How to make levels harder without just adding more/harder enemies?

[Danlex]

Play on Nightmare!

[Grain of Salt]

Stop strafing :0)

[Maes]

6 hours ago, Girl of Satan said:

Stop strafing :0)

 

More generally, try playing with an unfamiliar and/or less efficient control scheme. You'll be surprised at how much of your "bite" and "edge" you will lose that way, and how you will never completely get all of it back, until you switch to a more efficient *cough*keyboard + mouse*cough* one. Then you will feel like you just went through 10 years of physiotherapy ;-)

[Pegleg]

1 hour ago, Maes said:

 

More generally, try playing with an unfamiliar and/or less efficient control scheme. You'll be surprised at how much of your "bite" and "edge" you will lose that way, and how you will never completely get all of it back, until you switch to a more efficient *cough*keyboard + mouse*cough* one. Then you will feel like you just went through 10 years of physiotherapy ;-)

I think the discussions about changing the control settings or not strafing or playing on a higher difficulty level are getting away from the

intent of the OP. The question was how to make levels harder without resorting to using more monsters or harder monsters (e.g., increasing the number of hell knights from 3 to 10 or replacing shotgunners and imps with chaingunners and revenants).

 

That led to the discussions of monster placement/usage, ammo starvation, limiting/removing armor, lighting schemes, platforming, crushers, damaging floors, etc. The key is that these were all things that the mapper could do within the game that would affect how the player played the level.

 

These other suggestions about control schemes and difficulty levels are things that the player can do to increase the challenge that he/she experiences playing the level. They are certainly valid ways to increase the challenge of a level, and shouldn't be discounted by players, but I think those suggestions are not in line with the original intent of thread.

 

Of course, if the mapper could force a port to disable strafing and/or change the controls upon loading the map, I think that would only serve to irritate players. I think many of them would simply choose not to play the map instead of accepting it as a fun and innovative way to challenge themselves.

[Maes]

The mapper can still influence the controls of the player indirectly by forcing them e.g. to walk on perilous catwalks, constraining their movements with damaging floors etc. which can be every bit as crippling as a bad/inefficient control scheme. A more subtle variant of this is having maps designed for jumping controls played on ports with no jumping. Some may appreciate the challenge (if they even knew what the map originally was designed for), others may think it's simply broken. On the opposite end of this spectrum, are maps that actually rely on the player using advanced movement techniques all the time (e.g. mandatory SR50 jumps), becoming severely unenjoyable or unwinnable otherwise.

 

In any case,  no matter how much someone bitches/cripples a map, there will always be niches of players who actually enjoy and thrive with the extra challenge.

[Pure Hellspawn]

Set player max health to 50. Only green armor. Revenants and av's become 1 hit KO potential.

[mgr_inz_rafal]

Cybbies.

More cybbies.

 

Don't care about "complicated" ways of increasing difficulty.

 

Drop cybbies.

More cybbies.

[Zulk RS]

I am, by no means, in a position to talk about how to make fun maps but here's what I've found the most fun yet difficult parts in my maps. I would list actually good maps but I don't really chant "MAKE IT FUN! MAKE IT FUN! MAKE IT FUN!" over and over again when I play those so it becomes hard for me to pay attention to what exactly I found so fun about those maps or sections of maps.

 

Also, all of these assume that the player will crouch, jump and use mouse-look/free-look because I map in UDMF:

 

• Narrow passageways with a single baron or hell knight. It becomes very hard but not impossible to dodge fireballs by strafing. However, you can dodge them by crouching at the perfect time so that the current fire ball flies over your head but not long enough so that the Baron actually target's your lower position with its next fireball.
• Platforming over insta-death pits but it is very lenient. You can about 16-32 extra room on the platform your jumping to so that even if your take-off is a bit off, you'll still manage to land where you need to as long as you actually do a running jump and don't aim way off course.
• Height variation.
• (This one is less fun but more challenging) Place 2-3 mid-tier, normally trivial monsters in a tight enough space. Maybe have 4 barons in a 1024x1024 room but place a 256x256 (maybe larger) pillar in the middle. It helps a lot if the room and the pillar are not simple squares or circles. A Plus shaped arena and a plus shaped pillar can work.

