How to make maps difficult but fair.

[spineapple tea]

My last map was considered easy by a few people. I understand the basics for making difficult encounters such as tighter areas and asymmetry, but what else could someone do? And if anyone has a link to a similar thread, I'd be fine with you posting it here and letting this one die.

[VGA]

Don't allow the player to retreat, lock him in an area by closing the door behind him. And then after the battle he finds a switch to open it again. Also, you can put a Pain Elemental behind most of the enemies so the player has to get closer to kill it. They act as a wall. Another thing you can do it to open a trap with a couple of Demons behind the player when he opens a door to a room of enemies. So they cannot retreat easily. Or teleport them in the middle of an arena with not enough cover, no retreating!

 

Or have them jump down from a ledge, no retreating!

 

The most amazing idea I ever saw was in UAC Ultra, you are supposed to be in an area without oxygen and you use hazard suits. Basically it is a normal, linear map but every sector is damaging. So you are forced to push forward to find the next hazard suit before your current one runs out!

 

Or you can have a big elevator that the player takes and enemies spawn in there, no retreating! The player has to survive until the elevator reaches the top/bottom. Oh but look, there are more enemies there, I hope you cleared the elevator of enemies already or you're fully surrounded!

Edited December 15, 2020 by VGA

[Silhouette 03]

Have a look at this thread I started. There are good tips on difficulty in there, as well as on combat encounters.

[baja blast rd.]

I played that map just now since I was curious. 

 

It's indeed easy, but that in itself is okay. The only thing I found seriously underwhelming was the fight starting after you pick up three boxes of rockets on a rock, with a giant wall slowly lowering, only to reveal like ten imps, only to further open up into a huge area that is sparsely populated. That feels like more of a staging mistake: you're telling me "big juicy fight is coming" with map design, and not delivering. 

The map doesn't really need to be harder. What it could use is more sophisticated monster placement and fight ideas. "Open door or go down hallway, fight clump of one or two species of monsters in front of you" predominates. But you do have some solid setups too.

 

So my advice would be to just play (and replay) stuff you like, and try to study how they use monsters well. 

 

[spineapple tea]

Just now, rd. said:

The only thing I found seriously underwhelming was the fight starting after you pick up three boxes of rockets on a rock, with a giant wall slowly lowering, only to reveal like ten imps, only to further open up into a huge area that is sparsely populated.

Funny story. There was originally a BFG on the rock and the number of imps was at least 3 times bigger than it is now. Then the idea of having a voodoo doll drop down onto a BFG when you pressed a switch for the final boss was appealing to me. I realized I didn't know how to use voodoo dolls and ended up spawning in the out of bounds room. I decided to scrap the mechanic and just place the BFG on the floor with the rockets up on the rock.

[Bauul]

"more difficult" is an incredibly broad term. There are many different ways of achieving it:

• Decrease health
• Decrease ammo
• Decrease weapon availability 
• Decrease movement space
• Decrease movement options 
• Increase environmental hazards
• Increase monster count
• Increase monster variety 
• Increased use of higher tier monsters
• Improved monster placement 
• Non-standard gimmick (timed map, infinite spawning monsters, teleporting monsters, ghost monsters, etc. etc.)

All of these present a very different feel to the player. Which you choose depends on what you want to achieve with your map. 

 

The way most "normal" Doom maps are set up, improved monster placement and variety are the typical best ways to improve difficulty without feeling like you're removing content or just spamming monsters about. It's not just about more enemies, it's how you use them. The player's greatest strength is their mobility, so removing that is the most classic way to increase difficulty without it feeling like you're nerfing the player's abilities through ammo/health/armament starvation. Whether that's locking a door behind the player, using pincer attacks from enemies, or even just making the room smaller in the editor, all will help. 

 

If I were you, play some maps that you feel are closest in style/what you are aiming for for your map, and see how they do it. Think about the above bullet point list, and observe the different methods they use. That should give you good food for thought for your map.

