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SyntherAugustus

Making an alternate Skill 5

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I was thinking about Nightmare and trying to make an alternative via ZDoom's Skill Definitions. I was thinking of a "Turbo" difficulty for the game I was designing and the basic ideas were...

-Enemies have more health.
-Enemies get random properties to make them more difficult and create a new idea of replay value for the map. For example, zombiemen that get a small amount of rocket resistant armor. Or another example, a hellknight that shoots more projectiles at once.
-Enemies are more aggressive.
-Ammo modifier to deal with tougher enemies (50% more might be okay).
-I'm mixed about the respawn idea since I would want the level to be cleared. Perhaps make enemies that respawn that don't count towards the ammo counter?


Map specific
-I was also thinking that perhaps via polyobjects, have the level open up some more and create new rooms. "The expanded hard edition!"
-Change the challenge of a specific room dramatically to something different. An easy example would be of Doom2 MAP01, adding revenants to the open area next to the exit.


What would your idea of a Skill 5 be?

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Definitely not raising monster health, then it would be cheap and unfun to fight them. Also, nothing too random, like random properties to enemies - I like games to be fair, and even really hard games can be made fair.

I'd combine -fast behaviour with the player taking double damage. And I'd get rid of monster respawn and double ammo. Perhaps I'd also disable infighting and disallow monsters taking damage from each other, but just maybe. And lost souls and spectres would gain an ability to stroll through walls (lost souls only in their non-attack state).

Regarding health pickups, they would either stay unaltered, or give 1.5x or even 2x more health than normally (health bottle 2%, stimpack 20%, medikit 35 or 40%). Removing health (in comparison to lower difficulties) would be too evil and also unfun, IMO. Armor bonuses would also give 2% or even more armor.

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I actually like the idea of adding random properties to enemies. Maybe not increased health, but random changes in speed and projectile count would be pretty interesting. I'd get a kick out of a chaingunner who randomly began speed shooting fireballs instead of bullets, although that could be a rare behavior.

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I don't know if it's possible, but giving monsters the ability to attack whilst moving might produce some interesting results.

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durian said:

I don't know if it's possible, but giving monsters the ability to attack whilst moving might produce some interesting results.

No problem in ZDoom. Somebody should create sprites of the monsters moving their legs while attacking with their hands, otherwise it would look weird. Preferably, the monster sprites would also rotate in their waist, to face the player while walking in a different direction, at least +-90 degrees. With some extra state jumps, it would be possible to make such a movement look naturally and make the monster always face the player at least +-90 degrees while walking.

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scifista42 said:

No problem in ZDoom. Somebody should create sprites of the monsters moving their legs while attacking with their hands, otherwise it would look weird.


This. All of the examples I've seen of ground enemies moving and shooting make them look like they have hoverskates or something.

edit: The only problem with the ground enemies doing it is that they would probably want an independent torso while doing so. Otherwise you'll be stuck defining when the monster is strafing one direction and then the other.

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Good idea. I never play nightmare.

Honestly, I think it could be as simple as starting with UV and making health and ammo pickups 25% smaller.

Mapwise, aren't all things placed per difficulty level? You could just put the keys somewhere much less convenient on skill 5. Or give a qualitatively different weapon layout or progression.

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BlackFish said:

This. All of the examples I've seen of ground enemies moving and shooting make them look like they have hoverskates or something.

Heh, I guess I'm used to it from multiplayer, I don't think it would bother me so much. Though great of course if someone were to create the relevant sprites (though, it might be easier just to draw hoverskates onto the existing ones).

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BlackFish said:

edit: The only problem with the ground enemies doing it is that they would probably want an independent torso while doing so. Otherwise you'll be stuck defining when the monster is strafing one direction and then the other.

As I said, I believe that a few extra sprites with different torso rotations, plus a few extra state jumps would solve this elegantly and smoothly, without needing separated legs + torso actors, which would be prone to glitching (or maybe not, if their position gets synchronized in every tic during the attack animation, which is possible).

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durian said:

Heh, I guess I'm used to it from multiplayer, I don't think it would bother me so much. Though great of course if someone were to create the relevant sprites (though, it might be easier just to draw hoverskates onto the existing ones).


