Call of Duty: Wii Development

Overview

I joined Treyarch as a member of a small team dedicated to Wii development for Call of Duty: World at War. Later, I shipped Call of Duty Wii titles including Modern Warfare 1,  Black Ops 1 and Modern Warfare 3. Our team’s responsibility was to port the game from Xbox360 to Wii while minimizing any sacrifice to gameplay and graphics.

My daily routine during the development are:
– Identify and resolve problems in script/code without a debugger.
– Assist the art and animation team to identify and resolve any technical issues involving content. For example: missing bones, missing FX for assets, assets referencing a missing model.
– Create “lighter” versions of models/AI types/vehicle to save memory but without sacrificing the look and gameplay.
– Adapt different scripting structures between different internal studios.
– Maintain the memory budget by cleaning up any unused content from mainline such as animations, models and FX.
– Redesign the battle scenes with limited entity counts and keeping them as consistent to mainline development as possible given hardware constraints.
– Maintain performance by optimizing FX and animation without affecting gameplay and the look of the level.
– Work closely with artist and builder to make the level as detailed as possible with limited memory budge.
– Work under a tight deadline with small team.
– Continuously integrated content under-development for other platforms to the Wii project.
– Create script function to help optimize the level.
– Train new hire while project was under-development.