Gameplay: enter the tourney

Right, gameplay. I went through some of the main aspects of gameplay in the previous piece of text, now for application. The first thing that you need to take into consideration, especially with a modern day FPS game like Unreal Tournament 2004, is that your layout shouldn't be less important than the way it looks. Therefore, creating a layout should primarily be done withOUT the visual appeal. This kind of strategy to build maps is used by hobbyist and professional companies alike, and can be called very efficient. The visual side of things is ALWAYS a less important aspect of a map than gameplay, and you'd do good to keep that in mind when you start mapping.
Getting a good layout means that you pay careful attention to several things. The first thing you should keep in mind is the scale. Unless you're purposefully making a 'mini-me' map (a map in which the player seems really small), you would be better off using a scale model for your map. With scale model I mean an object that represents the physical dimensions of a player. The next thing to do is to keep in account the movement for a certain game. In Unreal Tournament 2004, a player can double jump, dodge jump, wall dodge etc. These movements require some space to execute, but using these moves for useful shortcuts or trick jumps stimulates gameplay. These 2 things can really alter the way you look at map dimensions, for instance the distance between ledges can be done using a double jump plus walldodge from the left wall, or something like that. Rookies could play the map, but the more skilled players could play it too. Layout is probably THE most important aspect of gameplay. A good suggestion would be to have all sorts of players (skilled ones, trick jumpers, hardcore, mainstream, rookies) test your layout before you finalize it and move on to the next part. This goes for ALL gameplay related aspects by the way.
The next big step on gameplay implementation is item placement. This mostly goes for FPS type games, where you pick up weapons/health throughout a map, especially in multiplayer games. Now the placement for singleplayer is very different from the placement for multiplayer, and I will take a look at multiplayer this time. (again, having lots of people test it really helps tweaking out the right type of placement)
Does the word 'refined' ring any bells? If you've read the previous text, it should. Item placement/weapon placement is something that makes or breaks a map, just like the layout. You can have made the best layout in the world, without a decent item placement to back it up, it won't stand out. A few ground rules for item/weapon placement:

- Never centralize a lot of the pickups in one part of the map, this'll make that part very well travelled, while the other areas never get visited.
- Divide weapon types over the map, don't place hitscan (instant hit) weapons close to each other, don't place the more powerful weapons close to each other, don't place important pickups (like a big shield or damage amplifier) close to each other.
- Placing ammo pickups near the corresponding weapons promotes 'camping' (staying in one place, stake-out), placing ammo throughout the map stimulates movement through the map.
- Divide health/shield pickups over the map, but not in a way that fleeing from a firefight will always result in being healed, have defined locations for health.
- Place superpickups (the big shield/damage amplifier) in somewhat trickier places to get to or to get out from. Higher priority should be leveled with higher risk.

After finalizing your weapon/item placement, gameplay is almost covered. The last real issue is performance, but that will probably only become an issue when you start making your map look beautiful. As you may know, games draw their power from video cards and your CPU/RAM. The more visual stuff a game has to render, the more power it costs. Rendering ranges from the amount of textures onscreen to the complexity of collision for objects to lightsource radii/player lighting. Of course, toning down your settings often helps getting the framerates you want, but supporting players by making sure by not having to render more than the game needs to is a smarter thing to do.
For Unreal Tournament 2004, here's a few things that are considered to be the best ways to optimizing a map to it's fullest framerate potential:

- Zoning ; sectioning the map into zones makes the game only render a 'zone' when it's visible for the player, thus saving on rendering power. This is probably the most important way to optimize.
- Anti-Portals ; anti-portals are the alternative for when a map cannot be logically zoned, or if zoning just doesn't help enough. Placing an antiportal will make anything behind it from the player's view unrendered. Therefor, an antiportal should NEVER be visible for a player, place it under terrain or behind a wall.
- Cull distancing ; Cull distancing means that you put a limit to when an object is rendered, in terms of distance of the object to the player. When the defined distance is exceeded, the object will no longer be rendered.
- Collision ; making use of simple collision (non-complex forms) really helps the performance. Selfmade meshes/meshes with a large amount of surfaces/vertices will have very complex collision unless you apply simple collision.

That about covers the gameplay part of level design. Any comments or questions are appreciated, and feel free to correct me if you think I'm wrong. I'll have a chat about visual design for level design next time...