MEDAL OF HONOR: ALLIED
ASSAULT - SPEARHEAD (Published by EA Games)
PC
Medal
of Honor: Spearhead, was
the first expansion pack to the best-selling Allied Assault on PC, and it was the first project I worked on when
I moved out to California and joined EALA in May of 2002. It was initially
started by the original Allied Assault
team (who went on to form Infinity Ward and created the Call of Duty series) but was expanded in scope and shipped by an
in-house team that EA assembled at their Bel Air
studio (formerly Dreamworks Interactive).The game was built with the Quake III Engine and Radiant level editor,
and gameplay was implemented with a very C-like scripting language developed by
Ritual, creators of the PC action game, Heavy
Metal FAKK 2.I was initially
responsible for one single player level but took on a second campaign mission,
optimized geometry for numerous multiplayer levels, and built a multiplayer
level completely from scratch.My
computer science background was crucial for rapidly learning the Ritual
scripting toolset and bringing other designers up to speed.
MALTA (Multiplayer Level)
Malta was the multiplayer level I built for Spearhead.Although it was
originally intended to ship with the game out of the box, it was ultimately
decided to release it exclusively online as part of the Spearhead pre-release demo
to help build interest amongst fans. During development, almost everyone on the
design team was building multiplayer levels in their spare cycles, but my
friend (who happened to be Maltese) was building this really cool looking map
called Druckhammern.In the spirit of
some friendly competition, I did some research and learned about this tiny
British colony in the Mediterranean Sea that served as a crucial Allied naval base during WWII
(and was bombed to hell by the Germans). I really wanted to capture some of the
flavor of the beautiful Mediterranean architectural style, as well as build
something that was grand in scope and really showcased everything I had learned
about level design and aesthetics at Irrational.I feel Malta strongly represents my talent
and abilities as a level designer.Please check out the screenshots here or follow the link below to
download and install the Spearhead
demo so you can walk around it yourself.
This second batch of screenshots are from
one of the two Ardennes missions that I worked on as part of the single player
campaign.One of the Infinity Ward
designers had already done an initial pass on the terrain and vegetation as
well as some of the gameplay scripting when I came on the project and was
assigned to this level.I built off of
this foundation by adding the fuel depot and farmhouse you see in the screenshots
here. My main contributions to this level were the overall design, geometry
construction, optimization, as well as the majority of the gameplay scripting,
AI placement and tuning. This level was considered by many on the development
team to be one of the best in the game, and the source map and script were
subsequently included with the Spearhead
SDK a few months after the game shipped.
Here’s a YouTube video playthrough of
the Ardennes mission.
You can follow the link below to
download the SDK, which includes the Radiant level editor that will allow you
to poke around the map file and see how it was made.
MEDAL OF HONOR: ALLIED
ASSAULT - SPEARHEAD (Published by EA Games)