Samuel Slayer Posted February 3, 2021 (edited) I've been thinking about designing levels with ammo in mind. In the past I've made sure that the player does not run out of ammo or have too much of it. But playing my levels over and over again, I've seen the ammo as a constant of sorts. I never run out -- the level provides. This has left me to focus more on my performance as a player in combat encounters and I didn't need to think about the inventory of my resources. Because I never run out. There's a sort of safety in terms of resources. I only dry up if I mess around, wasting ammo. But each time I play, the encounter plays out similarly more or less. I barely have to think about my options, because there is a gun that still has ammo and there's another box there. This has left me to think about the alternative. The what if? This question has become more alluring to me as a mapper who likes to make exploration levels. What if it's okay to run out of ammo? Then what? I wager that such a prospect would be considered unacceptable & undesirable by some players out there. But I've come to find it intriguing. Just imagine the thoughts going through your head as you formulate a plan to manage. Maybe you have a few more rockets. Maybe you'll do with a chainsaw for now. Maybe you'll brush up your strafing skills as you take on the imps bare-handed. Maybe you just start scouring each and every nook and cranny for that one box of shells. And you only found a pitiful ammo clip. But it gave you enough juice to take out at least one or two imps, but then there's a sergeant popping from behind the corner, so you shoot him instead and take his shells. I can already imagine some resisting this idea, for their level relies heavily on combat and they'd be right. At the end of the day, it's relative to your design philosophy. Slaughter maps have boxes and boxes upon rockets lined up neatly next to each other on a wide field so as to not disturb the flow of combat and I wouldn't change that. But for the rest of you who make exploration levels, give it some food for thought (unless that's what you've been doing all along, sorry about that). As someone who has played Lunar Catastrophe, Doom The Way Id Did, Deathless... I can assure you that some of my best experiences with Doom have been when I run out of ammo and the game turns into survival horror/micromanagement of resources. I chainsaw pinkies to save valuable shells, I go on a berserk rampage so that I can keep my ammo to be used on beefier monsters. I ration ammo. I make every bullet count. I use plasma gun to soften up Cacodemons and Barons. Maybe I stumbled upon a cache of energy packs and now I use the plasma gun. Or I have no shells but I have a lot of bullets & rockets. The gameplay and thus the experience has changed. Because running out of ammo is a very real threat in some of these wads. It forces me to re-think my approach. And sometimes all that I will encounter in a room is just a Caco or a squad of Imps or Lost souls. The experience is more paced out. What is Doom to you? Do you think that ammo needs to be easily available, or should it be deliberately sought out and scavenged? Edited February 4, 2021 by Samuel Slayer 8 Quote Share this post Link to post
Retro Dino Posted February 3, 2021 It depends on the difficulty of the WAD imo. Imagine playing an horror survival game, but you're packed up with tons of guns and ammo. It instantly takes away the fear factor because you can just blow through your enemies. If you want a more intense wad, I'd say use less ammo. If you want a wad that is for running and gunning, supply enough ammo. That's how I see it at least. I start to get nervous when I run outta ammo for the boom stick. It's my go to weapon, and if I have to use anything else besides it or the plasma rifle, I tend to have to use different strategies. This makes the gameplay way more intense for me because I tend to suck with something like the pistol. Especially if it's with harder enemies. As for exploration, I've been struggling with that. How do I give people incentive to go explore, and what can I use to reward them for exploration? 3 Quote Share this post Link to post
Samuel Slayer Posted February 3, 2021 (edited) On 2/3/2021 at 9:46 AM, Retro Dino said: As for exploration, I've been struggling with that. How do I give people incentive to go explore, and what can I use to reward them for exploration? Expand You give incentives to explore by placing items there, that's it. If there's ammo and health available everywhere, they don't exactly need to go looking for it. Some wads have more empty levels but more deliberate item placement. EDIT: I scrapped out that other text because it was unnecessary after re-reading your comment. I get confused when I read fast. Apologies. Edited February 3, 2021 by Samuel Slayer 2 Quote Share this post Link to post
