As some of our observant readers may have noticed we have a completely new design for COD4SOURCE. This will be a permanent change in an effort to make the site a bit easier to read and make it look better overall. I will be making some small tweaks to the design, and please let me know what you think of the new design and what changes you would make. Your feedback is important here and I will take all suggestions under advisement, and make changes as a result. For example, what do you think of the new header image? Is the color of links okay? Is the body text readable?
Also note that you can now register as an official site user, giving you an editable profile and making commenting faster and easier. We will be back to our usual Call of Duty 4 strategy posts tomorrow. In the next week or so we will also have a totally new feature up on the site to go along with our new design, so stay tuned for that.
Map Design isn’t just giving people a place to frag, it is an art form. In a good map players of all skill levels and play styles can interact and partake in a balanced game of Call of Duty 4, without the map ever getting boring or tedious. Map design is an exceedingly complex part of video game design, and I don’t pretend to be an expert in that area. What pains me though is when a perfectly good map is ruined, not because of the graphic design elements, not because of glitches in the code, but because of a fundamental misunderstanding in how the game play flows in a first person shooter .
The example of this poor map design is Creek. When it first came out with map pack containing three other maps it was greeted warmly, but after playing actually playing it a few times the opinions started to change. People complained that game play on the map was stagnant and the only way to get kills was to camp. Normally this would be discounted as typical gamer whining, but on Creek there was actually some truth to this accusation. The problem with Creek is there are only 3 points of travel, or choke points, noted in the image below (A is the path through the cave, B is the path over the mountain, and C is the wide opening next to the mountain).
This site does a lot about playing Call of Duty 4 and the strategy aspects of the game; but have you ever considered what goes into designing and creating such a great game? It took two years, a team of over one hundred people and millions of dollars to create Call of Duty 4. We take the huge amount effort required to create these games for granted, because all we have to do is pop a disk in and play. All that work is not for free though, video game companies and their employees reap huge profits from creating a successful title. For people like myself, who love video games, creating them for a living would be a dream job. Before you take that huge jump into getting a job in video games you have to consider many things, like applying to a video game design college.
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