Need tips and advice

[Soupcan pyro]

So I just published my first map recently, and I kinda want to make more (if my anxiety would allow it). And im looking for advice on monster and item placement and balancing.

Edited May 29, 2023 by Soupcan pyro
Added: and balancing

[Redneckerz]

7 minutes ago, Soupcan pyro said:

So I just published my first map recently, and I kinda want to make more (if my anxiety would allow it). And im looking for advice on monster and item placement and balancing.

There is this for Monsters and this for Items.

Edited May 29, 2023 by Redneckerz

[Jayextee]

13 minutes ago, Soupcan pyro said:

I kinda want to make more (if my anxiety would allow it)

 

Make more, please. Your anxiety is likely lying to you about something, we generally love more DOOM content and can be quite forgiving about the quality of a developing mapper's work. :)

[Somniac]

A general rule of thumb for item placement is to be more generous than you might think is necessary. Give the player a bit more ammo than you might need to clear an encounter. Sometimes resource starvation can work really well, but it's a fine line between tension and frustration. Same goes for stimpacks and such. 

 

For monsters, you can do a whole lot with placement but some good tips might be to think about which monsters make good stationary turrets/area denial, which monsters are good for causing infighting, and which ones can cause pressure on the player at close range and keep them moving. Chaingunners and Mancubus are really good at all three of those things, but you can substitute them with others for variety. 

[Soupcan pyro]

 

40 minutes ago, Jayextee said:

 

Make more, please. Your anxiety is likely lying to you about something, we generally love more DOOM content and can be quite forgiving about the quality of a developing mapper's work. :)

I just have some other stuff i like to do, art, sfm, playing video games, stuff like that... but sometimes my brain takes it a bit too far and makes me feel guilty when i try to do something else except drawing... like im supposed to be loyal to it. Ive made TONS of drawings, but it feels like its not enough...

 

Edited May 29, 2023 by Soupcan pyro
Added the last sentence

[Trustanus]

I found the map you made recently to be fairly challenged and balanced, just found the ending fighting a single baron to be a bit too easy. Perhaps if the door shut the player in with him there it would've made it harder to use the rocket launcher against him, making for a tougher close quarters fight to the end switch.

[azerty]

I can't really give you some concrete advice but I can tell you what I do. I either already have an idea of what I want want my fight to look like and then create my room around that idea or I just create a random room and find an interesting encounter in the room I just build. If I create my room before my encounter I usually change some stuff around to make the room flow better in combat. What I'm trying to say here is that I find monsters and environment working together pretty important. The room itself can make a certain monster way more powerful or scarier just because of how it's build and layed out. 

As for items, I tend to just look at the monsters I use, what weapons the player has and how easy the player is able to shoot the monsters with those weapons. Then I test the room like a thousand times and make small changes if I think it's needed. I don't really recommend this method but like I said that's how I do it.

Just make more maps and post them here on DW. I was like you at first I didn't dare to post my maps as I was scared of what people were going to say but when I eventually did I was surprised at how my maps were actually liked by people and if they weren't they were very constructive about it. They told me why and even gave some suggestions and I became a better mapper because of it. I hope this was helpful :)

[rita remton]

hi! just played your map. my take as a newbie mapper:

 

monster placement:

• most of the attacks were from 1 direction. i wish monsters attacked from multiple fronts at once. there was a trap (where the room became dark) and the monsters attacked from more than 1 direction, which i liked.
• use monster decoys - many weak monsters or a powerful monster to grab the attention of the player, while other monsters silently close in and attack from a different direction.
• avoid putting monsters in secret areas to give the player an option to achieve 100% kills without 100% secrets. if you still want to put monsters in such areas, use (a) a remote monster closet with 2 doors; 1st door to teleport the monsters to the secret location if the player finds it, and the 2nd door to teleport the monsters to an area near the level exit switch. or (b) use windows that makes use of monsters from non-secret areas to fire into the secret area.
• play other people's maps to learn their monster placement strategies.

item placement:

• as long as you do not put items in the middle of passageways to force players to pick them up. because some players would like to save health, ammo as backup.
• you could put keys on high ledges/near windows to guide the player to a certain map sector to obtain them.

balancing:

• for a map section, just add about 20% more than the health/ammo that you used in tests as buffer. this is the simplest solution.
• if you want to be thorough, give yourself 10,000 points for health and for all ammo (best test using gzdoom first because you could use [console commands] or [console command scripts] to assign the values). play-test a map section 10 times to find the mean health, ammo used, then calculate the 1st standard deviation for health and ammo. mean + 1st standard deviation are the initial values for the amount of health and ammo to be allocated for the map section.
  
