Some lessons I learned from watching others play my map

One of the unanticipated benefits of having my recent map end up in the mainstream gaming media is that there's been a spate of playthroughs on Twitch and YouTube, meaning I've had plenty of opportunity to observe how more casual Doom players approach the level.

My map isn't the most straightforward thing: there's a bit of backtracking and there are switches that open other parts of the map, but I thought I'd made it simple enough to be foolproof. Turns out I rather underestimated just how much hand-holding some players need.

So while it has been immeasurably frustrating watching players curse out the map because they didn't notice the huge obvious door that opened behind them, it has also taught me some hard lessons about map designing. So here are some things I've learned about how to noob-proof your map.

1: People are unobservant.
Like really unobservant. They often fly through the map without really paying attention to what's around them, looking for the next obvious way forwards. Unless something is extremely obvious, they'll miss it.

Therefore if there's one specific place you need a player to go, make sure you really draw their attention there. Flickering lights, bright textures, an enemy standing right in front of it, whatever it takes. People won't go somewhere just because they haven't been there before.

2: People are forgetful.
If a person comes across two routes, takes one and it seems as though it was the right direction, they'll often forget about the other entirely. Even if they then get stuck, they won't immediately go back and check the other route.

Key doors are the exception to this. Players make a mental note when they reach a locked key door and have no issues with retracing their steps to find it.

3: People don't explore.
On a similar vein, people don't instinctively explore a map. Instead, they simply look for the way forward. If they find the way forwards, they don't bother checking out anywhere else they haven't been.

4: People's attention span doesn't extend beyond the room they're in.
Often people don't stop to consider the map as a whole, merely what they can see in-front of them. If you're implementing a wider gameplay idea that extends across a few rooms or the map as a whole, you have to make it extremely obvious what's happening or players will just get confused.

6: People won't recognize recurring architecture unless it's super obvious.
Say you have a door that needs four switches spread about the map, you may decide to make all the switches the same design so it's clear to the player they all do the same thing. See Point 2: they won't understand. They'll have forgotten all about what the other switches looked like (due to point 1). Modern games get around this by dialogue and text explaining what's happening, but vanilla Doom can't do this, so be aware it's not going to be obvious what's happening.

7: People miss subtle secrets.
I've watched players repeatedly Spacebar on an inert piece of decorative MARBFACE to no avail, and then walk straight past the adjacent cleverly misaligned texture that leads to the secret. There were secrets I thought were too obvious in my map that after a dozen playthroughs no-one has got. One player actually spotted one (a Soulsphere on the other side of a non-solid doublesided slimefall) and then just walked away from it (promptly forgetting about two seconds later, see point 2).

Basically however obvious you think a secret should be, make it more obvious, because people will miss it.

8: People will use crouch and jump, a lot.
Don't design a map presuming people won't jump, because they probably will. This mostly applies to waist high barriers - if someone can jump over it, they'll try. Either disable it entirely using MAPINFO (even if it's a vanilla map) or make every barrier too high to jump over.

I've had players miss out entire sections of the map by jumping over a barrier they shouldn't have done. One even said at the time "I know you can't jump in the original Doom, but screw that, this is the 21st century!" and merrily skipped the whole section. It mattered more to him to beat the level any way possible than to play it "properly".

While many people here prefer the pure experience of Doom, it's really surprised me just how many people instinctively play with a full modern set of gameplay features (and just how many people default to Brutal Doom too, however much it breaks the map).


Basically, the problem is people rush. They just plow forwards like it's Call of Duty. They don't stop and think about the map, they just go forwards, however they can. Doom is capable of some wonderful, large-scale ideas, but short of a ZDoom style "THIS IS WHAT YOU ARE MEANT TO BE DOING" on-screen message, you have to make it really, really obvious to the player what they should be thinking about beyond shooting the monsters and walking forwards. Otherwise you run the very real risk of people just not "getting" the map, and getting frustrated and annoyed without ever stopping to think about what they're doing.

