Résumé

Zack Ganous

Senior Mission Designer

Irvine, CA

Mission and level designer with 13 years in AAA first-person action, twelve of them shipping Call of Duty. I take missions from whitebox to ship — encounter layout, gameplay scripting, AI and systems logic, cinematic sequencing — working directly with art, cinematics, audio, FX and narrative.

Experience

Blizzard Entertainment

2026 — Present

Senior Designer · STARCRAFT · In Development

Senior mission design on Blizzard Entertainment's STARCRAFT.

Raven Software

2013 — 2025

Designer — Mission, Level & Scripting · Eight Shipped Titles

Twelve consecutive years of Call of Duty shipping across campaign, battle royale and free-to-play online. Mentored junior designers on level-design philosophy, scripting practice and navigating production, and supported leads with knowledge-sharing.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6Campaign

Shipped2024

High Rollers — primary scripter on this linear cinematic stealth mission and, by the back half of production, driving it day to day: playing it end to end every morning and holding it to a near-flawless bar.

Hunting Season — designer, scripter and level designer on this open-world Iraqi-desert level. Built the trigger and scripting logic on the smart bundles system driving each outpost's AI and encounters, holding the mission inside budget by suspending and resuming outpost AI as the player came and went.

Call of Duty: VanguardCampaign

Shipped2021

Numa Numa Trail — designed layout and sightlines for the opening stealth section, and helped layer it for performance.

Owned level design and encounter scripting for the assault on the airstrip from the hill tunnels.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold WarCampaign + Tool

Shipped2020

Owned scripting and level design for the Operation Chaos side mission end to end, mentoring a junior designer through it, and built its alternate defect ending — where the player turns on their former allies — including the bullet-camera eliminations that punctuate each betrayal.

Wrote MapTranslator, a C#/regex tool that rewrote every broken map file during a mid-project engine migration.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4Blackout · Battle Royale

Shipped2018

Designed Rivertown and its trailer park, redesigned Asylum, contributed to the Hydro Dam and Turbine factory areas, and built one-off structures across the map — barns, houseboats and similar set pieces.

Designed the majority of the western town added in Blackout's first content update, plus large sections of the Alcatraz map, continuing through post-release content.

Also shipped Call of Duty: WWII (2017) · Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (2016) · Call of Duty Online — Hero Ops & Zombies (2014–2015) · Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (2014)

Disciplines & Tools

DesignMission & encounter design · Level design and whiteboxing · Cinematic sequencing · AI & systems logic

CraftGameplay scripting · Shipping at scale and production discipline · Cross-discipline coordination · Mentorship

EnginesRadiant · Unreal Engine 5 · Sequencer · Blueprint

CodeGSC · C# · C++

Background Self-taught out of a modding background into AAA level and mission design. Project work and mission breakdowns at zackganous.com.