 

[baja blast rd.]

22 minutes ago, Zulk RS said:

However, you can dodge them by crouching

 

:D

 

One can dodge fireballs in a narrow hallway (64-wide or tighter) by hugging a side and moving after the fireball is released. 

[Maes]

1 hour ago, mgr_inz_rafal said:

Cybbies.

More cybbies.

 

Don't care about "complicated" ways of increasing difficulty.

 

Drop cybbies.

More cybbies.

There's actually an entire megawad on ZDaemon that thrives on this theme: the infamous [LA] Spacestation maps. Initially their selling point was extreme amounts of Archviles, but eventually players got used to them so they had to up the ante to all-cyberdemon maps. 500 Archviles is now considered something your grandma could do solo, and even 500 cybies (admittedly, reduced-health ones) are deemed conquerable. I guess the next step will be 1000 or full-health cybies, and if that's not enough, double-health ones.

 

Then again people enjoy playing Chillax, another megawad, initially conceived for use with the SUPRWEP8.DEH patch and infinite ammo, just with regular weapons and finite ammo. Non-respawning, if you're even more extreme.

[cq75]

I'll list a few of the ideas I've had over the years, most of them have caveats but hopefully it'll help.

 

- One way you can increase difficulty is to focus on how much distance, on average, is allowed between the player and the monsters during a fight. If you shape the rooms and place the enemies in a way that the distance between enemies when fighting is generally rather short (I'd guess something like 3-5 feet) almost any fight will become very hard, even just a handful of imps (depending on what weapons / ammo you have).

 

The only downside of this sort of difficulty is that can make the game more RNG based, because the monster movements are not deterministic (case in point, my old wad, hardweps). The RNG aspect might be unique to Doom (Serious Sam might pull this sort of thing off better), I wish I knew a way to work around it.

 

- As others have mentioned, removing armor makes the game less forgiving, and so does reducing ammo. Reducing health pickups does too, though be careful -- some stressful running around at 3 health can be fun, but if the player spends the whole game being one hidden chaingunner shot away from death they'll probably quit, so I'd recommend having at least some health in the map.

 

- In addition to that, you could also put the ammo that a player needs to finish a fight in the room where the monsters are coming from (so that they are forced to dash their way in (alerting even more monsters), dash out, and repeat while they are still trying to fight their way out of the first horde (be sure the ammo in the next room is very clearly visible, to avoid the need for players to memorize the map).

 

This trick can make the players feel like they are surrounded and it will make it so that there is no easy way to hang back and snipe monsters, and it also defeats the old "Wolf3D Cheese" tactics of running into a room, shooting, closing the door, and then waiting for the monsters to walk up.

 

The downside of ammo starvation in general is that the game could quickly become almost impossible with a slight aiming error, and monster paths and damage aren't deterministic so it also makes it more RNG based as well. I recommend leaving at least something like 1 or 2 additional clips / shells / rockets to account for random damage.

 

- Having the player rely on hard to use weapons like the RL instead of a shotgun/SSG/Chaingun as a primary weapon at close range has its benefits, but it assumes that the player can predict the movement of monsters, in some cases this can work but you have to be reasonable with it and avoid assuming that monsters will move in some exact way.

 

- Custom / tweaked monsters can do a lot. With even a minor tweak like having monsters not drop ammo or changing firing rate, health, or damage, you can really affect the game if you do it carefully (e.g., Doom 64 style lost souls).

[cortlong50]

okay...so Swift Death is an absolute masterpiece.  Holy shit.  how have i not played this before?

like the amount of thought and precision ot takes to play it shows how much thought and precision went into making it.

its shit like this where i spend two weeks making one room and im like "but this speedrunning wad is still better."

