Proper pacing and item placement?

As I've been working on my first Doom 2 map, I have tried to wrap my head around map pacing and good item placement. So, are there any secrets to those?

This is what I've been able to figure out so far: Never place a difficult ambush right after another one. Leave some rooms without enemies to function as "breather spaces". Have health items placed some time after difficult encounters.

There are still a lot of things that I'm not sure of. How many ambushes can a map have before they become predictable/boring? How many overall health items should a map have? Should there be enough to be able to heal yourself from 25% to 100% at least twice? How frequently should the player be given weapons and ammo in relation to the enemy count?

This isn't my first time making a map for an FPS game (I've made two for Duke Nukem 3D), but so far I've pretty much placed items and enemies on where ever the heck I feel like they fit.

How many ambushes can a map have before they become predictable/boring? How many overall health items should a map have? Should there be enough to be able to heal yourself from 25% to 100% at least twice? How frequently should the player be given weapons and ammo in relation to the enemy count?

3, 14, yes, 5.

In my opinion, hard yet vague rules with fixed quantities tend to make for fairly boring maps. Gameplay in Doom is varied enough using exactly the same amount of monsters, health and weapon can result in widely different fights, due to architecture or placement.

...I'm tempted to make a few maps about just that, now.

I personally find non-ambush encounters to be quite boring, though too many ambushes of the same type are also boring. Basically, you want to have a mix of different type of battles to keep things interesting. Exactly what types of battles and how many really depends on the size and style of your map, there are no hard and fast figures.

How much health you need obviously depends on how many monsters you have, but not so obvious is that the ratio depends on how your monsters are placed, since Lanchester's square law comes into play. Lachester's square law, loosely stated, is that the strength of an army increases with the square of its size, when all units are able to attack simultaneously. It's easy to see why. Say you have two chaingunners in a room as compared to one chaingunner in a room. Not only does it take the player twice as long to kill the two chaingunners, but the two chaingunners are able to inflict twice as much damage per second to the player, so the player ends up taking four times as much damage in the time it take to kill both chaingunners. Note that if the chaingunners were in separate rooms, and unable to attack simultaneously, the player would still take twice as long to kill them, but would not take double the damage per second, so two chaingunners in separate rooms are only half as strong as two chaingunners in the same room.

It gets really complicated if you want to actually work out the numbers for each battle that's going to take place in your map, and I suggest you don't bother. Just add enough health so that you can complete the map fairly easily on UV; if you find parts of your map are particularly difficult, add more health; if there are parts that are way too easy, remove some health. Simple as that.

Ammo is much easier to figure out, since the amount of ammo you need doesn't depend on how much damage the monsters do, so it scales linearly: twice as many monsters means you need twice as much ammo to kill them. You can work out, based on how many hit points each monster has and how much damage each weapon does, exactly how much of each type of ammo you need. Generally, you should try to have about twice to three times as much ammo as necessary (to allow for missed shots), unless monster infighting or other such tricks are involved (don't count weapons and ammo in secret areas - it should always be possible to complete the map, killing as many monsters as possible, without finding any secrets). There's an old DOS utility called wadspy floating around somewhere that will analyse your map and calculate the ammo ratios automatically. Run it on the IWADs then see how your own maps compare.

Here is my view on this play test play test play test!

Your thinking about it all wrong, you need to play test your map over and over and judge each situation carefully ask yourself these questions.

Is the fight too hard or too easy?
Was I searching for ammo?
Was I searching for health?
Are there monsters infighting?
Are monsters getting bunched up in a single spot?
Are monsters waking up too early or too late?

Really, if you worry too much about this early you'll have a very slow mapping process and when completed could effectively change the game play dynamics of some of your stuff.

The best way is map everything out, including choreography (sector tags effects, doors, lifs etc) plan how you want the player to progress through the map but don't put much thought into monsters, items etc at this point.

Once your map is complete architecturally you'll want to start adding in your traps/monsters/items and fix any defects you might find.

Next start testing, then go and make changes then repeat this step until your happy. It could be 20 times, 10 times doesn't really matter in the end your map will be polished.

Just learn every element of the game(play) and try to figure out where to use each element for the best effect of giving player fun. Don't rush, first map is always where you learn, and you can't learn everything in a moment.

How many ambushes can a map have before they become predictable/boring?

Depends on the size and style of the map (slaughter, balanced, maze etc). Just don't give player enough free time to count them.

How many overall health items should a map have?

Depends on encounters, their quantity/continuity/difficulty, often even on the previous/next level of the wad.

How frequently should the player be given weapons and ammo in relation to the enemy count?

Enemy count? You can kill 1000 monsters with the fist but how fun would that be? Eh, eh? Always give enough ammo (except when you specifically design encounter for a melee fight). That's a rule of a thumb for any shooter game. However, that doesn't mean that every weapon should always have or receive max ammo.
Good way to test your map is to imagine what other player will think and do when they will be playing your map.

Hey bro, i have a question for ya, how's the DN3D mapping community these days?

Thanks for all the help guys! This has been really helpful :)

Harmata said:

Hey bro, i have a question for ya, how's the DN3D mapping community these days?

It's still alive, but not as potent as it used to be. Duke Nukem Repository's forums have been abandoned, and most of the remaining action moved to duke4.net forums.