Edited December 15, 2020 by Bauul

[Nine Inch Heels]

56 minutes ago, N1ck said:

My last map was considered easy by a few people. I understand the basics for making difficult encounters such as tighter areas and asymmetry, but what else could someone do? And if anyone has a link to a similar thread, I'd be fine with you posting it here and letting this one die.

 

Tighter areas and asymmetry don't necessarily result in more difficult fights.

 

Things that can make fights harder aren't limited to those 2 options...

 

 

You have:

 

Things that force the player to do certain things in a certain, often disadvantageous order. For example you could perch archviles to deny players real estate, and have them protected by other monsters to make sure the player must first deal with whatever is moving towards them before they're able to tackle the lethal viles. This also works well as a timed setup or a kind of switch hunt that will crush the viles eventually, so you can reduce the grindy parts of a fight, while players get to enjoy the height of the combat you present.

 

Weapon restrictions. For example, you could build a fight such that using the rocket launcher is necessary, but you threaten the player's immediate surroundings constantly, so they need to keep track of several things at once to avoid blowing themselves up.

 

Hurtfloor mechanics and crushers. What's there to say? Anything that requires additional attention can make a fight harder.

 

Force the player to stick to a certain order of operations. The classic: Make the player kill PEs and archviles first while some other shit takes a swing at them.

 

Dynamic terrain: For reference, see SunLust map 29 "carousel fight" with the archviles in the centre.

 

Platforming: Having to jump over gaps while fighting adds pressure, especially if a failed jump is guaranteed to be lethal. Inescapable death pits are fine, fuck the haters and crybabies.

 

Resource management: Make sure the players isn't fully loaded and at 200/200. Think about how many resources players need not how many resources they might desire.

So, there tons more stuff than just making areas geometrically tighter and asymmetrical, or just inserting higher tier monsters.

[HAK3180]

There's some good stuff here already, but I just wanted to add that "fair" is also a highly subjective descriptor, as Nine Inch Heels above kinda alludes to. The only thing that is really definitively unfair is if the map or part of the map is actually impossible, but even this could be hard to determine in some cases. People have very different thresholds of when they start accusing something of unfairness, although extreme RNG dependency is pretty widely considered unfair, but even this can be hard to isolate as the sine qua non of a given map.

[spineapple tea]

1 minute ago, HAK3180 said:

There's some good stuff here already, but I just wanted to add that "fair" is also a highly subjective descriptor,

I guess fair is sort of a vague adjective. A better way to say it would be "without using asshole design" as in stuff like pits you cant get up from, enemies that have an unkillable archvile behind them, four cyberdemons popping up around you all the sudden, stuff like that.

[spineapple tea]

17 minutes ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

Inescapable death pits are fine, fuck the haters and crybabies.

Oh, and call me a crybaby, but that's just kinda bad design. A good map to me is one that a good enough player can get through relatively unscathed. But if someone is forced to die no matter how good they are, that's on the mapper and not the player. 

[Bridgeburner56]

It's very hard to make fun difficult maps if you cannot beat them yourself. Yes you can use external testers to help but if you're initial balance is out of whack then people are going to not want to test your maps so much. Playing highly regarded harder wads will A) show you how other mappers have made  difficult and enjoying wads and B) improve your own skill so you can personally judge better how difficult your own work is.

There are a few good "learning curve" mapsets that can help you on this journey. Probably the best 2 are Sunder (for macro slaughter) and Sunlust (for tight technical encounters). There are others but those 2 are both very very good, and have a difficulty ramp across the set so they will draw you into more difficult content as you play through.

[Nine Inch Heels]

14 minutes ago, N1ck said:

Oh, and call me a crybaby, but that's just kinda bad design. A good map to me is one that a good enough player can get through relatively unscathed. But if someone is forced to die no matter how good they are, that's on the mapper and not the player. 

You're not going to die if you're good enough to avoid falling down. Simple as.

