Work is moving along fine on the environments. I miss working on the fighters but that’s water under the bridge. The Desert, Iceberg, Power Plant, Blade Pit, Canyon, and City arenas are all in there "polish up" phase.

The game play works, the hazards work for the most part (meaning a few are still in progress), and the overall visual look of the content is in line with each other.

Continuity is harder to maintain than you may think.

One great new thing to talk about is the new hazard for the Iceberg. On the very precarious and slippery bridges there will be a pickup that you can use to call for a strike against an opponent from several battleships parked outside the fighting area that will launch cruise missiles at your enemy. It’s going to be alot of fun I think.

There are of course little things that need changed in many of them. A map here and there that I am re-using from another arena, or a map that I am using as a placeholder. These are things that cannot and do not affect game play at all so they can be corrected during the beta testing period.

I definitely need to improve the system for tracking assets and allocating assets from one aspect of the project to another.

This is a system that has to be hand built of course, to fit with the needs of all current and future artists, so allot of time and forethought needs to go into it. Rob recognized this allot early and we have put one foot in front of the other, in the right direction, but it seems I will need some time dedicated just to asset structure and we just can't afford that right now. This is the type of thing that can best be done at the start of the next phase or game in the list.

Whatever we work on next will have a conception phase where we try to work out all the bugs we can think of before we ever hit full development, and during this time there will be allot of document writing and editing so working out a better system then will fit in perfectly with the groove.

The Space Station Arena, and the Volcano Arena, are in testing phase. Meaning they are awaiting full play testing to make sure the ideas are solid and working. I am confident there will not be any serious reworking though. We put solid time into each one in planning.

Creating the finished content won’t take very long on them either because the concepts are pretty straightforward.

There are no abstract shapes involved either. Whatever more natural states are needed can be easily handled by math routines.

What I am most excited about are the team or sport- based levels that are essentially modifications of the current arenas for the team or sport based game play modes.

(Personally) I am taking a break during the entire month of November from my home hobbies, basically Java programming and working on my own 3-d models and game ideas at home. To work on some arena ideas at home. My hope is that I can complete a couple or more quickly enough that we can use them for the final game at no extra development cost because they were done on my dime. This would help the game and it won't hurt me any either. I take great pleasure in designing environments and since I will be working on these at home I may take more liberties with them than I would at the office.

We'll see what happens.

~K~