Level Design:
Spawncamping:
Inventory:
Much is said about inventory placement by Cliff Blesinski here. Though it deals specifically with Unreal Tournament, it does contain general logical principles. The main aspect of inventory placement is risk/incentive. The more skilled a player, the higher the risks they can comfortably take.
Exposure and cover can both increase the risk entailed in collecting an item. Obviously, exposure can open up many lines of fire and reduce cover. Heavy cover, on the other hand, may well be confining and serve to cut off potential escape routes. For instance, if a linear trench runs through the bottom of a large floor space, a player in the trench may be less exposed than a player standing above and looking in, but in a 1 on 1 match this situation suddenly gives a large advantage to the exposed person, because they know roughly where their target will be and can use the edge of the trench as cover while retaining the mobility to attack at will.
Desirability and amount of items will modify the popularity of locations and paths. In an empty map, players will generally stick to certain routes, and this can be adjusted by inventory placement, drawing players into and out of cover, and tempting them along more vulnerable paths. Consideration of inventory placement should also include the ease with which items can be attained. This can be grossly simplified into several categories:
- By the spawnpoint, reducing effort to almost nothing.
- On a path. This minimises effort by putting items in a line along a well travelled route, enabling players to keep moving and focus more on their immediate surroundings.
- Off a path, necessitating a detour that takes a bit more time and attention. This could be a minor deviation from a normal route, a new path, or even, in the case of something very desirable and risk-worthy, a dead end.
These simplifications basically refer to risk, incentive, and effort. Effort made to acquire something requires time and attention to be taken away from opponents, and thus increases risk. If you overstock the level with necessary items, players will be able to focus almost entirely on each other. The extreme end of this is in gametypes such as instagib, based on infinite ammo and one-shot one-kill. In such a gametype, players need not worry about inventory at all, just movement and targeting. However, varied inventory makes gameplay much richer by causing players to perceive and act on more complex capacities and potentials.
Environmental hazards are a popular way of pushing up the complexity of navigation and acquisition, and hence the risk factor too. Depending on positioning, nearby traffic, and just how much the hazard will slow navigation down, they can be used for an entire spectrum of risk from mild to impossible and infuriating.
Inventory placement is very much an influential part of the game environment, and worth putting some thought, effort, revision, and tweaking into. Basic interactions and navigation will occur even if your map is empty, but well balanced inventory placement vastly increases the complexity of gameplay. As designer, you are in charge of enabling players to equip themselves and offering them exchanges of safety for benefit.