[Omniarch]

Difficulty comes in many flavours and has many facets, thus making it hard to give any specific advice. Fairness is even worse, being almost entirely subjective in nature. Personally, I think the best way to narrow things down is to acknowledge the inherent subjectivity of the topic and try to understand one's own definitions of 'difficult' or 'fair'. To this end, which wads do you think best represent the sort of experience you are aiming for?

[Khaoscythe]

"Wanna get better at choreographing Doom monster fights? Play Chess, play lots of Chess..."

[spineapple tea]

Just now, Omniarch said:

To this end, which wads do you think best represent the sort of experience you are aiming for?

I don't have a wad in mind when it comes to fairness. All I'm aiming for is fair in my terms, which as I said before, involves the player being able to go through the wad without feeling like deaths were cheap. Everything should be possible to do without having to save-scum or cheat.

[DMPhobos]

i don't think there's a proper guide or method to make a fight 'difficult' and 'fair', since both terms are very subjective. There's a lot of methods to increase the difficulty, ammo management, mob usage, environmental hazards, layout design, all those take factor in how difficult it is to up the difficulty in a map and there's been a lot of good suggestions on those here, but the "fair" part will be the trickiest part to tackle because what's "fair" to you will be different to someone else.

My only advice would be like some people mentioned, to play other maps to get an idea on how other mappers balance their maps and study the fight set pieces, to practice your skill and to test and balance a map around it. Your personal judgment is the best indicator on what makes a fight 'fair' imo, balancing a map around your skill is a good indicator on what works, where difficulty spikes or where it needs to be ramped up and if it fits on what you feel it's "fair". If you wish to ramp up the difficulty for a skill above yours, then balancing will be more erratic and less precise and will lead to some problems, so i wouldn't recommend that. You can also rely on external testing for balancing that, but imo the main reference point on the difficulty should come from your own judgment and feel on how to map plays

 

[VGA]

 

 

This mapset makes things difficult by locking the player in or by forcing them to run around a populated area, fighting their way to ammo and health.

[Omniarch]

11 minutes ago, N1ck said:

I don't have a wad in mind when it comes to fairness. All I'm aiming for is fair in my terms, which as I said before, involves the player being able to go through the wad without feeling like deaths were cheap. Everything should be possible to do without having to save-scum or cheat.

There are very few popular wads that require save-scumming or cheating to complete. I mean, one guy managed to do a deathless run of the entirety of Sunlust, one of the harder mainstream megawads. Sure, RNG would definitely play a role in such an achievement, but given the sheer length of the playthrough the good/bad luck would presumably average out. Can you think of a specific wad, map or even encounter that you consider unfair? That might help me to understand your personal definition.

 

As for my question, everyone has their own difficulty 'spectrum'. For example, Valiant or Eviterniy on UV are more or less the upper limit of my ability when it comes to saveless or low-save runs. I could probably save-scum my way through Sunlust on HMP, but only with considerable difficulty and frustration. On the other hand, wads like DTWiD are frustratingly easy to me, even on UV, which is to be expected given the project's intent. So, essentially, my difficulty spectrum goes something like this:

 

HARD = Sunlust HMP > Valiant UV > Return to Hadron UV > Alien Vendetta HMP > Doom II UV > Doom the Way id Did UV = EASY

 

So, when I asked the question, this is more or less what I had in mind.

[Nine Inch Heels]

Okay... so... How do people put WADs like valiant or ancient aliens in the "hard" category..? I will never understand this. SunLust on HMP also isn't exactly hard by today's standards. When you're talking about hard, you're looking at least at SunLust on UV, followed or accompanied by a good number of slaughtermaps out there, like Breathless and entropy.

 

Valiant, and other maps along the same line are at most "intermediate".

Edited December 15, 2020 by Nine Inch Heels

[alLAN95th]

N1ck,

 

I would suggest having other people play your map to where you can see them playing either in person of through demo recording. That way you can see where they struggle and where the level feels way too easy. You might find how they play your level different from how you play, and it will give you a different perspective which could help you with your design.

