Game Design Theory: Multiplayer Level Design

For budding game designers it often comes as a shock that there is more to designing games than coming up with a few ideas. The basic idea for a game is merely a seed that has to be developed to include detailed game mechanics and a complete schematic for how the game will actually work. You can learn a great deal about game design theory by playing the top games and considering the decisions the developers made about key aspects of how the game would play. There are plenty of books on the subject; there are even game design courses but the best way to learn about, and develop your game design knowledge, is to dive in and start making games.

This article will be the first in a series on game design theory and we’re going to start off with multiplayer map design for the first-person shooter genre. The FPS genre is extremely well supported by the modding community. And, it has a lively and demanding base of online players addicted to the kind of depth you can only enjoy by playing games with other real people. All of the top FPS series which support a large online community conform, to a large extent, to a particular set of rules about how to lay out FPS multiplayer maps.

In this article we’ll lay out and discuss some of those multiplayer map rules and provide a few examples to illustrate. There is an awful lot to game design theory and you’ll find many different opinions in the games development community. This article only scratches the surface and is intended as a general overview. Since so many modders start off by designing multiplayer maps for their favourite games this seems like an ideal beginning.

 All multiplayer maps need spawn points but there are many different ways of dealing with player respawn. Early problems with multiplayer maps included frequent spawn kills where players learned spawn points and camped nearby to kill off opponents before they could get going. There are few things more off putting than being killed before you’ve moved from your starting spot.

For team based games like Counter Strike players are often spawned at opposing ends of a map in a kind of safe zone. This works perfectly for Counter Strike because you never respawn, once you’re dead you are out of the round. The Call of Duty series developed a respawn system so it would spawn you close to your team mates but away from enemies and this works better in most game modes.

The map designer has to specify the location of the potential spawn points and where possible these should be in areas where the player spawning in has some cover. They also need to allow the player to instantly reorient themselves to the map so they shouldn’t spawn in facing a wall for example.

While the Counter Strike system can be used for multiplayer games where the players respawn after death, if the map is big this can involve a long and frustrating journey for the player to get back into the action. The best system is for the designer to place multiple spawn points and then the game code needs to check for enemy players and only spawn when there are none covering the spawn point. In team based games you want to spawn the player as close as possible to his team mates without placing him directly in the line of fire.