Throughout my time on the Call of Duty team I found myself quickly moving from one technical task to the next. I was first entrusted to lead a small 3 person strike team to implement the human faction fortresses that would be scattered across one section of the open world Zombies map. My main concern for this task was ensuring that the combat encounters leading up to the final boss room of each fortress felt progressive in difficulty and satisfying to play through. To achieve the desired level of play I scheduled daily play tests and organized the feedback in a series of spreadsheets that would allow us to quickly track the progress of the changes.

Thanks in part to my thorough handling of the initial batch of fortress implementations, I was then tasked with planning and implementing the Mercenary AI encampments across the same section of the map. There were nearly 4 times as many encampments compared to fortresses so it was imperative that I worked efficiently and delegated the correct tasks to my fellow strike team members.

The speed and efficiency of my work was noticed as I was then shifted to working on implementing new AI archetypes as well as improving the behavior trees of the previous AI archetypes. I had dabbled in behavior trees before but never on a professional level so in an effort to ensure that my contributions were solid I took it upon myself to block-out and maintain a set of AI test gyms. These allowed me to experiment and learn at a rapid pace. Soon following that I was entrusted to implement a brand new Rusher AI archetype that would be used in the Zombies mode.

As we approached the launch date, I was then put at the forefront of an AI strike team responsible for improving the general behavior and player-visible interactions of the new AI archetypes across the entire open world Zombies map.