My third mini article about level building.

Edges

An Edge is where a Place or Path ends and another Place or a Path begins. An Edge is a doorway, a drop-off, a corner, a shield door, a hill that obscures sight to a neighboring Place. This is where the callout for your location changes, when you are no longer in the base, but behind the base. When you are not on the cliff, but below the cliff. No longer in the dish, but beside the dish. Not on the ramp, but on the bottom floor.

Edges naturally exist, you almost never have to put thought into creating an Edge, because if you have and number of Places or Paths, then you already have Edges. So then why even bother talking about them? It's useful to consider Edges when thinking about how a map will be played. For instance, when a player crosses an Edge, he should be in a different situation and should have different options. On Hemorrhage, the big hill in the middle of the map is an Edge between the two halves of the map. You don't have to worry much about anyone on the other side of the Edge, and at any point in the game, threats will be different on each side of the Edge. Think about when there is one Wraith on Hemorrhage. When it crosses the Edge, things change.

Once you’ve determined where your Edges are, then you can more easily flesh out what your battlefields (Places) will play like. For the most part, battles will take place within the same Place. Of course there are exceptions (like when there's a long sight line for a sniper that leads way down a long hallway and into another room), but generally players will tend to fight with other players in the same Place. Knowing this, you can more easily decide what weapons to make available, and what types of cover should be where.

Another thing that should be taken into consideration with Edges is how you can use them to introduce a new Place. When a player comes around a corner (which is an Edge), the designer has complete control over what is immediately visible. Use these "reveals" to your advantage. Whatever information you want to convey to the player about a Place is best done when the player is coming through an Edge to get there.

My second mini article about level building.

Places and Paths

A Place is where actions happen. It’s a battlefield. Some people who design maps call it a "node." Often times these coincide closely with Landmarks. In Pinnacle, the dish is both a landmark and a Place. On Zanzibar in Halo 3, Generators meant both a landmark and a Place. Places are not always landmarks, though. Think about Asylum. There are not a whole lot of Landmarks in Asylum, but there are tons of great Places for battles. Places encourage people to stay put and fight. On the other hand, Paths encourage people to move.

Paths are walkways that connect important locations (Places). These are your bridges, hallways, paths through the forest of trees, ramps, mancannons, openings in cover, etc. This is where you are if you are not in a Place.

A person on a Path will continue on that Path, because by nature, people don’t want to stop on a Path. In fact, upon reaching the end of a Path, a person will tend to continue in the same direction he was moving when on the Path. Use this to your advantage. Do not put important places right around the corner of where a Path ends, people won’t look there. That’s why campers (like me) camp right at the end of Paths. At the end of your Paths, have an important location easily visible. If you do this, you have a lot of power over the way people navigate your map.

Don’t have Paths to nowhere. This will make players hate you. This is like telling a joke but leaving off the punchline. Paths should all lead somewhere worth going. If you have a Path that leads to a dead end alley, then there better be the coolest thing in the world at the end to make up for all the backtracking the player is about to have to do.

You can control the cadence of your map by controlling the ratio and size of your Paths and Places. When you watch a well made movie, it has a certain pace carefully crafted to help create the experience the filmmaker wanted. Action movies have faster cuts and shorter periods of downtime, while dramas can stay in the same scene for a while, building things up more slowly. Map builders have a similar type of control.

Short Paths with small Places will make the pace faster, and more hectic. Too much of this will make a player feel like he has little control, though. Long Paths and long Places make the game feel more epic with slower, bigger battles. Too much of this will eventually wear on a player, making him bored. Too much of any one thing will make a player lose interest. Mix things up. Maybe have a medium Path to a small Place, that has a short Path to a bigger Place. Mixing it up well will make players say things like, “There’s a good balance of short and long range gameplay going on in this map.”

"But wait," you may be saying. "Hemorrhage doesn't have any Paths, and it plays great [sic]."

To which I respond, "Yes."

Big outdoor maps usually have a lot of Places with few Paths. What they do have, though, is Edges. That's coming up next.