Nine Inch Heels

Well, R-type is probably my least favourite horizontal shmup, because the games I played from that series didn't have any scoring system to begin with, gradius is quite similar in that regard, though I'd pick gradius over R-type any day, personally.

If I was to implement scoring to doom in a shmuppy kind of way without forcing gameplay to far away from what we have now, I'd do it exclusively by way of multipliers.

To give an example, Imagine a monster with like 100 HP. When you kill it, you get its HP as a score, for example. To get a risk/rewardsystem in, I'd use 3 layers of multipliers:

1)Proximity: If you're at point-blank-ish range, you get like 4 times the score for a kill when you deliver the killing blow. If you're close to point blank and up to 200mu away from the monster, you get a 2x multiplier, and anything above 200mu gets no multiplier.

2)Health: The lower the player is on health, the higher their base multiplier. if you are at 33% or lower, you get a 8 times multiplier, if you are at 66% or lower you get a 3 times multiplier, and if you're above 66% you get no multiplier.

3)Attack animation: Killing something during its attack animation should give a 2x multiplier.

Assuming all of this was possible to implement: you could kill that 100 HP monster for 100 - 6400 points depending on the situation, and that allows for very shmuppy risk reward setups, because it is an incentive for players to take risks. Now imagine that scoring system on a cybie with 4000HP. That's what I'm calling interesting, because it makes people want to point-blank-BFG them all the time for score.

Hmm, I see how it goes about the points and I am already interested in that Doom risky gameplay, although it probably doesn't exist, since you need the point system for it to be worth it.

By the way, if you know by heart the level you are playing and the enemies that appear on it, would lowering your health to 33% and below from the beginning be a strategic move or would it be considered a dumb move?

I mean, if you are going for the points, it would still be worth it, but is it a viable technique and can a well-trained player survive the bullet tsunami, till the end of the level?

It would of course be a strategic move. Maps made for such a mod would have to have options available for players to make decisions about how much health they'd need before starting a fight in the next room or so. Letting something hit you, or having some voodoo doll trickery there to allow for a convenient quick adjust at the start would be mandatory for this, imo.