Game Designer
Call of Duty: MWZ
Intern Game Designer
Company
Treyarch
Tenure
May 2023 - Aug 2023
Team
Zombies / MWZ
Skills
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AI Behavior Design
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Radiant
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Level Design
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A/B Testing
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Cross Team Collaboration
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Technical Documentation
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Scripting and Prototyping
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Perforce
Overview
I joined the Zombies team on MWZ for a twelve-week internship, dropped into a proprietary pipeline I'd never touched before. Once I found my footing, I moved onto AI behavior work. A number of the specifics from that summer are still covered by NDA, Happy to discuss in a interview of course. Below Details a few of the things I learned from the Internship.
My Goal
Get functional in the studio's toolset fast enough to contribute to live AI systems on a shipping Call of Duty title, without slowing the team down while I ramped up.
Constraint to Mention
A proprietary C-based scripting language (GSC/GDT) and the Radiant engine, both I was unfamiliar going in, plus a codebase carrying years of studio convention. An Instance of needing to learn which is perfect for an internship.
Prototyping & Scripting:
Scripted in-engine using the studio's proprietary language to build and demo design prototypes, then documented each one to ensure people could understand the work given.
Example of Vision Cones Used to Visualize some of the existing behavior systems
Combat Systems Testing:
Ran A/B tests on combat loops in large-map scenarios, benchmarking Cold War's implementation against the in-development MWZ build, and built a dedicated test map to evaluate AI performance at scale. Findings fed directly back into refining the AI behavior systems.
Example of a Screenshot used to A/B test
Key Takeaways:
A short retrospective of the takeaways I had of the experience
Documentation, Documentation, Documentation:
Thorough record-keeping wasn't a nice-to-have, QA relied on it directly, and stale docs turned into hours lost chasing bugs that were never really bugs.
Find your Wins:
Twelve weeks of unfamiliar tools is disorienting. Naming the small victories kept momentum going when the big picture felt out of reach.
Tools Mastery, and be fearless in your pursuit of answers:
Built a working understanding of the studio's internal toolset for gameplay systems. Learning sometimes requires you to break things and ask why. Proactively ask for help, and choosing the right medium to present findings, resolved problems faster than working it out alone ever did.
Design Economically
Small changes ripple. Learning to weigh a tweak against its systemic impact changed how I evaluate every design decision since.
On the Record
This internship was featured by Treyarch's own studio culture team in the Intern Chronicles series, an outside look at the same twelve weeks covered in this Portfolio Piece
