How do I make combat in my maps more engaging?

[nerdybunny]

Maybe it's just because it's my own map so I know everything about it, but I find that the combat encounters in my map as they are kind of stink. I essentially just sort of make a decently sized room and plunk a bunch of monsters in said rooms. I try to vary the height and such but it still feels like I'm just creating big monster parties of varying sizes. Are there any tips or methodologies to improving combat encounters with monsters in my maps?

[thelamp]

something that has worked for me in the past is instead of thinking of the monsters in terms of their stats, I try to focus on the personality of monsters. stuff like:

- revenants and viles are sneaky bastards, always hiding somewhere you aren't looking

- mancs don't like moving much so put them somewhere with a good view so they don't have to

- imps know they're squishy, that's why they like being grouped up

you can pretty much contrive any reasoning you want since it really doesn't matter, but I find thinking this way helps to make an encounter feel more cohesive

Edited October 22, 2022 by thelamp

[Lucius Wooding]

-Don't make all your rooms decently sized, otherwise everything is just a monster storage warehouse. Make rooms a bit more cramped since blocking the player's movement is a huge threat compared to a vanilla ball of monsters you can circle strafe. Big rooms feel empty a lot of the time and if you fill them with monsters it can be slow and tedious to clear them. In the same way, having the player clear 30 revenants instead of 5 is often redundant since a simple arena will make them play the same but take longer and use more ammo. I often find the 5 or fewer in a tricky setup to be a lot more interesting to fight than the slaughter squad in a big open room.

 

-Don't make your rooms traditionally shaped, use some more interesting shapes or architecture like platforms and stairs to add verticality. Instead of a rectangle or hexagon or the like which tend to play the same, something that's effectively V shaped or T shaped, for example, play dramatically differently. If you have a square room, maybe throw in a U shaped tall staircase to an upper section on one side, or place some platforms to cut down the player's space and serve as cover, or some side passages to hide in and find supplies. That kind of stuff is super important, every possible setup for a flat simple polygon shaped room has been done to death in the last 30 years of mapping. But sometimes just a slight variation done creatively and executed well can feel very memorable. Plus that kind of stuff creates more visual interest and can be a great starting point to build the aesthetics around.

 

-Use archviles, they work differently from everything else. They make some of the best turret monsters since they can deny part of a room to the player, and can make a few monsters into a big threat against a thusly trapped player. Being able to resurrect monsters is a threat but their hitscan attack and unique infighting AI make them stand out in a crowd.

 

-Use barrels, people forget they exist but they can create interesting strategies and increase the player's damage output without giving them weapons or ammo. A great way to turn monsters like arachnotrons into squishy turrets is to chuck a few barrels to their sides, very satisfying to take out. Also you can use them as a form of soft cover or a terrain hazard, or hide a monster teleporter under them depending on your sourceport.

 

-Don't design fights strictly around the SSG, it gets a bit bland though some people don't mind the safety blanket.

 

-You can place monsters where they're very awkward to kill, it will make the player slow down and play carefully a lot of the time. If you tee up monsters where they're a breeze for a given weapon it will make that section play a lot quicker. It can create a spectrum of pacing, make things more fun or hostile feeling, and you should definitely experiment and learn to create the feel you want. It can be good to use both styles in different sections of a map to create contrast, and obviously the monster types and weapons and ammo available will certainly play a factor as well. Also the same contrast can be attributed to the health available to the player; if you're sub 50 health a lot of the time in a map stuffed with hitscan, it's going to be very gritty while a map full of megaspheres, even if the monster count is high, is going to encourage the player to stroll around with impunity.

[Stabbey]

1 hour ago, nerdybunny said:

Maybe it's just because it's my own map so I know everything about it, but I find that the combat encounters in my map as they are kind of stink. I essentially just sort of make a decently sized room and plunk a bunch of monsters in said rooms. I try to vary the height and such but it still feels like I'm just creating big monster parties of varying sizes. Are there any tips or methodologies to improving combat encounters with monsters in my maps?

 

My first thought is that you have the wrong order of construction. For me, the first step to making interesting combat, is to think up an idea for an interesting combat scenario, and then build a room to hold it. There's more to finishing the combat encounter, but the first step is the start with the idea.

 

Once you have an idea, build the room out roughly, without much detail. Then put in the monsters, and test it to get a feel to see if the combat plays out. If it doesn't work as you envisioned, figure out why and revise the room or monsters. Iterate on that step a few times to get it satisfactory.

 

If you "can't think of any interesting combat scenarios", then play more WADs, there are thousands out there. Play enough WADS and let your mind wander and you'll find inspiration. Look at interesting WADs in an editor if you're curious on how something works.

