trying to bang this stuff out now since it's kind of important to have all the things in mind before making a bunch of maps
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tell a story. it's about how hell is infecting earth (and now you have the power to show this better) but also about how the protagonist is the last human left in this whole place, his home. scale should get bigger and lonelier as the game goes on
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should introduce a new or changed thing in a natural way (valve style) — don't force the player to read a big fuckin readme that spoils everything
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keep with the doom theme! don't radically change the game, don't use images or sounds that don't fit. evolve it, gently.
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minimize dead ends. connect areas together naturally but surprisingly. have the player revisit areas from new perspectives. be more open, less claustrophobic (except when deliberate — vary it). vary height, add themed detail. start general, detail last.
some zdoom features i hear about that sound neat but that i have not yet found a particular use for
- you can have an inventory
- there can be weapons made out of multiple pieces — you need all the pieces to get the weapon
- there's a "morph" mechanic that can turn you into a chicken or whatever
- there are sector types that heal you
- you can freeze monsters
- you can make friendly monsters
- you can spawn monsters from items
- you can fake area-of-effect damage with e.g. flames or toxic gas objects
- you can, apparently, push monsters much more effectively than my grenade attempt
- you can make weapons/armor cost armor/health, or drain health from an enemy, etc
- smoke trail behind imp fireballs
- pistol, chaingun, shotgun drop shell casings
- lighter blue
i love items. i love powerups. i love just finding stuff to get. gives me more things i feel like doing.
radsuit: i think i'd like to split this into two items — one that protects you against green slime (including hell knight slimeballs) and one that protects you against lava (including fireballs)
soul sphere: replace with a regeneration effect?
more keys: for when i'm tired of red/blue/yellow.
medium-size ammo, health, armor: allows for some variation in pickups, which is nice.
doom sphere: 2× damage dealt, 2× damage taken. i really fuckin like this.
combat armor: only bumps you to 50% (so you need less than that to pick it up), but absorbs bullet damage really well?
something that teleports you back to the spawn point the first time your health drops below 25%?
something that temporarily increases how much health/armor you can have? three possibilities come to mind: raise max to 250% or 300%, normal logic; leave max alone, but medikits can increase you over 100%; immediate bump to 300%, but it decreases over time back to 200%
i dig alt fire, but given that two thirds of the stock arsenal just shoots bullets, i'm not sure what all space there is for alt-fire here. instead maybe each weapon number could just have two weapons?
i've been reading what doomrl and brutal doom (sigh) do, and kind of like some of these ideas
i'm not really big on reloading. and i don't mean the ssg's reloading; that's per-shot, which is fine, makes it part of the fire animation. adding reloading after X shots would kind of dramatically change the game; you could have a weapon up and fire and discover you are fucked. that doesn't really fit with a run-and-gun game like doom
would prefer not to add more ammo types; definitely no more than one
some niches that are missing from the doom loadout: extreme crowd control, dispersion (once you're surrounded you're fucked)
one thing that always struck me: despite the obvious hell theme of doom, none of the weapons are hell-themed. every single one is techy. that seems really weird. alas i don't really have any good art resources at my disposal for filling this gap.
TODO: rifle through the resources in the old weapons resource wad and doomrl (some not usable without attribution) and maybe even that joke weapons wad
fist: seems fine. interaction with berserk is interesting; basically a better weapon that you lose at the end of the level. does that kind of mechanic make sense for anything else?
chainsaw: it totally annoys me that a second chainsaw, anywhere in the entire game, will just sit there, taunting you, unable to ever be picked up. but then what is the alternative. wait! what if your chainsaw breaks after so much use? (i guess that would function as invisible ammo, where the amount you get from a chainsaw pickup == the max you can carry)
pistol: sucks. hard to kill basically everything. in my mind the base weapon is really the shotgun. every other weapon has SOME use, but the pistol is only useful after you've run out of ammo for everything else and haven't found a chaingun. but what to replace it with that wouldn't unbalance everything else? i really like the blaster from quake 2 but i think having an ammo-less weapon in slot 2 would kind of change the game a lot. but also, maybe not? i mean, running out of ammo is what changes the game really; maybe you want to still have something you can fire with zero ammo. note that valiant replaces it entirely, with a pistol with a much better fire rate (and the chaingun is likewise much faster)
shotgun: bumped up to 9 pellets per shot, same spread.
