Call of Duty Vanguard

2021

Client : Activision, Sledgehammer Games

Director : Joe Salud, Sandy Liang Chang, Matt Abbott, Matt Bein, Daisuke Imai

Services : Concept Design / Environment Design / Illustration / Visual Idenity / Marketing Art

Deliverables : Art Direction / Illustration / Marketing Collateral
Industry : Video Games / Entertainment

Project thumbnail image and content copyright © Activision and Sledgehammer Games.

Concept_

Multiplayer Maps

Mutliplayer maps for the COD franchise is a key element in the game play experience. During my time on Call of Duty Vanguard, I touched a couple of these maps, both revisiting remastered maps such as Subpens from World at War as well as new maps like Champion Hill. Below are some mood painting and layout concepts for a small selection of the multiplayer map designs.

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Campaign Intro

COD Vanguard campaign starts off on a train heist in mission Phoenix. These concepts explore the mood and tone of this level, but also some key gameplay elements. The first being the games intro. I pitched the idea of having the game begin with the train car’s barn doors revealing the level and the mechanic of jumping in between the different cars.

Concept _

Battle of Stalingrad

Battle of Stalingrad was one of the first times in the campaign where you get to play as the Soviet sniper Polina Petrova. One of my largest contributions to this project is in this mission from designing the set pieces, level layouts, tone and some key action set piece moments.

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Collapsing Building

One of the unique and exciting moments in this mission is the runout section through the collapsing buildings. We had the idea that at some point towards the end of the sequence, the player would leap between the collapsing buildings and be knocked out from the rubble above. This also served as a solution on how to load in the next section of gameplay.

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Apartment Retraversal

This sequence which was dubbed “The Children of Men” hallways, was where the gameplay tone shifted from a run and gun action sequence to a stealth mission. Enemy soldiers are looking to capture any remaining civilians that survived the carpet bombing in the beginning of the mission. These hallway designs were used to tell that story as well as find clever ways to highlight the golden path for the player through the rubble.

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Load Screen Designs

Load screen designs communicate to the player what the map your about to load into is going to look like. To create these images, we used existing meshes in-engine to compose a couple high resolution shots of each map. Each one of those images were then taken into Photoshop to paintover and plus up the visual appearance through VFX, lighting, and material rendering. It was imperative to keep the integrity of the meshes and layout of the map during this process.

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Graphic Load Screens

As we were working in development on the load screen designs, I took it upon myself to pitch some more graphic treatments. The idea was to be able to swap in some of these as an option for certain maps. We also experimented with using screenshots with typographical treatments, but ended up reverting back to singular images as a more cost effective result.

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Calling Cards

Calling Cards (also referred to as Titles and Backgrounds) are a player customization option for the Playercard that appears in every Call of Duty game since COD: Modern Warfare 2. The concept team was provided a library of images from actor photoshoots to create these images.

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Marketing Art

Having a background in graphic design, I got approached to help design and pitch logomarks used in the game from In game emblems to the final logomark shipped with the game. These emblems were used on the calling cards and rankings, with the final game logo being a tweak of one of the emblem explorations.

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