[Maes]

11 hours ago, cq75 said:

The only downside of this sort of difficulty is that can make the game more RNG based, because the monster movements are not deterministic (case in point, my old wad, hardweps). The RNG aspect might be unique to Doom (Serious Sam might pull this sort of thing off better), I wish I knew a way to work around it.

 

I'm not sure what you mean by Doom being "non-deterministic", but the precisely predictable and repeatable nature of its RNG is what makes demo playback possible, and its knowledge and manipulation to the player's advantage is what makes TAS speedruns possible.

[cq75]

11 hours ago, Maes said:

 

I'm not sure what you mean by Doom being "non-deterministic", but the precisely predictable and repeatable nature of its RNG is what makes demo playback possible, and its knowledge and manipulation to the player's advantage is what makes TAS speedruns possible.

 

True, the RNG itself is predictable enough for demos and TAS, but (based on player feedback) I'm not sure the RNG is predictable enough for a player to anticipate the RNG, in real time, on their first playthrough. Personally I'd like to make more maps that are very hard, but don't require repeated playthroughs.

[baja blast rd.]

1 hour ago, cq75 said:

True, the RNG itself is predictable enough for demos and TAS

 

Good TAS demos manipulate the pRNG indices to achieve things such as make all weapons do optimal DPS and position themselves for effective bunching (ET12x913 by Andy Oliveria) or get monsters to position themselves optimally for maximally efficient movement, such as SR50 with perfect angles and a maximum of wall/thing runs, and to cooperate with the requisite tricks (swallx249 by ClumsyDoomer). 

 

That is what is meant by RNG manipulation. Good human play that accounts for predictable tendencies in monster behavior -- crowd shaping, infight induction, and so on -- is not referred to as manipulating or predicting the RNG. Even the cruder TAS demos that use segments to funnel playthroughs into desired states (Azuruish, CrazyDoomguy) isn't RNG manipulation proper. The RNG is absolutely not predictable enough for human runners to manipulate it except in rare, and extremely simplified, cases -- and that is in practiced runs. In first playthroughs it's completely inconceivable. 

Edited March 23, 2018 by rdwpa

[Woolie Wool]

On 3/18/2018 at 8:21 PM, hardcore_gamer said:

What do you think is the best way to make a level harder that doesn't involve merely increasing the enemy count or putting more difficult monsters into the level? This is something I have been spending something like the last half an hour trying to figure out and the only thing I can come up with is forcing the player to fight in a narrow space where mobility is limited, but even that only really works against powerful monsters anyway or large numbers of weaker ones.

 

What do you think the ideal way is to make levels harder without just increasing the monster count and without putting more high level monsters in?

Monster placement. Monster placement. MONSTER PLACEMENT. One revenant with just the right ambush spot can be worth 10 revenants right in front of you. Spring close-range ambushes with high threat monsters. Force the player to fight with limited space. Use hitscanners in groups for area denial. Reduce the amount of rockets and cells so they can't be used all the time. Have some inspiration. 79 monsters. Every one of them can steamroll your ass if you screw up.

[baja blast rd.]

On 3/23/2018 at 8:52 PM, Woolie Wool said:

Monster placement. Monster placement. MONSTER PLACEMENT. One revenant with just the right ambush spot can be worth 10 revenants right in front of you. Spring close-range ambushes with high threat monsters. Force the player to fight with limited space. Use hitscanners in groups for area denial. Reduce the amount of rockets and cells so they can't be used all the time. Have some inspiration. 79 monsters. Every one of them can steamroll your ass if you screw up.