I know your map has garnered attention outside the typical Doom places, as I've seen it pop up on a couple occasions on random places on the internet. Unfortunately this is going to get the attention of traditional non-Doom players as you pointed out. Basically you're watching the wrong people. Folks here would obviously respect the map and your decisions to not allow jumping for instance, and I'm glad you're aware of that. The fly-by-nighters and COD players aren't you target audience, they never will be nor should they be. Your map is well crafted and it's the real Doom players who know that and understand how it's to be played.
In short, please don't change what you're doing, don't cater to these clowns and keep listening to real feedback from those who've been playing the game consistently for 20 years or dedicated fans.

It's funny (and sad), what you listed here I imagine is the same sort of list that would appear on a design brief white-board at some current generation game developer's headquarters. :P

Bauul said:

Otherwise you run the very real risk of people just not "getting" the map, and getting frustrated and annoyed without ever stopping to think about what they're doing.

Cool, let them not "get" it.

I haven't played your map, but ive read some of your posts regarding the trouble you were having with the doom engine in trying to get your gargantuan map to work. I'm sorry I didn't say anything but when I read the obstacles you were going through, I was almost certain your map was going to be a mess.

I almost always encourage new mappers to start small. To most dummies, people read dumb snippets of facts like "40,000 Sectors!!" and "25,000 monsters!!" and "took over 4 years to make" and they assume that's the information they need to know if a map is good. Its more complex than that.

I dont blame you for feeling the way you do, considering how much time and energy you invested in this project, but with no prior releases (that i know of) and not a lot of active seeking of input from the community, i can't say it comes as much of a surprise to me that people had trouble enjoying your map. You're doing yourself a major disservice to blame the players for not understanding your work. I hope you'll consider making more maps in the future but if you want to enjoy the process, you'll have to practice with more bite sized work so that your maps will be easier for most people to play and comment on, and you'll get more specific feedback that you can work with.

I'd imagine that you're going to have a hard time getting good constructive criticism in a map this large, only because there's an excruciating amount of content to cover. Read dews 5 paragraph essays for all the tiny CTF maps in the 32in24 DOOT CTF. Imagine how much writing that's gonna be needed to cover your map. No one is gonna take the time to do that.

Its good that you learned something from this but you have to understand that the doom IWADs have always encouraged fast reckless gameplay, so the players shouldn't be considered to be at fault to applying what they have always been predisposed to doing in your map.

You must help people remember things. Doors or switches that require keys are easy to remember. Doors that open elsewhere should be more memorable, they should look really unique so when the player initially cannot open them, he will remember them and get back to them later after he has pressed a switch that he didn't immediately see what it affected.

Also using bars to block progress is pretty good because the player can see there is stuff he is blocked from, like a box of shells and a medikit.

Anything that is blocking mandatory progress must stand the FUCK out.

Also, when there is a branching path, one path could be marble stairs upwards and the other a rock corridor with torches, he will remember the choice hopefully and will want to explore the other path.

Some of your gripes are about retarded people who have no hope, like breaking the progression with jumping :D

You can also make the automap easier to read if you add pentagrams and other easily identifiable details and make the map branch out instead of cramming everything together like some mappers do. There is plenty of real estate people, use teleporters to unique locations too.

Just my thoughts as a player who regularly has to watch YT playthroughs of maps to see where the fuck to go lol

Use3D said:

In short, please don't change what you're doing, don't cater to these clowns and keep listening to real feedback from those who've been playing the game consistently for 20 years or dedicated fans.

I wasn't thinking I need to dumb the map down, more just the importance of not presuming the player knows what they should be doing. For example: there's a room at the end of the map where you enter through a lift, kill the boss, then a door at the back opens to another lift and away you go.

For symmetry, I made the back lift using a similar design to the entrance lift, as it'd look nice that way. However, what I didn't expect is because the two lifts looked somewhat the same, a good handful of players presumed they *were* the same, and just ran past the newly opened lift half a dozen times thinking it was the way they came in (even though the way they came in was still there in plain view). Simply turning around would have shown them that both doors in the room were open whereas before there only one was, but it didn't matter.

What I should have done was made the second lift visually distinctive (e.g. a different texture, flashing light or something) so it was obvious it was "new", and not relied on the players to grasp what had happened.

