New World is the second mission of Call of Duty: Black Ops 3. One of the more interesting challenges involved with the creation of this mission was sorting out how to present combat tutorials in an intuitive and engaging way without breaking the flow of the traditional Call of Duty style combat. For this level, I performed the role of Point Designer. This involved coordinating with and managing the other game designers on the level, in addition to my normal scripting and game design duties.
In this clip, you can see one of the tutorials I scripted for this mission. The entire cybernetic ability system was new for the franchise, so we needed to on-board players with selecting these abilities from a radial menu as well as using them in the flow of combat. As a side note, working on the train afforded me the opportunity to execute some fun presentation details. I authored custom script to make the robots’ corpses get pushed to the back of the train by the wind, as well as get flung at high speed when they fall off the train.
Here’s a small detail I scripted into an in-engine cutscene. The scene called for the player to experience a quick, stress-induced flashback to the robot attack that paralyzed them and required their limbs be replaced with cybernetics. So, here I set up the scenes of the robots breaking out of their charging stations. Timing these out to work with first person cinematic animations was a fun challenge.
In this section, we slow the player down for a moment and introduce the remote hijack ability. It took a good amount of iteration to make an intuitive tutorial for hacking and controlling a drone. The following warehouse fight serves as a neat introductory space to the game’s small vehicles combat.