The Fun Zone™ aka the difference between how you think a player will behave vs how the player actually behaves

[⇛Marnetmar⇛]

This topic of discussion occurred to me after watching a demo hfc2x recorded of a level I'm working on. With mapping and monster placement, I think it's unavoidable that you will end up balancing your levels around your own playstyle to some degree. Now, my own playstyle is this: I play Doom extremely recklessly and over-aggressively, arguably to the point where someone might think I'm playing badly on purpose. This puts me in the minority, as it seems most people play about ten times more calmly and strategically than I do.

 

Thus, I tend to design rooms and fights with the assumption that the player will go in all-guns-blazing and think that I'm hot shit when I playtest my own level and die a hundred times. However, when someone does the objectively more sensible thing of hanging out in the back of the room and picking enemies off until the room is safe to enter, what I thought was a hard-as-balls fight actually turns out to be an easy weenie fight for babies.

 

Thing is, while playing more strategically is the objectively sensible thing to do, I don't think my own playstyle is wrong. After all, Hugo Martin even has a term for it -- running back and forth across the room, narrowly dodging projectiles, switching weapons mid-fight -- and that term, as you may know, is The Fun Zone™. During Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal's development, id was faced with the question of how to force the player into The Fun Zone™ and keep them there, and the answer ultimately came down to locking players in rooms until fights were over -- I don't like doing this, so I don't do it, but it seems that in the years since 2016 and Eternal's release, nobody has come up with a better solution yet.

 

What are your thoughts on this? Can you force the player into The Fun Zone™? Should you force the player into The Fun Zone™? And of course, discussion isn't limited only to this topic specifically -- what anecdotes or thoughts do you have about players not behaving the way you expect them to during playtesting?

Edited April 10, 2024 by ⇛Marnetmar⇛

[ObserverOfTime]

If you don't want the player to be able to play a safe game you simply have to deny him safety. This can be done a number of ways:

 

1. Exposed ledges with enemies placed outside the effective autoaim range, meaning you can't linger or have to eat the chip damage

2. Damaging floor everywhere and a measured amount of radsuits. You can play with this by offering non-damaging spots to stand on, but you should ideally also apply the first point to such spots.

3. Teleporting a measure of monsters a little further behind an already cleared out area, so that if the player retreats he will still run into resistance. Of course you should make sure the player knows there are monsters there to take out as to not miss them by accident.

4. If you really don't want your player to stand in the doorway and just pick off monsters one by one, a little ceiling or floor crusher can work wonders to get the player moving. Ideally activated after a sufficient delay.

5. Locking the player in an arena is simple and effective as it prevents the "Just Leave™" strategy and forces the player to confront the monsters.

6. Careful ammo balancing can force the player to have to forage into unsafe territory for supplies. If you keep the ammo short but sufficient and scatter what is needed throughout the arena for the upcoming fight, you can motivate a player to venture out of the doorway out of sheer necessity.

 

I honestly wish there were more types of doors that close after a certain time has elapsed. Those 30s perma-closing doors are pretty fun to muck about with but I wish there was more flexibility about the total time before closing. You could design little reward closets you get to for finishing an area extra fast and taking a risk.

 

These are half a dozen ideas that come to mind. Should you force the player to play in an aggressive and risk-taking manner? That is entirely up to you and what experience you are trying to create. If you are simply trying to improve the quality of your level(s) then my best advice is putting it out there for people to play it and gather feedback. Or get a number of people to playtest, either works. It is amazing what a different set of eyes can see and pick out. Getting a sample from players of all different skill levels is also a good idea, unless you are specifically targeting a certain demographic. Can't say I have ever heard about the Fun Zone, it sounds vaguely familiar to the concept of Flow.

[RataUnderground]

As a counterpoint, I would like to argue that the concept of "fun zone" is misguided because it is not universal for all players. In fact, for each person the way to have fun playing would be different, and perhaps penalizing a specific style too much so that a map has to be played in another way, takes away too much agency from the players. You have to know when to apply pressure and when to give the player the freedom to face challenges in their own way.

