Black Ops Cold War
Level design and scripting across two campaign missions, plus the pipeline tool that kept the title's maps building through a mid-project engine change.
Operation Chaos
A cinematic aerial ambush. A helicopter insertion drops into a desert trailer park and motel, then hands off from mounted gunfire into on-foot combat. I owned it end to end — level design, scripting, and the cross-department coordination that sold the entry.
It began as a clandestine convoy assault on a VIP in Pakistan. When the story pulled enemies onto US soil mid-project, we rebuilt it as the desert trailer park and motel — same aerial-ambush core, new setting.
Ashes to Ashes
A late-development branch built to give the player agency over the story — the choice to rejoin Perseus after learning the CIA had brainwashed you into being an agent. I owned the gameplay beats, the cinematic moments, and all the scripting.
The mission's signature shot rides a bullet into each named ally as it dies. I kept a constant read on ally health and, on every incoming round, precalculated whether it would land and whether the damage was lethal. On a confirmed kill shot I spawned a model bullet linked to the real one, dropped the game's timescale, and mounted the camera to the model bullet to carry it into the target.
MapTranslator
Mid-project, Cold War moved off Infinity Ward's engine onto Treyarch's, and the ported .map files broke Radiant across the board. I traced the crashes in Visual Studio, found the damage could be repaired by hand, then built a tool to do it at scale.
.map files, C++ handled Perforce — checking existing files out for edit and adding new ones..map in its dependency tree, so a whole level got fixed in one pass.A .map is just text at the end of the day. Attaching to Radiant to catch its crashes showed most of the breakage came down to brackets and stray entity blocks, missing P4User info, no GUI's etc — fixable by rewriting the file itself. Ideally the editor should handle this. However this is one of those rare opportunities where I was able to flex into a new set of skills while engineering was busy fighting fires in other areas and contribute well outside expecations for mission design.
Beyond my own missions
Guide
Helped guide a junior designer who joined during Operation Chaos's production.
Tet Offensive
A quasi-open-world mission set in Hue City during the Tet Offensive. As an operative sent to rally scattered US and ARVN forces, the player works out of the MACV compound as a hub — galvanizing the defenders through objectives across the city, then leading an assault on the Imperial City Citadel where an enemy agent is embedded with the NVA.