Edited April 13, 2023 by alLAN95th

[spineapple tea]

In that case, here's the map I've been working on for a few hours. Not very far yet, just a few rooms, but just so you can judge where it is so far. It should be vanilla compatible but I haven't tested it in anything besides GZDoom yet. https://www.mediafire.com/file/ha33occbsisomtg/Test_map.wad/file

[alLAN95th]

N1ck,

 

So far, so good. I think that the area with the chaingunner should have some pink demons in there too, and I assume those walls will collapse in a later version to reveal more areas of the map?

 

Edited April 13, 2023 by alLAN95th

[spineapple tea]

5 minutes ago, alLAN95th said:

N1ck,

 

So far, so good. I think that the area with the chaingunner should have some pink demons in there too, and I assume those walls will collapse in a later version to reveal more areas of the map?

 

Respectfully,

 

-alLAN95th

I was thinking about adding some more monsters in there, but never the idea to lower the walls. I hope you don't mind if I use that idea. Thanks for the feedback.

[Pechudin]

1 hour ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

Okay... so... How do people put WADs like valiant or ancient aliens in the "hard" category..? I will never understand this. SunLust on HMP also isn't exactly hard by today's standards. When you're talking about hard, you're looking at least at SunLust on UV, followed or accompanied by a good number of slaughtermaps out there, like Breathless and entropy.

 

Valiant, and other maps along the same line are at most "intermediate".

 

'Hard' is kind of subjective. For a long time, 'hard' for me meant that I could not reasonably finish the map blind without dying. Nowadays I've relaxed that category a bit. Ancient Aliens is in 'hard in places' category for me though.

 

Might be interesting to know what the 'mean skill' for the DooM playerbase is, meaning what is the mapset they feel is their skill cap ATM.

[purist]

I think there are two basic principles to setting up an area to be both fun and challenging:

 

1. No easy outs

Don't give the player an easy way to back track and fight from a safe distance or simply bypass it entirely. Also look for ways to cheese the fight such as safe spots and remove these from the equation. I prefer not to rely on locking players into set pieces too often, it's ok to allow a sequence break but there should be a risk/reward or skill employed to do so.

 

2. Competing priorities

Give the player more than one thing to worry about at a time. This can be attacks from multiple angles, a creative mix of different monsters, forcing a player to find or make space or introducing environmental hazards. This adds a dynamism to the action and rewards the player for making good choices.

 

Think of the fights as a puzzle for the player to solve, the challenge is for the answer to be solveable without being obvious.

 

EDIT:

There is also something to be said about challenging a player by attrition over several fights or the course of the entire level. The idea here is that each individual encounter is not designed to have a realistic chance of killing the player but the objective is to avoid taking too much damage to better survive the subsequent parts.

Edited December 15, 2020 by purist
An idea struck me

[Nine Inch Heels]

33 minutes ago, Pechudin said:

'Hard' is kind of subjective

 

What people perceive as "hard" is one question... Which kinds of objective metrics make something hard are not a matter of opinion, they're facts.

 

SunLust is objectively harder than Valiant when both are played on UV. Dimensions is objectively harder than the vast majority of challenge maps out there. Alien vendatta is objectively harder than OG doom2...

 

None of this is rocket science, and even somebody who can beat most, or even all of SunLust's maps without dying will tell you that yes, SunLust is objectively harder than valiant.

Edited December 15, 2020 by Nine Inch Heels

[Stupid Bunny]

One trap I feel like I fall into sometimes is getting too focused on how I want a part of the map to be played, without thinking about how somebody else might approach it.  I can make an area with a bunch of cool set pieces and areas where the enemies can flank me, making for what seems like a great tactical challenge, only to realize that an obvious way to break it would be to, for example, just run into an adjacent room and let the poor monsters bottleneck their way through a small doorway I never thought about, and gun them down as they Three Stooges their way through.  As such I make an effort to try different approaches on different playsthrough, and if a really challenging area suddenly becomes lame and redundant then I'll think about ways to adjust it.  One way, as others have said, is to lock the player into the area where I want the battle to happen, but there's other ways to, an obvious one being to have more monsters emerge or spawn in adjacent areas, or shifting geometry throughout the level so that monsters trapped in another area can emerge and start punishing the player for avoiding them earlier (which is another thing to watch out for: if the easiest way to beat the map is just to run past everything, and the player has to contrive to actually fight something, then something is clearly wrong.)