Cruduxy Pegg Posted February 3, 2021 Ammo lets you control where the player will go. You'd be surprised how many people you can kill with 2 elevated arch-viles protecting a cell box.. Look at ammo as your tool to funnel where the player should be going. Doesn't matter the quantity as that is a different layer of balancing. If you want the player to have more movement options you'll have to break down ammo boxes into the smaller ammo currencies and spread them around instead. This is why shell boxes tend to be meh for exploration compared to maps that hide shells around. You find one and you know where it always is, and it provides a lot of power. If you look at some speed runs you'll see that a lot of the time the optimal path is whatever passes through rocket boxes, cell boxes or shells just enough to let the player kill the few "mandatory" monsters that actually block a path instead of walk around. A map with more of the small ammo hidden around tend to be harder to optimize if there are some hard mandatory fights to break through, instead of just SSGing a hell knight in the way. 9 Quote Share this post Link to post
Samuel Slayer Posted February 3, 2021 On 2/3/2021 at 11:12 AM, Pegg said: Ammo lets you control where the player will go. You'd be surprised how many people you can kill with 2 elevated arch-viles protecting a cell box.. Expand That is evil, I love it! 2 Quote Share this post Link to post
BoxY Posted February 3, 2021 Personally I prefer ammo to not be too tight, although if I can always use the map's most powerful weapons to kill everything in front of me, I would consider that kinda bad design (slaughter excepted). That said ammo starvation is obviously a legit game mechanic. There's situations that really just suck when players have low or no ammo though: -where you can't scavenge due to a one way passage, lock-in or whatever that closes off previous areas, and the situation means you have kill stuff to survive but just can't. Most hard arena style fights have lock-ins by definition. If you have a save game in an area like this and don't have a backup, it's immensely frustrating, especially if the map is long or you wanted to play continuous, because now you have to either reset, cheat or do some insane tyson/pacifist gymnastics to get free. Nobody wants to have this happen to them, it just sucks. -where an enemy needs to be priority killed but can't: pain elementals and archviles are the worst offenders here, you can't always just leave them to go find ammo because they can really quickly make whatever area they're in uninhabitable by spawning too much shit or attacking you in places where you can't avoid it. -RNG bullshit: you just can't give the player exactly 32 shells to kill 4 viles and expect them all to have a fair and consistent experience, even if you play perfectly there's always going to be some times where enemies just take more ammo to kill than usual. This can have chaotic effects, when I've been testing my own maps I've been keeping an eye on how much ammo I leave different areas with and there can be wild swings in the numbers even if felt like the fight went the same way as all the other times. For this reason alone I think mappers should always pad their ammo supply at least a little bit to keep bad luck from screwing people too hard. -secrets containing ammo being too powerful: if I have to waste a lot of time finding obscure secrets to be able to just beat the map it always leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, even more so if a lot of the ammo given in the map is for weapons only obtainable in secrets. Same deal with chainsaw/zerk. It makes me assume the mapper always made a beeline to grab all the secrets when testing their map without thinking about how a blind player might have to deal with the situation. -not being able to get max kills: not everyone cares about maxing stuff but I think a considerate mapper should at least attempt to make it possible without having to go to extreme lengths, it just feels reasonable to me. It doesn't feel good having to dash to the the exit with a bunch of stuff still alive because there's no way to clean it up. 6 Quote Share this post Link to post