It might be easier to design an enemy that has like, shoulder/back gyros or something similar to what some of the robots have in the Gundam series.

http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/gundam/images/0/0b/Svms-01.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20110213214749

You the just need one frame per direction of where the guy is "boosting" to when the enemy attacks.

edit: oh ok Scifista42 I see now.

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Maybe when monsters respawn, they should respawn with half of their normal health. When/if they are killed again, they respawn with half of their previous health, and so and so forth. But then maybe their respawn time should be shortened. In time, a Baron might go down with only a few chaingun hits, but then he'll get up faster than normal and continue to harass you. I don't know if it's possible, but I've always liked the idea or variations thereof.

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Clonehunter said:

Maybe when monsters respawn, they should respawn with half of their normal health. When/if they are killed again, they respawn with half of their previous health, and so and so forth. But then maybe their respawn time should be shortened. In time, a Baron might go down with only a few chaingun hits, but then he'll get up faster than normal and continue to harass you. I don't know if it's possible, but I've always liked the idea or variations thereof.

Interesting idea! I like it. I think it should be moddable into ZDoom: On skill 5, all monsters would be replaced with an alternate class, which is actually a spawner that spawns a monster and stays connected with this monster through master/target fields, while the spawner itself stays in place. Once the "child" is dead, the spawner would detect it, wait a while, and then spawn a different child with less health. As the respawning continues, the spawner can gradually go through a predefined list of child types with precalculated (less and less) health (and using shorter and shorter waiting cycles), until the "lowest" one with just a few hitpoints, which it will repeat spawning forever.

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Go the diablo way and make 'champion' alternate enemies randomly replace the normal ones.

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Inkie said:

Go the diablo way and make 'champion' alternate enemies randomly replace the normal ones.


This was kind of what I meant with the randomized enemies. However, if it were map specific, what I'd love to have is a situation similar to Diablo where

UV: You fight 3 hellknights
Skill 5: You fight 3 hellknights but you also get minions with random properties to deal with too. For example, the minions can't be killed until a hellknight is killed and they die with them.

The reason for map specific is because maps that are already congested (slaughtermaps being the extreme example) would not benefit from this at all.

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Aggressiveness 1.0
damagefactor 2.5

This is what I use when I want to make something as simple as KDITD make me think twice about rushing into a room of zombies.

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I have a little doubt, BlackFish.

Do you want to make Nightmare skill easier, slightly more difficult, or just have an "alternate skill" replacing the classic Nightmare (basically the same difficulty, but with a different approach)?

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Blackfish, Brutal Doom has a "Black Metal" difficulty that does just about everything you said you wanted, save for the ammo modifier that I'm aware of.

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Random, but here are some ideas for what you can call Skill 5. It's stupid, but Skill 5 just doesn't sound threatening enough.

Bloodsoaked Nightmare
Night Terror
Play Then Suddenly Die (or PTSD)
Hades
Taggart
Hell
Hellocaust
Tribulation
Demonizer (For my fellow Judas Priest fans)

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The only alternative to Nightmare mode vanilla-wise would be -fast mode whilst on UV.

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I can't think of a single thing in poor taste about the term "Hellocaust". I'm half German, so I think I'd know if something was too mean or not. Am I right?

Now, what would be horrible...is if four Jewish comedians started a stand up comedy tour called "The Hahahalocaust" that only had Jewish performers on their program.

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Avoozl said:

The only alternative to Nightmare mode vanilla-wise would be -fast mode whilst on UV.

Are you talking about disabling monster respawn via a DEHACKED edit that will make all monsters not affect kill percentage? Or did you mean a hypothetical hack of the engine with vanilla features only?

EDIT: I've got it now, you had just meant regular UV skill with -fast parameter.

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Adventures of Square has a skill 5 that is pretty good, it gives you less health, much more aggressive enemies, and a special enemy that doesn't appear on any other skill level.

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I remember the N64 port of Duke 3D allowed it's monsters to resurrect indefinitely as long as the corpses weren't gibbed. I always wanted to see that in Doom.

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I found that out when I played the Duke 64 mod for EDuke32, at first I thought it was cool but then I found it got tedious after time and was a waste of ammo.

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