 

This is the type of map I'd call "engaging" but not hard. It can kill you -- probably will at least a few times, actually, with some of those chaingunner traps -- but it won't take too long to get an exit on it. I guess what is missed by "hard without spamming hundreds of monsters" commentary is that many of the spammy hard maps are also much harder than many of the spare hard maps (not that maps with tons of monsters are all hard, which is far from the case). There are of course lots of ways to pet a cat, but generally speaking, using enough monsters is the most robust and flexible baseline way of introducing challenge, which is why the mappers who make (the relatively low number of) legitimately hard challenge maps that use few monsters almost universally also make slaughtermaps. Designing "hard" fights in non-cramped spaces that the player can traverse freely will almost inevitably require either a noticeable skew towards powerful monsters or lots of monsters (sometimes both). I think that making good fights with a minimum of monsters is an essential skill, but that sticking to that arbitrarily can be harmful. Sometimes a map is just more fun with 100 extra imps or troopers that don't increase the difficulty. 

My second attempt after my scouting playthrough was a success. Some close calls and near deaths, but it wasn't practiced. To me, that isn't what can be called a hard map. The perpetual floors in this are horrendous imo. I do like a few of the encounters (HKs + chaingunners at the start, baron + rev sandwich hallway, and baron elevator).  

 

 

[Nine Inch Heels]

2 hours ago, Woolie Wool said:

One revenant with just the right ambush spot can be worth 10 revenants right in front of you. Spring close-range ambushes with high threat monsters.

One trick ponies.... What's that to do with difficult? It's "Here, have some damage you couldn't see coming, now load last save and faceroll."

[Woolie Wool]

That's when you try to get inside the level designer's head and try to predict how the traps will unfold. Although that might be more a Wolfenstein thing than a Doom thing since most of the hardest maps I've enjoyed are for Wolf3D, where enemies have a delay before they fire, giving you about 1/3 of a second to figure out what's happening and escape.

 

As an example, I created this level, and I think it's pretty damn hard for only ~100 enemies:

 

[Nine Inch Heels]

2 minutes ago, Woolie Wool said:

That's when you try to get inside the level designer's head and try to predict how the traps will unfold

You're literally advocating playing maps that keep beating the same damn drum over and over until players obviously have accustomed to "more of the same".

 

A legitimately hard fight is hard and stays hard even when you know it's coming. Anything that can be trivialized by way of knowledge isn't hard, because hard fights require a certain amount of skill in terms of execution and situational awarenes. "Gotchas" only ask one thing of you and that's "know about it". Hate to break it to you, but knowledge and skill aren't the same thing in doom, or any other "action game", even though they both benefit the player in surviving the map.

[Woolie Wool]

I disagree, not only can maps reward specific knowledge, they can reward general knowledge about many things, including the personality of the level designer. This element of intuition from general patterns over mere rote memorization or has drawn me towards games like Quake 1 or Descent which challenge you to try to get one step ahead of the level designer rather than memorize the maps or rely on raw dexterity. It's an entirely different way of approaching a video game, doing a first playthrough of a map like jam2_scampie from Quake's func_mapjam2.

 

 

(I'm not nearly this good, this map kicked my ass)

Edited March 24, 2018 by Woolie Wool

[SleepyVelvet]

^ I wrote out half a post and had a demo lmp attached.  It showed up in your post Woolie.  I'm gonna have to bring this up to ling, it happened once before for me in a differnt thread.

[Woolie Wool]

So that's why an attachment somehow ended up in my post without me attaching anything.

[Nine Inch Heels]

1 minute ago, Woolie Wool said:

I disagree, not only can maps reward specific knowledge, they can reward general knowledge about many things, including the personality of the level designer.

Knowledge being key here. Once I knew that speed of doom uses "insta pops" aplenty, I obviously handled those a lot better, doesn't change the fact that these instapops became pretty much trivial in virtually all cases as soon as I knew, or "guessed right". Most of the harder fights in SOD weren't insta-pops, but rather fights of the kind that keep you busy for a minute or two, because consistent execution is a skill, and that does not come with knowledge, it comes with sitting down and practicing. Not to mention that once you got things like a plasma gun, or even a chaingun ready to go when you expect an ambush, you're already ahead of the game in many cases to begin with.

