Good Progress Today

We made some great progress today even though things started out slow and I was a little worried at first. I got to the game lab at noon, and no one else was there. Then I realized that I had forgotten to bring a flash drive with Americas Army on it, so I had to wait while it downloaded. Then, shortly after Elken and Sean arrived we had to leave the game lab. Apparently the game lab was reserved from 1 till 3. We then decided to go to the library and hash out some ideas. We spent a couple of hours going over the ideas we had and we came to a lot of conclusions. First of all, we didn't quite go with either Elkens idea or mine. Instead we ended up combining the two designs together. We took Elkens idea of two paths with a third objective in the market, and we used my concept of integrating the center hills into limiting the extra pathing we had. At 3 we got back to the game lab and we integrated the changes. We ran some tests on the map. At first we just walked around the map to get a feel for it, but the first round we had where we actually played the map was amazing. I could really feel the difference. I walked into the market area at the beginning of the match and a strange foreign experience came over me. I felt safe. Limiting the players options made the playing field far easier to understand. I didn't have to worry about enemies coming from a thousand directions. It still wasn't something that was legitimately "safe", but first person shooters arn't suppose to be safe. No, instead it had just become maneagable. I also found that combat in the market area is awesome. The high visibility high cover environment created tons of extremely long satisfying firefights. The only problem we still have with the map is that it looks like capture wins are going to be somewhat unlikely. The map favors Team West capturing the southern objective and Team East capturing the northern objective. Both teams then fight over the middle objective. This works out fine, but it usually doesn't get past this. Tonight Sean is going over the terrain and fixing the texturing. Tomorrow we will tackle the issue of the low rate of point capturing. We talked about it a lot today, and we have a lot of ideas about how to fix it. Wish us luck.