40oz said:

I haven't played your map, but ive read some of your posts regarding the trouble you were having with the doom engine in trying to get your gargantuan map to work. I'm sorry I didn't say anything but when I read the obstacles you were going through, I was almost certain your map was going to be a mess.

I wouldn't exactly call it "a mess"! Indeed the vast majority of feedback I've gotten has been extremely positive. It's just interesting seeing how something 90% of players get past fine can completely stump some people who are perhaps more used to having a level presented to them in a more linear fashion.

If you do have the chance to play it, I'd love some feedback on how I could have made things more obvious.

I had the same problem with the first map from my Retribution series.

Just like your map, it is really big and complicated, with lots of secrets and alternative paths.

A lot of Doom veterans found it to be easy to navigate but one returning Doom player (he hadn't played it in over 10 years) and one complete newbie had a lot of trouble in it. The returning player never finished it and quit not even halfway through while the newbie took one hour and a half to beat the level.

I kind of don't envy Id Software. It's really hard to make a map in which players new to old school design won't get lost but won't be trivial for vocal veterans like myself. We have the advantage that we only have to make maps for a very tiny slice of the gaming community.

The more casual doom players fall in love with linear brutal doom maps. I should know, my mapset is exactly that and non doom worlders eat it right up. Although come to think of it, so do I. But I'm a bit of an exception.

From the few youtube playthroughs of my wad people really do match your observations. It's kind of aggravating to watch. But you need to understand these people are mostly untrained and not interested in the depths of Doom mechanics - including the exploration long term thinking thought process.

You should be proud of your work getting special attention anyway.

I find that points 1, 2, & 3 apply to a large amount of people, even to Doom Veterans at times. I watch a lot of Doom youtube videos & twitch streams & I find that a lot of people just don't pay attention to what they are doing. For example Dime is one of the more well know Doom twitch streamers & has been playing Doom for many years, when he knows the map set he does well, but if he is playing a new release it becomes pretty annoying to watch, he will often forget to hit a switch, pickup a key, or miss an obvious path & then he'll just wander around for a bit trying to figure out what to do. He's not the only one to do this, I actually find this problem more common than not. You can also just tell that people are unobservant by just reading their comments on certain maps. How many times to people complain about getting lost in Downtown & other city maps, or that they're too confusing to navigate. I personally think that city maps are some of the most easy to navigate, just clear each building one at a time & remember what building has been cleared, but it seems as if a lot of people are incapable of remembering.

40oz said:

I haven't played your map, [...] I was almost certain your map was going to be a mess.

[...] i can't say it comes as much of a surprise to me that people had trouble enjoying your map. You're doing yourself a major disservice to blame the players for not understanding your work.

Its good that you learned something from this but you have to understand that the doom IWADs have always encouraged fast reckless gameplay, so the players shouldn't be considered to be at fault to applying what they have always been predisposed to doing in your map.

I have played Foursite and I have applied the recklessly stupid Doom fast gameplay to it. I had almost no problems navigating the map. Everything that occurred was obvious and I never got stuck. It also wasn't difficult to figure out that the eye-sore skull switches complete the section and once you activate them you should move on to the next one. I would be lying if I said that I never run back-and-forth, especially after the first skull switch, but a quick look at the automap reminded me that there's more to the level than the tiny section I'm in. People should use the automap more.

Bauul said:

One even said at the time "I know you can't jump in the original Doom, but screw that, this is the 21st century!" and merrily skipped the whole section.

Visions of Captain Picard facepalming to warp 9. That's why I always put MAPINFO in my vanilla maps and put "NoCrouch" and "NoJump" in them.

People aren't necessarily noobs or stupid because they get lost or stuck. There is a lot of information to take in when you first play a level, and not everybody is at the same level of experience or skill. It can be hard to fight monsters, manage your resources and navigate the level, especially in a large map.

Watching people play your level has given you insights into how to make the next level better.

Bauul said:

8: People will use crouch and jump, a lot.
Don't design a map presuming people won't jump, because they probably will. This mostly applies to waist high barriers - if someone can jump over it, they'll try. Either disable it entirely using MAPINFO (even if it's a vanilla map) or make every barrier too high to jump over.

