The goal: Make use of Zombie AI in Warzone in a way that blends with normal Warzone gameplay and ties into content from Modern Warfare Zombies.
While developing this Contract, I wanted to create a feeling of hunting and tracking down a dangerous threat while still being balanced for a Warzone match. This resulted in the Contract being multi-step where players find a corpse and then track what caused it to a deadly zombie nest with a zombie HVT.
Challenge - Zombie AI: There were some significant challenges in making sure the Zombie AI didn't interfere with the standard Warzone gameplay, including ensuring the AI stayed within the nest in a believable way and being easy enough for a player to take out the nest so they didn't spend too much time or ammo or be exposed to other players in the process.
Challenge - Footsteps: Through working very closely with the Engineering, Level Design, and QA teams, the footstep trail that leads players to their target ended up being fully dynamically generated each match depending on where the Contract started and ended and it was made into a system that has since been used for other quests.
The goal: Moderately complex puzzle with a novel solution, where players are well rewarded for their time, and it adds into the lore of the island. A sea of gold and valuables, wondrous, but locked away. Some kind of booby traps to overcome or escape that are protecting special treasure. Goonies or Indiana Jones-like, not tech-based.
This feature went through many iterations before landing on what is seen here, including much more complex puzzle box and escape room-like variations with pieces of the wall moving and revealing more clues. Ultimately I landed on a puzzle that is quite simple to execute but also tricky enough to understand that even players who do it every match need to pay attention.
Challenge - Tutorialization: The step of sitting on the Throne originally was not included in this feature, but through playtesting it was determined that an extra step before getting in the vault added intrigue and subtly taught the player part of how to open the vault - utilize torches to open a secret area.
Challenge - Player difficulty: A delicate balance needed to be reached for the Vault where it was difficult enough to open to be engaging but easy enough so multiple players would try to open it each match, causing a hot spot of player engagement. As a result, the rewards within the Vault also needed to match the effort it took to enter, including potentially fighting other squads and using up resources and equipment.
The goal: Simple feature that presents a formidable challenge to complete during a regular Warzone match.
I took a systemic approach to this feature so it could be implemented in any map and not be dependent on any other content or other devs. It was self-contained per skull and multiple skulls could be active at one time.
Challenge - Communicating progress: Players need to get 5 kills while holding the Cursed Skull to complete the quest, but the progress was tracked between players if the skull was ever dropped. This presented a challenge of how to communicate the progress previously made. In the end, I gave the skull "ammo" that decremented with each kill so a player could look in their inventory to see how many kills they still needed to get.