 

Edited October 22, 2022 by Stabbey
if can't think of interesting scenarios

[fai1025]

my brand of make map fun

• don't just make demon wander around
• avoid monster window dressing
• Barons are rubbish, use Hell knights
• I hate cramp maps
• use more variaty of enemy
• I hate ammo stingy maps
• I hate health stingy maps
• to much pain elemental to much pain, 1 or 2 pain element make fight different 

[Nefelibeta]

29 minutes ago, Stabbey said:

 

My first thought is that you have the wrong order of construction. For me, the first step to making interesting combat, is to think up an idea for an interesting combat scenario, and then build a room to hold it. There's more to finishing the combat encounter, but the first step is the start with the idea.

 

Once you have an idea, build the room out roughly, without much detail. Then put in the monsters, and test it to get a feel to see if the combat plays out. If it doesn't work as you envisioned, figure out why and revise the room or monsters. Iterate on that step a few times to get it satisfactory.

 

If you "can't think of any interesting combat scenarios", then play more WADs, there are thousands out there. Play enough WADS and let your mind wander and you'll find inspiration. Look at interesting WADs in an editor if you're curious on how something works.

 

Second this, come up with encounters first instead of trying to make encounters that fit into the shapes you draw.

I would suggest you to not follow the exact steps of how other people build their encounters though.

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

That is a very loaded question.

I would say, try to play a bunch of Doom and every now and then pause and take a look at what the encounters look like. How they're set up. Whether you enjoy them or not. If you learn to paint, you have a look at other people's paintings in hopes of learning something from them. Not with the attitude of "I wanna paint just like Van Gogh" but more like "this is interesting line work, I haven't thought of that." Don't just copy other maps' design or encounters - get inspired. Understand how and why they work.

 

Secondly, learn about the monsters. They're your pals, dudes, and amigos. You wanna get to know them well. Making a room of the right size and shape is much easier if you know you wanna have a scenario with the player having an SSG and behind door is a flock of four revenants waiting to ambush. How much room for movement you need to get by in that situation? If you know that revenant will always try to punch you if you're 196 units or closer to them, you can size the room just right. 196 units feels like a lot of space in the editor, right? It's not that much in-game. Or maybe you make the room deliberately a bit too small so the player has to leave. And expecting that, you can have some nice surprise waiting outside as well. Think of the encounters, the flow, how the player may react, surprise the player, make them go "haha, you got me there, bud!" 

 

Test your map a million times, make adjustments here and there, take different gameplay approaches, are you getting sick of your own fights? What can you do to make them more interesting?

 

Good level design is not just about making nice spaces, and then dropping monsters in so the player has something to do. Making a level the plays good is hundred times more important than making a level that looks good. Fortunately for us all, Doom is fun to play. You can pick up any 90s shovelware map, and have a good-ish time with it. You make a level, and Doom provides some base level of fun. The rest is in your hands.

glhf

[Nefelibeta]

9 hours ago, Sneezy McGlassFace said:

Don't just copy other maps' design or encounters - get inspired. Understand how and why they work.

I would say it's a pretty interesting idea to remix the fights that you adore.

 

Spoiler

I'm not trying to justify for all my previous attempts to steal others' ideas. heh

 

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

1 hour ago, Nefelibeta said:

I would say it's a pretty interesting idea to remix the fights that you adore.

 

  Hide contents

I'm not trying to justify for all my previous attempts to steal others' ideas. heh

 

What's the saying? Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery? I think it's totally cool to do, it'll help trying to understand them. If it's not just "oh, this is a cool fight, control-c, control-v."

[PineFresh]

On 10/22/2022 at 2:09 AM, Sneezy McGlassFace said:

Think of the encounters, the flow, how the player may react, surprise the player, make them go "haha, you got me there, bud!"

I only recently came back to this community, so I wasn't around when the big focus on combat design became a thing. But this line is kind of like how I'm trying to do combat these days. I'm reworking an old project that I never released, and I've found myself thinking of how combat flows and one group leads to another, etc... it reminds me almost of encounters in D&D or another tabletop game.

 

"Ok, as you enter this room there are four radiation tanks with an arachnotron on top of each. You can start picking them off with the SSG and hug the tanks for cover, but now there are mancubi who woke up from behind the furthest tank and complicating things (and a few imps for flavor). The arachnos are too high up for infighting to be made easy."

 

"In the next room, a few hitscanners stand on a bridge over a radiation pit. As you take those out, several lost souls rise out of the nukage. Flip the switch, and the back and side walls open to reveal a catwalk with further soldier types, and now cacos have warped in where the lost souls rose up earlier."

 

"Later you warp onto the catwalk, where a new group has appeared. As you round the catwalk killing imps as you go, a mancubus on the far end draws your eye as the apparent priority, but then when you're halfway around your path, an archvile spawns down on the bridge from earlier. You have some cover from his fire, but the catwalk is enclosed with bars so you can't get close to him, and the bridge is still littered with dead hitscanners for him to raise (and cacos, if you let them float over the railings)."