possible altfire idea: hold to charge up to three shots, like doom 4?
super shotgun: might increase the spread a teeny tiny bit
possible altfire: shoot only one barrel? 10 pellets, so slightly better than shotgun, but in a different spread pattern
chaingun: maybe increase spread and speed slightly
rocket launcher: is cool, but seems like it doesn't seem all that much use? especially when ssg packs roughly equivalent punch. also, 100 rockets??? that seems like a lot??
altfire ideas: slower, less damage, but slight homing? much faster but very little splash (a la direct hit)?
plasma gun: sound needs toning down :) surprisingly powerful; about 200 to take out a cyberdemon, and leaves it in pain anim most of the time.
altfire ideas: shoot green pellets instead, which would cost 2 and have slight blast damage?
bfg: i don't think i want to mess with the bfg son
altfire: throw it (losing it and all your cells); after a few seconds it explodes in a huge radius. TODO: need sounds for the charge and explosion, need to make the explosion cool visually somehow
2: silenced pistol: this does damage, but makes no noise, so it doesn't alert enemies. it needs some severe toning down as a result, but i think making it wildly inaccurate might be a good start?
altfire ideas: ??? this is already a pistol variation so i'm really not sure
4: minigun: like the heavy's minigun in tf2. dispenses bullets at an alarming rate, but has spinup/spindown and slows down movement speed. altfire is to spin up the barrel without firing yet.
current status: mostly done, works surprisingly well. view bob looks kinda silly when slow but i have no control over it; maybe should just reduce the slowdown. needs a whirr sound.
5: grenade launcher: bouncing differentiates it from the rocket launcher, which is good. i was playing around with this, trying to make it so that grenades did low damage but had a lot of knockback (to help with the problem of being surrounded by enemies and unable to get away) but without much success so far. it must be possible, i'm pretty sure something in wrw did a lot of knockback?
6(?): railgun: it's like the one unique thing zdoom supports, so might as well
current status: pretty stock. designed for skulltag, needs some balancing for doom. probably reload after every shot.
altfire ideas: zoom? can i do that? can i also disable regular zoom? i think it's a keybind
7: ???: resurrect monsters as friendly? freeze monsters? summon monsters? some kind of projectile that also hits everything around it, bfg style, but radius rather than rays?
in general a lot of monsters could stand to have their ai jiggled a little bit, just enough to keep doom experts on their toes — for example, mancubi should really have the angles of their fireballs randomized, and sometimes they might want to fire a fourth one
i'm not sure what gaps there are in the existing bestiary that would be interesting to fill. so far i only have a couple, both low-health.
so what else? i have realm667 sprites for railgun or rocket zombies but i'm not sure about them; railgun is a big colorful thing you can't dodge, which seems against the spirit of doom, and rockets everywhere is kind of chaotic. either way they are both very specialized, right?
there aren't that many other sprites available to me that aren't very clearly edits of existing monsters, so i don't want more than a handful of them, and they should probably do something interesting. lemme see here:
- a more stealthy or tricky monster? something that can teleport away, or teleport in, or whatever?
- boss-ish monster with multiple forms? monster that spawns another monster when it does? (valiant mods arachnotrons to do this)
- something that splits itself (and its health) if you're not paying attention to it?
- something with an attack that has a persistent damaging effect, like fire or toxic gas or whatever?
- something that summons minions?