• another way is to have primary and secondary weapons in a map section. that is, a map section could be completed using only the primary weapon or using only the secondary weapon (usually the sg/ssg :)). in this case, no additional % of ammo is required (mapper uses his/her own ammo amount in tests) because the secondary weapon's ammo becomes the buffer.\
• in all cases, you still need playtesters to test your map because all the calculations above only revolve around the mapper's abilities and does not consider other people's skill, especially for blind runs.

 

that's all i can think of from the top of my head. and please remember to stop mapping from time to time to play other people's maps to increase playing skills + learn monster placements etc from other mappers. again, please take all o this with a truckload of salt since i'm a newbie mapper too and still learning how to do basic mapping. good luck :)

Edited May 29, 2023 by rita remton
playtesters, blind runs, corrections.

[baja blast rd.]

My biggest tip would be that enemy placement and health/ammo balance is all about creating experiences, not playing it by the numbers. This approach is better and even easier to learn too. 

 

Try to have some idea of how you want something to play and how you want the player to feel, and make something that creates that scenario (you'll get it wrong, so playtest it and then iterate on your first draft until you get what you're going for). "I want a very exhilarating fight where the player has loads of rockets and cells, and imps are spawning in, and the player feels in danger but they can't really die" would lead to a different health/ammo balance than "I want a very tense setup where monsters are lurking behind shadows and corners and the player hears alert noises but doesn't know where everything is and is clearly undergunned and has a rush of elation just to find the next weapon or green armor." 

 

A lot of people get in in their head that balance is all about giving the player some amount of health relative to expected damage and some amount of ammo relative to the HP of monsters in the map, but that's not really how it works and it's possible for a map to be 'perfectly balanced' by those metrics but have no gameplay appeal. Balance is more about shaping what the player feels like they can do. If you want to create a fun 'power trip' map but the player feels they can't unload, you haven't succeeded yet even if there's 50% more ammo than needed. Likewise, an evasion and resource denial map hasn't succeeded if the player can easily kill everything or if you overlook pretty basic infighting, nor has it if the beginning of the map misleads and the player runs out of ammo without even having a shot (for example by kitting you up with lots of pickups and having nothing after that and no way to tell).

 

Also a second tip would be to never be too wed to one paradigm. You can learn the traditional 'monster roles' by the book, and use them efficiently to create threat. But then you might decide you want a fight where the player simply has a lot of fun blowing up imps that aren't especially threatening. Or you might use enemies in a non-standard way to create a specific encounter dynamic, like wedging a few harmless pinkies between a mancs and cg'ers as a buffer against infighting, or placing harmless zombies in front of chaingunners so there's a slight time buffer before when the chaingunners shred the player after they pop out of a trap. You're a beginner but that doesn't mean you can't think critically already. Think of enemy roles more as options you have, not rules or even guidelines to follow. 

 

I played your map and basically every enemy is encountered on the ground behind in front of the player, often behind a narrow doorway. The layout is pretty restrictive in some senses, because gameplay design starts with layout design. (With some paradigms, you work hard on having a good layout and then spend a relatively small amount of time placing enemies and you're already done. And that's not because the monster placement was an afterthought, but because the layout itself creates the gameplay.) 

 

If I had to work with a layout like this, I would use more turret enemies (monsters on ledges and perches, which means the player has to move out of the doorways to engage them). I would also create more setups that open up closets or teleport traps when the player is already inside of an area. A lot of people like placing more enemies in a more natural way, directly in the map itself, but the layout as constructed limits your options there. I would also use darkness and atmosphere to unnerve the player and mask enemies that would otherwise be trivially corner peekabooed (aesthetic and gameplay are related). Using those devices well is all about pacing. You might not want to overdo traps like that, maybe space them out at crucial moments. There are some moments where the player backtracks from one key door to another, and it's a common device but you could have a "backtrack trap," where a closet opens up for the player to fight monsters on return. There are a few moments that could be more intense. The blue key trap is very telegraphed and the player has a rocket launcher with healthy ammo, but out of those big closets come a total of two HKs and four imps.   

 

The best way to learn is to play maps you like and think about what they're doing critically, and try to remake aspects of them. The remaking part is powerful because you might think you understand everything just by playing it, but upon trying to remake it and having your attempt fall flat, you might realize you didn't really get many subtle details about it. Tacit learning is a thing, which is why people don't learn to ride bikes by watching a video and then assuming they know how to ride a bike -- you have to do it too, which goes for reading. If you find some advice in this thread helpful, play around with it in the editor. :P  

[Lucius Wooding]

If you place hitscan, be sure to place extra health since they basically cause automatic damage.

 

There are some mitigating factors like the amount of cover or having monsters in the crossfire to infight, but this is a good rule of thumb. Too much hitscan will make the player slow down to a crawl in order to play safe, and even then it's difficult to hold onto your health through long sections. However you should absolutely use hitscan since it's a good way to provide ammo and is very satisfying to kill.