[JezChrist]

4 hours ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

You're not going to die if you're good enough to avoid falling down. Simple as.

......

Sorry to bring a somewhat unwanted hostility but this is wrong.

 

First thing, a average map, even difficult, is rarely targeted at people able to consistently avoid falling down pits.

Second and most important thing, if you are in a situation where pressure is coming down, and you need to dodge many incomong projectile while trying to plan your next move... your finger can easily stay too long on the key and let doomguy fall to death. No matter how good one can claim to be.

The only way to consistently avoid this would be to know the map very well... thus having fell down serveral times before when playing and replaying the map.

Luck is out of the equation.

 

I'll also add that Nick said "no matter how good you are" reffering to inescapable death trap that do not challenge the player in any but just kills them and force them to reload or retry (the crushing trap in Plutonia when you pick a key or press a switch and if you run back you get killed by the ceilling). Its not fair. So talking about being a good player is talking about a different situation than the one presented by N1ck.

 

If have nothing against death fall,as long as their purpose is clear, and that they kill you quicly so you don't waste too much time, but this is was a lame argument.

Edited December 15, 2020 by JezChrist

[JezChrist]

Also, I thought that AV in UV was hard....

I don't think it is anymore, for the simple reason that difficulty depends on your skill and familiarity with the map.

You can make maps harder, but you will never ajust the difficulty perfectly... I think the middle part of Eviternity is the easiest,because there is a lot of open spaces. Someone else will argue that the early stages are harder, because he can see shit with all the darkness and gets always suprised.

You can raise up the difficulty, but the better is to map for your level of play. If you, the map maker, can beat the level on UV without dying whitout picking secrets (if secrets are not needed to beat the map on UV... its not the case of everymap)... it is the right difficulty for you. From there and from feedback and comparaison with other wads, you can build up what would make this and this easier or harder, and ajust the difficulty of each level in your wad to give a sense of gradual diificulty.

 

This is how I deal with it right now... might not be the best way to deal with difficulty,but I think it helps for new mappers, especially those (like me) who begin mapping with only OG Doom and Doom 2 (maybe plutonia) for only experience.

[Nine Inch Heels]

10 minutes ago, JezChrist said:

.....

Sorry to bring a somewhat unwanted hostility but this is wrong.

 

First thing, a average map, even difficult, is rarely targeted at people able to consistently avoid falling down pits.

Second and most important thing, if you are in a situation where pressure is coming down, and you need to dodge many incomong projectile while trying to plan your next move... your finger can easily stay too long on the key and let doomguy fall to death. No matter how good one can claim to be.

The only way to consistently avoid this would be to know the map very well... thus having fell down serveral times before when playing and replaying the map.

Luck is out of the equation.

 

If have nothing against death fall,as long as their purpose is clear, and that they kill you quicly so you don't waste too much time, but this is was a lame argument.

I don't care how good or bad you think my argument is when there are players with enough experience out there to make the vast majority of jumps on their first try, because they can discern how wide a gap is, and how it needs to be approached...

 

Furthermore, the "what are you gonna do when all kinds of projectiles are flying at you?" kind of argument is pretty lame in and of itself, because it's very well in the realms of possibility to place a few weaker monsters to simply add a little pressure to something players could otherwise spend forever on. Don't go around and just assume that my idea was danmaku style proj-hell paired with angle-perfect SR50 fuckery. There's a whole lot of nuance to this stuff, so I won't leave a thinly veiled strawman attempt - even if not intended - uncommented...

 

Sure, there are some hard platforming sections people need to practice in WADs like for example flotsam, but there is no case to be made that these very high pressure jumps across awkwardly shaped platforms are the norm, or that any platforming scenario with added pressure is equally difficult or lethal..