Kaizo doom

[Walter confetti]

nice map!

[haschischtasche]

Sorry for bumping this thread.
So I searched for Kaizo Doom a few days ago, didn't really find anything except for people asking if there was Kaizo Doom, so I started working on a KaizoDoom wad of my own.
Searched again today and suddenly found this here, which is something substantially different from what I was doing. I mean this is only one level, so it is somewhat hard to critique, but I don't think it captures the experience of the three original Kaizo Mario hacks.
Kaizo Mario has this reputation of being unfair for unfairness sake, because of things like invisible blocks, even though that's not the reason why people enjoy playing it. It is the reason why people like watching someone play it for the first time. But the great appeal of Kaizo Mario for players was always the execution required from players - you had to play close to perfect. Yes, Kaizo Mario sometimes threw things you couldn't expect at you, like the invisible blocks I mentioned, and they do have a point. Most of them immediately follow a hard passage, so they train you to play better and more consistently by forcing a restart. Besides that they usually force you to think outside the box. If you see an easy jump, expect that you need to do something else to get past the gap, because there is probably an invisible block there. But the thing is that Super Mario World can also be played very consistently. Doom on the other hand has a lot of RNG in it.
Your map starts of with a bunch of hitscanners that block you after the vile jump, and that is just incredibly inconsistent. A quarter of the time I take considerable amounts of extra damage getting through those, half of the time they block me in a way that makes me eat a second archvile blast after I hit the teleporter and a quarter of the time it works out, even though my execution is close to identical every single time.
That's not encouraging me to play better, that is just frustrating. Yeah, it's also hard, but it doesn't feel like it gives me a fair chance with consistent results.

The approach I took is quite different:
First of, the first level is basically a copy of the first Kaizo Mario level (the textbox prequel screen thingy) with a crusher that is seemingly impossible to get through: https://twitter.com/haschischtasche/status/702218640653950976

The second level is a remix of the second Doom2 level (no screenshots or videos atm though) which just makes it considerably harder, because I think it is a neat idea and it is not uncommon in Kaizo Mario to use parts of actual levels to play with player expectations (see switch palaces). Uses very few hitscanners though, because it also has a very small amount of health pickups, and as I said, players beating levels needs to be a reward for execution, not a reward for doing multiple attempts in order to get the right RNG.

The third level is a Cyberdemon fight in a small room with very small amounts of space to dodge and just enough firepower to kill him. Here are my first attempts at beating that: https://youtu.be/lAIr22h0KAk
To be clear here, you can get screwed by bad RNG if he decides to start shooting rockets just as you get teleported, because you can't dodge those. But this is all work in progress and the issue can easily be fixed by extending the notches with the keys you get teleported into.

And currently I am working on level number four, which currently looks like this: https://youtu.be/KUdW3K_xrX4

As I said, it's all work in progress and it is very early. Just wanted to give you a little bit of feedback and tell you why I think your approach is not a right one for a potential KaizoDoom. Don't get me wrong, your map has it's appeal and there's people right here who said they enjoyed it. But a lot of people also mentioned things similar to my opinion, in that the RNG heavy nature of Doom requires a different approach with much more thought through levels. :)

[Salt-Man Z]

I wonder if it's possible to seed the RNG from within a PWAD, and therefore make it truly a game of skill and timing?

[haschischtasche]

Salt-Man Z said:

I wonder if it's possible to seed the RNG from within a PWAD, and therefore make it truly a game of skill and timing?

Nope, the Doom RNG uses a fixed table with random distribution that gets advanced with every call. If you restart the whole game, you (should) get the same distribution in vanilla every time though (if you play exactly the same way).

[Salt-Man Z]

haschischtasche said:

Nope, the Doom RNG uses a fixed table with random distribution that gets advanced with every call. If you restart the whole game, you (should) get the same distribution in vanilla every time though (if you play exactly the same way).

Yeah, I just read up on the RNG on the wiki. So in theory you could do it, but in reality it's probably not very practical.

[haschischtasche]

Salt-Man Z said:

Yeah, I just read up on the RNG on the wiki. So in theory you could do it, but in reality it's probably not very practical.

It's also pretty unlikely that the current index gets saved in savegames, which would means that if you mess up once, you gotta start from the very beginning.
It's much smarter to just work around the RNG and use it as a means to introduce some dynamism into the gameflow. :)