 

I don't know how well this kind of style meshes with modern standards - and I don't have any interest in slaughter maps, so I don't think in that mindset - but for now it's good enough for me to look at my old designs and go "wtf?" I definitely had a more boring/methodical approach when I first made some of these maps. In addition to the bland SSG-centric dispatchings that Lucius mentioned, I always used to use archviles and pain elementals in ways that made them completely irrelevant (you'd open a tiny room with just the one entrance, there's an archvile, the door's too small for him to get out if you block it, SSG x3-4, dead). I think back in those days I just really hated those enemies, but I guess I felt I had to include them somewhere (I recall having a lot of faux-OCD over keeping any created/resurrected monsters to a minimum when I play). Best way I've found to use them is to, by all means, give the player a chance to dispatch them before they cause trouble - but make them work for it (for instance you'd gonna have to get a few rockets down to that bridge in quick succession in my last example, and the vile is restricted by the closeness of the bridge but he of course also moves pretty damn fast, and SSG will be ineffective at that range).

[RDETalus]

4 hours ago, PineFresh said:

it reminds me almost of encounters in D&D or another tabletop game

That's exactly how I go about it and it makes my combat enjoyable. Not mind-blowing innovative doom combat, but just fun.

 

On 10/22/2022 at 11:34 AM, Stabbey said:

For me, the first step to making interesting combat, is to think up an idea for an interesting combat scenario, and then build a room to hold it.

Seconding this. It's very important to imagine a fun combat scenario in your head FIRST, then build the room to accomplish that scenario SECOND.

 

On 10/22/2022 at 9:58 AM, nerdybunny said:

I essentially just sort of make a decently sized room and plunk a bunch of monsters in said rooms.

Do you create any traps?

For example:

1. A player moves down a bend in a hallway, a closet opens up behind him, pinky demons rush out and force the player further down the hall right and into the line of sight of chaingunners.
2. A player walks into a room when suddenly some doors pop open and revenants pop out. The player tries to retreat backwards to find cover, but an archvile that secretly came out behind him blocks his way.
3. A player is walking near some water when he sees an imp. He shoots the imp, but the sound causes a bunch of cacodemons to suddenly rise out of the water.

 

Environment plays a big role too. Suppose you have a pond of lava, with a safe little island for the player to stand on in the middle. Unfortunately, standing on that island puts you in direct line of sight with an archvile, so the player has to make a decision to stay on the island and get nuked or get off the island and get burned.

Edited October 23, 2022 by RDETalus

[Naarok0fkor]

Use "Spawn things" on important powerups to spawn monsters using tagged map spots in the right places...

[Stabbey]

If you really want to get those creative juices flowing, you can always write down the names of all the monsters in the game on folded pieces of paper, stick them into a hat, and pull out 2-3, and make a small map using only those monsters. Figuring out how to make an interesting map using only a very limited monster selection should be brain-stimulating.

[PineFresh]

As a related idea, you could make a map without a specific few numbers of monsters. Like in one map you don't have mancubi or arachnotrons, and in the next you have those but you don't have barons/knights and revenants. Before you know it the player's moved onto another map and they're like "dang haven't seen those guys in awhi- oh."

[nerdybunny]

Solid advice in this thread. Thanks everyone. Didn't mean to start a discussion but here we are! :P

[Kappes Buur]

Some maps I have played go for shock value, where it is not quite evident where the bullets are coming from. Maybe from far away or possibly through some window opening. 

 

Include enough spaces where the player can hide for a spell to get a bearing of the layout. There is nothing more annoying than to lose 60% of health in the first few seconds.

Edited October 24, 2022 by Kappes Buur

[IcarusOfDaggers]

Lot of good answers here. Only thing I would like to add is my own categorization for monsters(one of many):

 

• Dangerous up close: Hell Knights, Barons
• Dangerous, if left alive: Pain Elementals, Lost Souls, Arch Vile
• Dangerous from afar: Chaingunner, Arachnotron, Cacodemon, Bunch of Imps
• Good at cornering: Pinkys
• Dangerous at ambushes: Revenants, Hell Knights,Chaingunners, Shotgunners
• Fat guys blocking a lot of area: Mancubus, Cacodemons, Pain Elementals,Pinkys
• Dangerous in dark rooms: Spectres.
• Dangerous in large areas: Arachnotrons, Mancubus, Cyberdemon.
• Turret monsters: Revenants, Arachnotrons, Arch Viles, Hitscan(zombies), Mancubus
• Snipers: Mancubus, Arachnotrons, Imps, Chaingunners, Turret Cybers.
• Cage turrets: Cacodemons, Revenants