Tips for making difficult levels?

[AtticTelephone]

I want to make more difficult levels, but I'm not entirely sure how to make difficult fun levels. I've just been doing things like using arachnotrons and revenants in tight areas and generally using different monster combinations and experimenting with layouts to create unique situations. I want to imitate the best parts of Hell Revealed (monster clusters and stuff) and some of Plutonia (mostly just the traps and surprises), and maybe experiment with ammo deprivation as well. Are there any tips I should know for creating difficult levels?

[ViolentBeetle]

What I do is design each encounter to push me to the limit with saves, give myself barely enough ammo and health to get by. I don't do monster clusters, but it won't be an obstacle. But of course if you yourself aren't having a good time, how can you expect the player to?

Then I remove 1/3 of the monsters for HMP and turns out it's actually fun to play.

[Stabbey]

The more directions a player has to worry about attacks coming from, the more divided their attention will be, and the more chances for mistakes. Height variations of placed enemies can help with that.

 

Tight areas are usually much tougher to deal with, but too tight an area can feel unfair and therefore unfun.

 

The same area can play out very differently if it brightly lit or if it mixes bright and dark. (I say mixes bright and dark because it feels more fair than an area which is just completely dim.)

[illYay1337]

I'm thinking about this too.  I'm used to making adventure style maps that are more chill, but I noticed the community really likes tougher frantic maps.  So I thought I'd make an adventure style map but toughen it up with crazy fights too.

I think there's more to it than just throwing in a room with 50 revenants.  There's gotta be some thought to map layout, item placement, etc...  I was just watching videos of playthroughs of maps like Sunlust, which tend to have nice looking but more abstract maps that focus on gameplay.  I'm thinking about making maps that feel like real world locations for that adventure feel, but actually also have crazy fight situations.

 

Doom Zero seemed to have a great balance of this too where the maps were really fun, felt like an adventure, and the fights ranged from chill to somewhat frantic, but rarely if ever, hitting plutonia levels of intensity.

Maybe block out some areas and playtest it to be fun in a fight, and then go in and theme it to look like a real world location afterwards.  That's basically the approach in any AAA FPS too as you design maps for multiplayer and single player.

Edited February 2, 2022 by illYay1337

[Jacek Bourne]

Difficulty is based on the following and much more that I’m not going to get into:

Shape of room or area in which an encounter takes place (what is the room in which the encounter takes place shaped like and how does that affect the monsters within it)

Amount of space within that area (how much space is there? Less space will increase difficulty)

Amount of monsters ( how many monsters are there within a space and how much space is there to accommodate their presence)

monster type (what monsters are you using)

monster placement (how are you using your various monsters? What function does a monster perform in the encounter? What is it’s purpose?)

how any given monster will function in a space (monsters will function differently based on the amount of space and the amount of any given monster type)

how will your monsters of the same and of different types interact with one another in an encounter or fight (will they be infighting? Will they be blocking one another? Will archviles be resurrecting anything?)

Weapons (what weapons does the player have access to and how effectively can those weapons deal with a the situation at hand? Does the player need to switch weapons during the encounter to deal with a developing situation? [For example, say the player has limited space and has a rocket launcher and a plasma gun. They have the rocket launcher out and enemies are approaching them and they cannot kill them before they get close enough to the player for the rocket’s splash damage to hurt the player. They will need to switch the the plasma gun so they don’t kill them self with the rocket’s splash damage)

Ammunition (how much ammo does the player have to deal with the encounter? Do they need to conserve it and use specific weapons at specific times because of a low ammo)

 

 

Edited February 4, 2022 by Jacek Bourne