eirc Posted February 3, 2021 Some random thoughts: Ammo & health are directly tied to difficulty. Yea they also make a map feel more survival-horrory if you put very little of them but remember that it always makes it harder. So depending on the difficulty you aim for you may want to compensate in other ways. What Pegg says about movement is also one of the main slaughtermaps use of ammo (it's not just for them, it's just more obvious there). The point is not to just stack infinite ammo to take it out of the equation, it dictates where you'll need to be before you run out. I was literally just thinking of this about (the beautiful) map03 of https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/119448-beta-release-micro-slaughter-community-project-17-maps/ where the final encounter has 3 or 4 times the amount of ammo strictly required to complete it in both rockets and cells. This looks weird after you clear the room but it also makes it that the fight can be done in a ton of different ways depending on which pickups and thus route you choose to go for. Also berserk is ammo, chainsaw is ammo and cyberdemons (on occasion) are ammo. In general I think a good thing to strive for is to give the player different choices regarding ammo (and health) they will make willingly. So maybe they can head to a no-backtrack drop on the right to grab these few shells in the distance or go for a berserk on the other side. Most people don't like forced pickups and while the mapper has specific reasons to do them you can always "disguise" them to not look forced. 1 Quote Share this post Link to post
Rytrik Posted February 3, 2021 (edited) On 2/3/2021 at 9:46 AM, Retro Dino said: As for exploration, I've been struggling with that. How do I give people incentive to go explore, and what can I use to reward them for exploration? Expand I'm not a mapper and haven't played tons of maps, but I keep thinking back to the quote from the John Romero article about Sigil, which I posted in the "Are Secrets Really Necessary?" thread: https://www.doomworld.com/forum/post/2247306 I think it makes a ton of sense. Edited February 3, 2021 by Rytrik Clarified quote details 2 Quote Share this post Link to post
Maes Posted February 3, 2021 (edited) Ammo balance is one of the things that are super-easy to screw up in Doom, even if the road to said screw-up was paved with good intentions. IMO, lots of ammo & slaughter/intense combat or little ammo & more exploring/survival gameplay are both OK, if it's clear what you subscribe to as soon as you start playing. What's not so OK, always IMO, are maps that put you in intense combat (or even slaughter) situations but don't give you enough ammo, or restrict your weaponry so that you cannot use said ammo efficiently or at all, or are super-generous with one type of ammo but stingy with another. Those fall into a grey zone IMO, and depending on how well the rest of the map plays and how said unevenness affects the gameplay, it may be perceived either as an extra challenge, fake difficulty or the result of poor playtesting. Edited February 3, 2021 by Maes 7 Quote Share this post Link to post
Retro Dino Posted February 3, 2021 On 2/3/2021 at 1:47 PM, Rytrik said: I'm not a mapper and haven't played tons of maps, but I keep thinking back to the quote by John Romero that I posted in the "Are Secrets Really Necessary?" thread: https://www.doomworld.com/forum/post/2247306 I think it makes a ton of sense. Expand Is Romero's account on here N1ck? 0 Quote Share this post Link to post
Vorpal Posted February 3, 2021 Limiting/stingy ammo doesn't really create dynamic gameplay, it usually ends up railroading the player into "the mapper's intended path" which leaves the player feeling like they are in a scripted event with one solution, and the difficulty being made unnecessarily high having to play the scavenging minigame. It feels awful when you get to the exit switch with like 5 bullets and a single rocket left, to know that you rode a laserbeam tightrope of The Approved Path And Meticulous Balance, and that final boss fight's PRIMARY ROLE at the end there was just to make fucking certain that the next map in the series plays essentially from a pistol start, because that one too is going to be tightrope balanced to hell too. By comparison the id maps have stupendously ridiculous stores of ammo and health, and this is what leads to experimentation and risk taking and alternate solutions and general fun stuff. Sorry for the rant hah 7 Quote Share this post Link to post
Rytrik Posted February 3, 2021 On 2/3/2021 at 2:56 PM, Retro Dino said: Is Romero's account on here N1ck? Expand I don't know. Why do you ask? 0 Quote Share this post Link to post