 

You approach video games however you like, but so far you have brought forth nothing in terms of arguments that is gonna convince me to consider knowledge (and I don't care how it is attained) a skill. You can have the most genius plan ever, if you're unable to execute it, then it's not gonna help you. Hard fights require both knowledge (Knowing roughly what's ahead, knowing the game's mechanics, etc), and "raw dexterity" to beat, as soon as one of the two things is practically not a part of the equation anymore, then the fight is not hard.

[Woolie Wool]

Well then you're against hundreds, or even thousands of levels for Doom, Quake, Descent, and other games built around tactical puzzle-solving and intuition that are considered difficult by most of the people playing them, and entire genres of games like classic CRPGs where it doesn't matter how fast you can execute techniques because you can pause at any time (or it's turn-based, entirely removing dexterity and muscle memory from the game), but if your plan doesn't work out, you're toast. Icewind Dale II does not require you to spend hundreds of hours practicing your clicking techniques (though it might make you spend a while studying the monster manual) to be generally regarded as an exceedingly difficult game.

[SleepyVelvet]

fda noisy_CHORD_NG.zip (1 death)

 

Chord_NG: cool map @Woolie Wool; an old one too. thanks for sharing.  My scales are calibrated differenty than rdwpa's, so i'd still call it "remotely hard" or "challenging" without the venturing into the territory of what i'd call "bullshit".
Chord_NG could've been more brutal, but the mapper kept things fair while still being tense.  Health resets before some tough moments: soul sphere at start, megasphere before a revenant swarm boxing match; there's also monster block lines for the blue key vile which probably saved my life.  I died only once in my fda by some miracle, but the map still felt tough throughout and my death was partly due to bad tactical choices under pressure.  Thus, a hard map.

Additionally, I found myself doing stuff like juggling multiple close-quarter revenant punches.  The map gives a megasphere beforehand, but still, I wouldn't call it "easy".  I might've gotten slightly lucky on each of the viles too.

When I hear the term "one trick pony" to describe a general revenant flank, I disagree.  The flanking revenant ambush here in Chord_NG (on the 2-rev/4-baron bridge) doesn't seem like a "one trick pony"; It's still fun second playthrough, and even if you are going in blind, it pads out the encounter with a soul sphere, and you can use the teleport sound cue to check for flanking.  I still died there but it wasn't to the flanking ambush, but was because i didn't fight the barons well and neglected the fact that i could've just left into the door behind me.  But, it certainly wasn't just a shutout encounter even though I was playing blind.

also, on @Nine Inch Heels note (ps. i mean first note, these last couple posts are flying), almost every encounter ever will be easier foreknowledge; It will at least be easier by some margin, just by varying magnitude per encounter.  To your point: Will an encounter still be "hard" afterwards? depends on the encounter design, but it can at least be "hard" on a blind playthrough by all means.  The map Woolie linked as an example was still non-trivial and skill-demanding, despite the player benefiting from foreknowledge (even @rdwpa died once and somehow even he still considers it "not hard", lol).  But in the end, the semantics of "hard" here are context dependent anyways - something can be "hard" blind but not "hard" with foreknowledge, etc.  We can also introduce more dimensions and go deeper down the rabbit hole too: take a static analysis on things like a player's technical skill - ie: does a player know how to 2-shot cybies and juggle pinkies and revenants close range?; such things totally change the fight dynamics for the players and thus maps' "hardness" or "level of bullshit unfairness".

p.s. (can't keep up with this insane post frequency, jeebus lol): risk profiling based on health/layout/ammo, and using your gut to decide how to play the odds, is very much something you can get better at.  In other words, it is a skill, even if it's on a layer of meta above technical skill and dexterity.  I mean, you can at least push the odds of death down, even though survival isn't guaranteed; but even great technical skill/dexterity doesn't guarantee survival depending on the map (that's why the map above I consider pretty fair w.r.t the health distribution and doesn't goes tough enough, but not overboard).  Certain approaches blind will do you better than others; this is part of the game in my opinion.  