IMO, it should be a common-sense knowledge that if a wad is being presented as vanilla / limit-removing / Boom-compatible, then the player is not supposed to jump and crouch in it, and if he does, he risks breaking the map. The player should know this and decide for himself whether to take the risk or not. Maybe he wants to for some reason (fun, curiosity, experiment, convenient saving time), then let him do so - potential "trouble" will be his business, not the mapper's fault - and the player should be able to recognize it (and if he doesn't and complains, it's his, the player's, fault). For this reason, I'm not a fan of enforcing no-jump/no-crouch via MAPINFO.

scifista42 said:

IMO, it should be a common-sense knowledge that if a wad is being presented as vanilla / limit-removing / Boom-compatible, then the player is not supposed to jump and crouch in it, and if he does, he risks breaking the map. [...] the player should be able to recognize it [...].

Unfortunately this is a big fallacy, for, in fact, people outside these forums does not know the meaning of those "standards" nor care to learn about it. They want to play the map in a way they find most enjoiable, and if the source port of their choise allow them to jump they WILL jump. I've played plenty of old wads myself freelooking, jumping and croucing and (big surprise!) it did not ruin the experience for me most of the time.

Btw great analisis Bauul, i think you've nailed plenty of them.

It's not really about dumbing the map down. Given your position of map author, it's gonna be really difficult (maybe) for you to get what I'm saying, but let me try:

First and foremost: You designed the map. You looked at each line, each sector, some of them hundreds of times, until you got every detail exactly the way you liked. But your players have never seen any of it. Nothing's obvious. We've seen maps where you have to wall-hump, as mandatory progression. We've seen every possible texture known to man, used for walls, doors, switches, etc. We've seen red blue lock doors. We've seen unmarked lock doors. We've seen water that burns you, and fire that feels like a cool breeze. Yeah, it may be obvious, but I don't know if you're a considerate mapper, or if you're a guy that puts a secret tunnel to a mandatory part of the map, without marking it in any way. I have no way to get inside your head, and know if you've led me through your map, or if you've placed every possible obstacle in my way to progress, just to see me squirm. I can try to get a sense of that during your map, but on one map? That's a tall order.

You even suggested that you were not sure if some secrets were too easy or not. You've seen the map so much, you have no way of being able to even answer that question in even a reasonably unbiased way. It's just what is.

Also, navigation is hard for some people. I am one of them. If I walk forward past 3 doors, when I turn around, I'll be lost, and won't know how to get back to where I started. Some people do not have this issue.

You mentioned making 4 switches have a special texture, so the player would know it was related. But vanilla Doom uses that red/green indicator w/slide switch all over the place, and those are not related. This requires more knowledge than you are transmitting with your single texture. I would have to see ALL of your map's textures, before realizing that there's a scheme at play. And, even if I saw what I thought was a scheme, I don't know if you, personally, would implement such a scheme, or if you just liked the switch texture.

Now, add on top of that, a sprawling area, with lots of options. I use dead bodies as breadcrumbs, and I can remember the room with 2 walkways, and realize that I missed one. First, I have to remember where that room is, which is difficult for me. And, in Doom, new areas tend to open up, which can distract from a fragile memory, adding a new way to explore.

I suggest playing someone else's big-ass map, to see if any of these effects happen to you. Maybe you're one of those gifted people with a photographic memory. That's great, but it leaves the rest of us behind. If I cannot easily find the places where I only took one of two paths, I do tend to get frustrated. I may know it's my fault, but that doesn't make it easier. Using the automap can help. Removing some of the thousand side fights and small, twisty rooms can also help, if that's your goal.

You have to decide what's more important to you: Your artistic vision, or player satisfaction and enjoyment. Maybe some degree of both. Remember, no one purposely played poorly. Youy just got a vision into how your map is truly experienced, by people that have never seen it before. Are they unobservant, or did you make a playfield that's so massively complicated that it's difficult for the layman to enjoy? Be honest. Cause this is as good and real as it gets.

scifista42 said:

... I'm not a fan of enforcing no-jump/no-crouch via MAPINFO.

Nothing wrong with turning them off by default, and making the player change a setting, or typing a console command to enable them, is there?