Retro Dino Posted February 3, 2021 On 2/3/2021 at 3:56 PM, Rytrik said: I don't know. Why do you ask? Expand I'm trying to find the quote you're talking about. 1 Quote Share this post Link to post
Rytrik Posted February 3, 2021 (edited) On 2/3/2021 at 3:59 PM, Retro Dino said: I'm trying to find the quote you're talking about. Expand Ah yes. Got it. Both quotes are general quotes from the website I linked in that post. Neither of them, in closer look, is directly what Romero said. The second quote is in a paragraph where Romero says something quite similar AFTER the line I quoted. Thank you for the correction. Edited February 3, 2021 by Rytrik 1 Quote Share this post Link to post
Retro Dino Posted February 3, 2021 On 2/3/2021 at 4:36 PM, Rytrik said: Ah yes. Got it. Both quotes are general quotes from the website I linked in that post. Neither of them, in closer look, is directly what Romero said. The second quote is in a paragraph where Romero says something quite similar AFTER the line I quoted. Thank you for the correction. Expand OH okay, no sorry i'm just slow. Thank you! Sorry for taking over the post @Samuel Slayer 1 Quote Share this post Link to post
Xaser Posted February 3, 2021 On 2/3/2021 at 3:39 PM, Vorpal said: Limiting/stingy ammo doesn't really create dynamic gameplay, it usually ends up railroading the player into "the mapper's intended path" which leaves the player feeling like they are in a scripted event with one solution, and the difficulty being made unnecessarily high having to play the scavenging minigame. Expand Gonna have to disagree with you there. Ammo distribution certainly can be used to enforce a particular playstyle, but it certainly doesn't always do it. In fact, it's quite the opposite in my experience: if you overload the player with all ammo types, that often leads to players the dominant strategy of "hold mouse1 with rockets or BFG", 'cause nothing's stopping them from doing so (provided the level layout allows it). If you instead scatter ammo throughout a level/arena/whatnot, now the player's got to make a choice: they can go Leeroy Jenkins and dive straight for the cell packs, or play it safe and use the resources they do have to slowly chip away at the baddies, or stir up some infighting, or some combination thereof and so forth. tl;dr removing Domininant Strategy A doesn't necessarily mean that players are forced into Intended Strategy B; it may be that strategies B, C, D, and E were always on the table, but with Dominant strategy A gone, players are encouraged to pick one of the others and hey look, it's dynamic gameplay. :P [That said, there's always going to be a portion of the playerbase that goes "oh no, I ran out of ammo, but I'm not going to bother venturing anywhere to find it and just sit here and quit or die," and my strategy for dealing with that is to say "fuck 'em." :P ] 10 Quote Share this post Link to post
Stabbey Posted February 3, 2021 The ammo provided should be enough to fit the type of map you want to make. If you want players to run from enemies, provide very little ammo, and that will discourage them from fighting. However, if you want players to fight, provide enough to avoid making the fighting tedious. For instance, a Baron takes 100 bullets/15 shells to kill, but it's not that interesting shooting it 100 times. It's important to not confuse "tedious" with "difficult". You don't want to overpopulate levels with ammo of course. In most of my levels, I rarely ever use Large Cell Packs (100), and instead sprinkle in small cell packs (20). This helps reduce the variation in plasma ammo players could have, and helps prevent trivializing fights by using the plasma rifle or BFG. At times I also encourage players to use certain weapons by providing a lot of ammo of one type and a lot less of another. In my latest levels, I'm placing ammo to direct the progress of the fights. I start off with a big fight room. The ammo and weapons are in the middle so the player can't really retreat or run away - or rather, if they do, it will be unpleasant when they need to return. In another part there's a fight on moving platforms. The player could stay on the outside, but the ammo is on the inside, so they'll have to complicate their lives to beat the fight. One section I encourage the use of the Rocket Launcher by providing a bunch of single rockets, but substantially less of other types. I also do all my testing without finding any secrets, so I can be confident that beating the level does not require knowledge of the secrets. 0 Quote Share this post Link to post
