We have already talked about how to make Geometry more interesting so that your map is more fun to play on, while casually mentioning that such forging can add depth to your map. I now want to focus on depth itself and particularly intentionally making your map more interesting to play on by offering choices through the features you forge onto your map.
If you make a simple map and play Slayer on it, you will get bored after a short while, because all you do is run around trying to kill your adversary. That sort of Game Play doesn’t take a lot of thinking on anyone’s part. You just run around until you find someone, aim, and shoot. That is a shallow map.
It is when you add features to your map that offer players to make decisions - or force players to adapt - that you are adding depth to your map. You are making the Game Play on your map go beyond the basics of focusing on the primary objective itself (killing for Slayer, the flag for CTF, etc). You are giving players more to think about, more choices to make, more strategies to employ, all of which are to achieve advantages so that they can win the match. Choices make your map interesting, which translates to fun.
Depth is not documented, but more discovered or encountered, sometimes unintentionally, other times as a way to adapt or exploit. In so doing, it adds skill gap, if not through any other attribute, sheer knowledge.
The more depth a map adds to the game, the longer the life of that map. If the map is still presenting new depth years later, its life is renewed as a somewhat renewed map.
In this chapter I want to discuss various ways you can forge depth into your map. I want to talk about using Power Weapons, vehicles, Geometry, and Spawn Layout. But keep in mind these are just a short list of samples. Ultimately the breadth of this topic is well beyond the scope of this blog and well beyond my imagination. I only want to give enough breadth of ideas to get you started and to get you to see how limitless the possibilities can be.