[Stabbey]

3 hours ago, ⇛Marnetmar⇛ said:

This topic of discussion occurred to me after watching a demo hfc2x recorded of a level I'm working on. With mapping and monster placement, I think it's unavoidable that you will end up balancing your levels around your own playstyle to some degree. Now, my own playstyle is this: I play Doom extremely recklessly and over-aggressively, arguably to the point where someone might think I'm playing badly on purpose. This puts me in the minority, as it seems most people play about ten times more calmly and strategically than I do.

 

Thus, I tend to design rooms and fights with the assumption that the player will go in all-guns-blazing and think that I'm hot shit when I playtest my own level and die a hundred times. However, when someone does the objectively more sensible thing of hanging out in the back of the room and picking enemies off until the room is safe to enter, what I thought was a hard-as-balls fight actually turns out to be an easy weenie fight for babies.

 

Thing is, while playing more strategically is the objectively sensible thing to do, I don't think my own playstyle is wrong.

 

It's perfectly all right to design maps explicitly for yourself and your own enjoyment. It's also up to you to decide whether or not you want to encourage players to play maps a certain way. If fixing a map would make it less fun to play for you, you don't have to fix it.

 

I do however think that even if you only want to play a map in one way, you should at least try to play your maps in multiple different ways. Try different approaches, see what ways there are to cheese or exploit fights. Try to escape. Try to find different spots to hide. As the map designer, the duty of trying to break your map falls on your shoulders. Once you know how to break a fight, you can decide what to do about it - including doing nothing at all. But you should at least know as much about how the map plays in multiple different ways as possible.

 

I'll do a study for my map Nukage Treatment Pools.

 

Spoiler

Starting Room:

The opening room of the map has the player starting by looking towards an Exit across a pit of nukage, which has boxes floating in it. Text on the ground labels it as "Overflow Pool". A small building sits in the middle of the courtyard with a window facing the pit on one side and a yellow keyed door on the other. The room is otherwise empty of threats, although one secret is available for the eagle-eyed. There is just a single medikit, no ammo, armor, or weapons.

 

First Encounter:

The first encounter is actually tremendously busy, even though the player starts out with nothing. It’s a large square room, with a raised walkway on the outer area blocked by an impassible grating on both sides.  The center is a lowered pit with wide terraced stairs descending into the center to allow for free movement of players and monsters. There are doors at cardinal directions leading out of the arena. A shotgun, some shells, and green armor are given to the player near the opening door. Most enemies are facing away, allowing the player a few seconds to scan the room, but some imps and cacos will see the player immediately, so the clock has started ticking.

 

I want to encourage players to fight in the arena, which is difficult because there are groups of shotgunners at each exit, and a couple chaingunners at the far side. There are also shotgunners in small alcoves around the perimeter. But the biggest threat are the four Revenants, whose tracking shots have a lot of freedom to travel because of the gratings. There are of course pillars to smash the missiles on, but the player will have to be aware of missiles. Here’s how I encourage the player to stay in the arena:

 

• No supplies in the opening room. The player isn’t going to be able to do much with no ammo. There is a chaingun and SSG in the center of the room on the lower ground. Ammo is all in the center room, but around the edges.
• There is a good supply of health, but only small packs around the outside. Medikits are around teleporters in the center which take players to the opposite high/low corner of the arena, and around the center itself, so if players want to heal, they have to get into the middle.
• All three doors out are initially guarded by shotgunner groups. Opening any of them reveals a long open corridor/stairs with three chaingunners at the far end and pits on either side of the stairs. The player can charge at the chaingunners, but may be worried about taking damage from continuous fire. The pits will allow them to approach in safety, although that will allow enemies from the main room to catch up, and I suspect few players will wish to charge further into the unknown.
• The large amount of enemies will encourage infighting as they attack towards the player and hit their fellow demons.

That third point however, produced a problem: It was too easy for players to just run in circles picking off hitscanners while letting everyone else kill each other. Running in circles is boring. I needed a way to force the player to actually engage in combat. I added a few Pain Elementals into the mix which slowly filtered in to fill the arena up in lost souls, which encouraged the player to stop running around the outside and enter the spicy center to take them out before being overwhelmed. With that, I didn’t need to use a lock-in.

 

Don't forget that you can play with weapon, ammo, and health placement to adjust encounters. Something as simple as putting health and ammo in the middle can work wonders at making players take risks. That's what Doom 2016 did with it's glory kill system, encouraging players to heal by putting themself at risk.