Vorpal Posted February 3, 2021 On 2/3/2021 at 6:25 PM, Xaser said: If you instead scatter ammo throughout a level/arena/whatnot, now the player's got to make a choice Expand Play conservative and abuse infighting is how almost all players will handle that situation, and that's what I mean by railroaded, as it's less of a player choice and more of a necessary response to the choices the mapper made available, of which the guns-blazing-risky approach is off the board. Unless it is playthrough #5 where the player knows the flow and where the big fights occur, but it's not really fair to expect multiple playthroughs. At least in an ammo-glutton map, holding mouse1 with rockets/bfg is an extra mode of play, not the only one as you argue. Though, it doesn't stop players from still conserving all 600 cells in an ammo-glutton map lol, due to past trauma from the now standardized "tight balance" / scavenge school of design. If excess ammo was the standard school of design I'd probably be arguing that was boring and formulaic tho. Regardless, the most choices are available to the player when they have the most tools available to them, dropping to chainsaw/infighting is not a choice (and not interesting or enjoyable to play) but a necessary response to the field as the mapper has laid it out, 99.99% of the time. 2 Quote Share this post Link to post
Cruduxy Pegg Posted February 3, 2021 Excessive ammo is the standard though.. Even the Iwads have enough ammo to destroy everything and some more. If a map even tries to hide some ammo you'll find the usual ammo replies. 0 Quote Share this post Link to post
Samuel Slayer Posted February 4, 2021 On 2/3/2021 at 9:54 PM, Pegg said: Excessive ammo is the standard though.. Even the Iwads have enough ammo to destroy everything and some more. If a map even tries to hide some ammo you'll find the usual ammo replies. Expand Which episode? I believe I was starting to have problems with ammo on higher difficulties with Episode 2&3. If not that, I really got that micromanagement survival experience with Lunar Catastrophe. 0 Quote Share this post Link to post
meganium_menagerie Posted February 4, 2021 (edited) On 2/3/2021 at 8:41 PM, Vorpal said: Play conservative and abuse infighting is how almost all players will handle that situation, and that's what I mean by railroaded, as it's less of a player choice and more of a necessary response to the choices the mapper made available, of which the guns-blazing-risky approach is off the board. Unless it is playthrough #5 where the player knows the flow and where the big fights occur, but it's not really fair to expect multiple playthroughs. At least in an ammo-glutton map, holding mouse1 with rockets/bfg is an extra mode of play, not the only one as you argue. Though, it doesn't stop players from still conserving all 600 cells in an ammo-glutton map lol, due to past trauma from the now standardized "tight balance" / scavenge school of design. If excess ammo was the standard school of design I'd probably be arguing that was boring and formulaic tho. Regardless, the most choices are available to the player when they have the most tools available to them, dropping to chainsaw/infighting is not a choice (and not interesting or enjoyable to play) but a necessary response to the field as the mapper has laid it out, 99.99% of the time. Expand Assuming it's not an empty box with Chaingunners and Archviles lined on the walls, I don't see why people would default to playing ultra conservative with infighting. Doom has a pretty high skill ceiling and you run a mile a minute; there's a lot of room for fancy footwork and dancing through firefights. Plus, the ammo in the open encourages me to try and be risky and show off. When I have too much ammo, that's when I start to hang back and play it safe. But that might just be my ADHD making me too impatient to plink away at enemies with the pistol or shotgun. Edit: First playthroughs are always miserable for me though! I never judge a map off them because going in blind poisons the enjoyment for me. So playthrough #5 is around when I expect to really start having fun, you're right. Edited February 4, 2021 by meganium_menagerie 1 Quote Share this post Link to post
Cruduxy Pegg Posted February 4, 2021 On 2/4/2021 at 1:52 AM, Samuel Slayer said: Which episode? I believe I was starting to have problems with ammo on higher difficulties with Episode 2&3. If not that, I really got that micromanagement survival experience with Lunar Catastrophe. Expand All of them except E4M1 :P. That's the only map that's extremely brutal with ammo. 3 Quote Share this post Link to post
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