At the time, Origins was Treyarch’s most ambitious zombies map. It brings players back to the mode’s beginnings, in a war-torn alternate universe World War II battlefield. For this map, I contributed scripting and design for a wide variety of mechanics, easter egg quests and more.
Much of my work for this map focused on the behemoth robots that walk straight through the gameplay space. I worked extensively on these sequences where players enter into the heads of the robots by shooting a secret hatch hidden on the bottom of the robots’ feet. If the player lingers in the robot’s head too long, they get ejected out the pneumatic tube and free fall back down to the map.
The G-Strike was an easter egg quest reward that I really had fun implementing. The player initiates it by throwing a beacon down like a grenade. The beacon blinks and attracts zombies to it. Then, one of the giant robots that periodically walk through the map launch a huge barrage of missiles that fly up to the sky and slam down on the area surrounding the beacon.
Storytelling and continuity are critically important to me as a game designer, and it's all the little details that matter. When I first saw that the intro cinematic to the level ends with one of the giant robots stepping their foot on top of the bunker where the player spawns, I pitched an idea: let's actually start the level with the robot's foot right there and a big cam shake plus some debris VFX to sell the idea that the stomp from the cinematic just happened in real time. Tying the intro cinematic into the actual gameplay helps sell this as a real, living world.