 

Basically, I'm a weirdo that thinks base doom gameplay is meant to be played blind, and NIH is likewise a weirdo who thinks phmlspd map12 is a 10 min map that is best played with route foreknowledge and a self-disciplinary, aggressive "rail shooter" style play (if i understand correctly).   Everyone is just a weirdo.  I don't even know why I wrote all this up anymore instead of just playing doom.

Also for an off-topic side-note: i like some cheeky fun-house style traps in casual, short-medium maps, like S. Petersen maps,  regardless of them being "one-trick-ponies" or "hard".  But that's more of a topic of "fun" and not about what is "hard".

[baja blast rd.]

56 minutes ago, NoisyVelvet said:

(even @rdwpa died once and somehow even he still considers it "not hard", lol)

 

'Difficulty of achieving a saveless exit' is what I think is the purest way to judge difficulty.

 

A three-minute long map that can kill you a couple dozen times in FDA but you'll get an exit in under 30 minutes even without working out a strategy with saves or practicing parts? Easy.

 

A map that'll take a reasonable -- but not incredibly large -- amount of effort to beat (in the vicinity of a couple to several hours), including working out strategies and practicing? Moderate difficulty.

 

A map that'll take many days of effort, and lots of sweat and frustration, to get an exit on? Now we're talking about 'hard'.

 

('Will stand a very high likelihood of surviving in FDA play, perhaps nearly 100% with solid play' is more like 'very easy' or 'trivial' -- but in practice I'd just lump it in with 'easy' and use 'trivial' in a completely different sense, as a qualitative way of describing dull encounters.)

Maps can still be engaging and fun and hectic despite being 'easy' or even 'pretty easy' on this scale. I think that describes most competent maps that are released these days. I don't consider 'easy' a pejorative. 

 

Yeah I just can't wrap myself around 15 minutes of half-assed effort, with nary a feeling of frustration, making a map 'hard'. In a cautious mood I probably die ~0%, but survivalist FDA play is something I have to be in the mood for. Bear in mind that my exit (somehow) beat the max record by a good chunk, despite some wandering, so it's not a cautious, campy FDA-ish playthrough. I just can't consider that hard. Honestly, phrasing it that way makes me want to describe it as trivial. 

Edited March 24, 2018 by rdwpa

[SleepyVelvet]

8 minutes ago, rdwpa said:

'Difficulty of achieving a saveless exit' is what I think is the purest way to judge difficulty.

 

A three-minute long map that can kill you a couple dozen times in FDA but you'll get an exit in under 30 minutes even without working out a strategy with saves or practicing parts? Easy.

 

-Makes sense.  To be honest, i've been framing some of shorter maps in ESP that way so far in my current playthrough.  Likewise, for something like Swift Death, you kinda have to spend tokens on a map it until you win, in an "arcade-y" kinda way; death is highly likely and the main goal is just to see if you can get an exit, and skill just rewards you with tighter odds. (I still like these blind though as long as the maps are short)

 

-Other mapsets I frame in an entirely different way though, where the goal is to survive at all costs, in preferably the least amount of tries.  I put more weight on a single death in these cases.

 

-Otherwise, if the map is just long and hard, i'll use saves just so i can get through the map and still experience it.

 

Three completely different play preferences that frame things pretty differently.

 

I dunno if any of that makes sense, I hope it does.

[GarrettChan]

11 hours ago, NoisyVelvet said:

I dunno if any of that makes sense, I hope it does.

Totally make sense to me. Length is a factor in difficult (of course, we are talking about saveless) in my opinion since Doom is heavily RNG-based. You can have long time in a map, and then something weird happened and you're dead. Saving midway pretty much means eliminate the factor of time and this means difficulty is only judged by individual encounters.

 

Long maps sometimes give you the feeling that I don't even want to run this map legitimately, and I just want to go through it and see what's inside (eg: CChest Map29 :D). Yeah, I have the same mindset. As a lazy person, most of the time I will go through the map with IDDQD to see whether I want to run it...

 

Therefore, the answer to OP, make a super long map, unless you judge difficulty by other way.

[Akenore]

"How to make levels harder"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

viagra?