As a paintball field we pride our self on 3 major things: community, experience, and field quality. Today we will go into some of the history, process, and decision making that goes into why we build fields the way we do.

In the beginning, OSG Paintball started with two giant fields. Halo Village and Sherwood Forest (Big Woods) were one field simply called “The Village”. The other field was our Castle field which was home to a three story, 360* structure. The next field we built was on the area you all now know as Western Town. It was a stacked log “speedball” field. From there, we went through many iterations of speedball fields where Urban Town and the overflow parking lot is. Then we added Western Town, Urban Town, Hamburger Hill, Fire Base Kilo (now Area 51 & First Contact), Small Woods, Pirate Cove, The LZ, and Star Wars (not in that order). From two fields to twelve. The rest is history.

Themed fields are our specialty. Multi level, multi stage, immersive environments are what we strive to create.  We aim to recreate the forts we built as kids, the video games we play in our youth, and the movies we watch as adults. Paintball fields should be challenging yet forgiving, adrenaline pumping yet provide a level of safety, and stressful yet rewarding. Our fields are built with love and tested by our employees to make sure the finished project is everything described above.

Our fields are not simply made to look good in pictures and video, they are planned out from start point to start point. We use the lay of the land to create shooting, running, and lanes of movement.  “The first thing I do when I am going to build a field is walk the terrain…then establish start points based on the theme. I start with the main building placement first and then build out from the center” says Kevin Oakes, the man responsible for building our fields over the last 20 years. “I also determine the size and height of a bunker based on the terrain and shooting lanes from other bunkers in the immediate area. Another vital aspect of field design is analyzing movement from bunker to bunker. Placement of bunkers should be a reasonable distance forward and side to side.”

As marker technology and ROF have advanced, so have our fields. Those long runs of the past are now almost impossible to make. Over the years we have built structures and bunkers closer together to accommodate the changes in marker tech and playing style.

Once a field is built, it’s about testing it to make sure it plays as well as it looks. Our employees will play games on repeat trying different game types and starting points. We search for field flow, dangerous “lanes”, potential weak points that can be exploited, and bunkers/locations that are too “powerful”.  From there we adjust to make sure the field plays the way we want it.

Once the employee testing phase is complete, we let our season pass holders get first dibs at playing it. Listening to their feedback is vital because sometimes no amount of employee testing can predict how these fields are played by the masses. Once this phase complete, it’s time to open to the public!

The last piece of testing comes in a form we don’t discuss much. We will use some of our better players and staff to try and find and exploit gaps in field design. What are we talking about? It’s best described with an example:

Eight or so years ago one of our employees found a way to run Western Town in under two minutes  (normally just north of 1 minute) with two players from the hotel side. This exploited a big gap in the Western Town design that no one would have ever noticed during the initial testing process. A few of our season pass holders ended up picking up and replicating this move which turned Western Town into a one sided affair. There was no way to counter it without changes to the field so we added a large bunker on the church/woods back corner aptly named “stick bunker” and a couple extra buildings on lookers right of the church. This is one example of how our fields are always evolving and changing based on player habits.

Our fields are not just designed to run as individual fields. We also run multi-field big games during BYOP and full field scenario games. When we build new fields, we design them to play well when the boundaries are dropped between fields. On top of this, we analyze scenario game player movements and areas that tend to cause stalemates. We will add bunkers and structures to try and encourage movement and make it easier for players to progress around the field.

The final piece of the puzzle is field maintenance. We have a field maintenance crew that maintains our fields every week to keep everything clean and safe. We use the hashtag #alwaysbuilding because that’s what we do. We are always building. Always improving. Always progressing. Any given weekend you will find new bunkers, more brush clearing, groomed walk ways, and so much more. This is essential at any paintball park, and something we do on a weekly basis. In fact, we have logged our field updates and maintenance every year since 2014. Want to check out the 2020 Field Maintenance Log and read the previous years’ updates? Click the button below!

2020 Field Maintenance

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