate from the vision I had of the Amalgam and its adds emerging from the smoke.

    • Port over the keypad UI Widget from Single player

    • Create a puzzle using a note that players can print out with a code word and a childrens chalkboard with grouped letters in it to hide a code to open the air lock

    • Enable that save/load would always restore the same values to both the code and the cypher

    • Work with 2D Art and Tech Art to sell all the effects and make key props/items stand out while still blending in to the environment

    • Video of the quest: youtu.be/3yfg7wYZR5Q?t=112

  • This was the very first feature I worked on in this map and it required heavy use of VFX and their parent structs as a linked list to create a chain of light. It was my introduction to much of the work flow that HMS follows.

    • Reuse a previously unused prototype and hold ownership of a light reflection puzzle with 2 moveable mirrors that are hidden around the map

    • Refine the encounter zombies by round count and make the Ghouls that you revive reset back to their petrified state upon failure

    • Make full use of the Aether Worm statue in the center of the room to show progress and be memorable to players

    • Keep documentation up to date and communicate with multiple teams and production to keep milestone goals on track

    • Video of the quest: youtu.be/3yfg7wYZR5Q?t=661

  • This was my favorite quest that I made for this map but it was by far the one that needed the most amount of revisions. We knew that we always wanted to make some of the Stonehenge-esque rocks float in the air before slamming down and kicking off part 2 of the quest. Initially we wanted to use it as a way to tutorialize this maps new Elite Zombie the Elder Disciple. However this created a hydra of bugs so we decided to return to the drawing board and with the help of my director request permission to reuse the Abomination Elite Zombie from the Liberty Falls map which could be seen not far off in the distance from the mansion this map took place in. The Abominations 2 special attacks are a laser beam attack and a bull charge attack. We used the laser beam to “charge” the stone with mystical powers and then the bull charge attack to release the energy causing the stones to rise up. This final revision taught me that sometimes the high level idea is on the money but you have to be willing to change out other goals to make sure the vision is clearly conveyed to the player.

    • Prototype and hold ownership through many revisions for a quest where the player must use Elite Zombies behavior to raise 3 rock monuments before starting a final defend the point holdout

    • Work with the director when undergoing a large itteration that allowed us to use Elite Zombies from other maps to help make the step stand out

    • Keep documentation up to date and commuincate with multiple teams and production to keep milestone goals on track

    • Video of the quest: www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjjK8PBoJm4

  • Every zombies map needs its own trap and in this one we used a large microwave trap to pop the head of any zombies that walked by it. Players could slide under it while the trap was active so they wouldn’t cut off their own pathways

    • Take the prototype and update it as assets came in for it

    • Fixing edge cases and general bug fixing as they arose

    • Work with Dialogue team for all the quests I made to give context and later implement any VO work

    • Partake in weekly playtests to help refine the quest lines and core feature placement as a whole

    • Partake in brainstorms and giving input for revisions

    • Save/Load for quest steps