Testing Difficulty

[magicsofa]

When I am making maps, I generally play through it many times as each area is created. This coincides with the fact that I don't map in the layout-detail-objects progression. I will create the beginning area complete with monsters and detail, test it, and continue. This means by the time I get to the end I have played through the first parts about a hundred times.

What I want to discuss is difficulty settings and how people playtest for them. I know some people get other players to test their maps, which is a wonderful thing which I sometimes forget to do :)

However, when I start implementing difficulty settings (which is always after the map is fully complete or 95% complete for UV), I will try to play through on skills 1, 2, and 3 to make sure the balances are correct. The issue is that after knowing the map inside and out, and being able to beat it on UV, playing on a lower difficulty does not reflect what a player of that skill might do. So, I have a little trick to simulate what it would be like: I play using keyboard only, which I am not as good at, and on ITYTD or NTR I will only use the arrow keys (no strafing). Furthermore I purposely don't try as hard to dodge projectiles. This is actually kind of fun because on the easiest setting I get to run and shoot wildly, wasting ammo and health all the time, as a gauge of "okay, if some 10 year old who sucks at doom played this, would they have fun? and/or would the ammo and health be balanced?"

Have you mappers ever employed such a technique, or other techniques to "demote" your skill level so you can see how your map plays for the less hardcore players? What about the other way around: Do you make maps that are good for you on HMP but really challenging on UV, and if so do you do anything during testing to give yourself a little boost?

[gggmork]

It made sense for id to tediously create separate difficulty settings because they were making a commercial game to appeal to a wide spectrum of people. I almost always only implement UV for my maps because I'm not trying to maximize profit by selling to as wide an audience as possible, creating skill setting other than my own is mostly guesswork and its tedious. If someone doesn't like the difficulty in my map they can choose from a gazillion other wads.
For testing I generally try to iron out awkward stuff (and too low or high difficulty for my tastes gets lumped with that) while playing over and over. Like 'this berserk sucks here because it auto switches to fists' or 'more/less health/ammo/etc here' etc. If making a longer level, which I rarely do, you can probably be more modular. Like make multiple smaller areas to test independently, then later attach them all together, rather than testing from the complete start tons of times.

[magicsofa]

You are right that the audience is going to be generally more accustomed to playing on high difficulty, and personally I used to not implement difficulty settings. It wasn't until getting involved with community projects and the like that people asked me to do so. It only takes a couple of minutes, most of the work of difficulty settings is just removing the "medium" and "easy" flag from some of the monsters/items and then removing the "easy" flag from some more of the monsters/items. Of course, you have to think a little about which monsters and items you are removing, but if your map is already balanced enough it isn't too hard.

Plus, I would rather spend that five minutes and then do a quick playthrough on easy setting pretending to be a little kid, than force a player who is overwhelmed by a huge monster count to skip my map.

[RjY]

If you can't be bothered to do difficulty settings properly - and I don't blame you, it triples the playtesting time - just shove in a load of extra spheres and other large bonuses on lower skills. Especially invulnerabilities. It takes hardly any effort at all!

[gggmork]

I still want to make a wad where a ton of invulnerabilities spell out "YOU SUCK AT DOOM!" on the floor and are tagged only for the non-uv skills, heh heh... no just one heh... Heh.

[magicsofa]

It's funny how invulnerability spheres barely seem to appear in people's levels these days...I think they can be totally fun :)

[myk]

magicsofa said:
However, when I start implementing difficulty settings (which is always after the map is fully complete or 95% complete for UV), I will try to play through on skills 1, 2, and 3 to make sure the balances are correct. The issue is that after knowing the map inside and out, and being able to beat it on UV, playing on a lower difficulty does not reflect what a player of that skill might do. So, I have a little trick to simulate what it would be like: I play using keyboard only, which I am not as good at, and on ITYTD or NTR I will only use the arrow keys (no strafing). Furthermore I purposely don't try as hard to dodge projectiles. This is actually kind of fun because on the easiest setting I get to run and shoot wildly, wasting ammo and health all the time, as a gauge of "okay, if some 10 year old who sucks at doom played this, would they have fun? and/or would the ammo and health be balanced?"

Have you mappers ever employed such a technique, or other techniques to "demote" your skill level so you can see how your map plays for the less hardcore players? What about the other way around: Do you make maps that are good for you on HMP but really challenging on UV, and if so do you do anything during testing to give yourself a little boost?

The best way to go is to find a few people of different skill capabilities and ask them to play the levels and send you feedback, demos and videos. The latter two are more objective than feedback, directly showing you how the player interacts with the maps.

I think good testing on the three basic skill settings is pretty important, but in addition the text file for the level set should have a way to describe the difficulty on each skill level so that players trying the WAD may choose a suitable setting. See the Alien Vendetta text file for an example where this is attempted.