- zombie marine, who has your full loadout? uses whatever weapon you hit him with...?
cacodemon: bleeds blue. drops and splats when killed.
hell knight, baron of hell: bleeds green. radiation suit protects against slimeballs.
pistol zombie: 5% chance to drop a bullet kit instead (+30, versus +10 for clip)
shotgun zombie: 75% chance to drop shotgun (+8). 25% chance to drop either shells (+4, 30%) or shell kit (+12, 70%). those two rolls are independent, so you might get both shotgun and ammo from the same zombie, or neither.
chaingun zombie: 75% chance to drop chaingun (+20). 25% chance to drop either commando armor (5%), a box of bullets (+50, 25%), or a bullet kit (+30, 70%). again, the two big rolls are independent.
(all three of the zombies, on average, only drop slightly more ammo than they do in doom 2.)
lost soul: doesn't bleed. 9% chance to drop an armor bonus.
arachnotron: 12% chance to drop a plasma cell (but using the beta sprite).
spider mastermind: drops a variety of bullet pickups.
cyberdemon: drops a variety of rocket pickups.
zombie scientists: low health, fairly slow, melee enemy
plasma zombies: low health but shoot plasma cells, so higher threat
baby cacodemon: adorable
i also have female variants of the stock zombie monsters but have yet to use them — would be cool if every zombie could randomly become female when spawned though
this is tricky since i can have no input whatsoever; basically i can find sounds and use them, and that's it
i'm only even thinking about this because doomrl has some pretty nice sounds
just some thoughts about maps
spoilers!!!! don't read this if you don't want to know what i have comin
i like the idea that each map should have a sort of editor theme going on; so far map01 does a lot of room over room, map02 does a lot of liquids. what wonders will map03 hold?? (looking to be slopes)
gatr suggested a door that leads to a different area depending on what keys you have, which is fascinating
i want areas to change to become somewhat more hellish when you come back
make maps slightly different to play on different difficulties? e.g. some doors are unlocked, some walls are missing, some secrets are more obvious? maybe rooms are even smaller on higher difficulty?
beginning doesn't really make sense; you aren't infiltrating, you just came back through a portal from hell
getting stuck on the sloped light is really annoying
consider having the player start with literally nothing? (but then, i'd have to do that on every map... which is actually kind of interesting)
need to teach the player that they need to crouch and jump in this wad
terrain out front needs some serious improvement; pretty obviously flat atm. iirc it looks especially bad from the office window. vertex heights are probably the most reliable way to make this work.
i saw at least one misaligned texture on the fountain
poor introduction to the doomsphere. not obvious what it does, and you will basically die. (doomsphere needs some more space to experiment with it, and maybe like a poison floor so you can tell what it does)
ending elevator should start moving down before the level ends
needs to loop back together a lot better. general rule: minimize dead ends. should be able to drop back down from the outdoor area in a sensible way, and probably
get rid of the teleporter
i don't know what i'm doing with the dark sewer bit. probably figure it out, chief.
water temple bit is kinda bad. need some flat alignment on the crates, or just pick a flat without obvious edges. also there's a zdoom bug with drawing the boxes when they hit the roof; investigate/fix, or at least report?
starting elevator should be in the process of moving down when you start the level
this seems like a connecting area between map02 (sewers) and map04 (very techbase). should kind of wind around and feel like a back entrance to something. how do i make this a good interconnected map though? (to be fair, original map03 doesn't feel very interconnected; has three distinct segregated areas, is pretty short and simple overall.) maybe i can take the original ideas of map03 and connect them better, so there's not like an awkward teleporter in the middle there.
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dead simple: doom 2 used this map to introduce two new higher-level baddies, arachnotrons and mancubi. probably a good place to introduce something new of my own, then?
also everyone is extremely familiar with the usual gimmick on this map, which is an excellent opportunity to shake it up and surprise the player with something totally different
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tricks and traps: i love me some tricks and traps. i am going to fuck with the player so hard right here it will be great. (ps: what IS this area? how does it connect to anything else in any way? kind of wrecking my "abstract real places" theme here)
- move walls around when the player's back is turned
- silent teleport the player to an identical area that gradually becomes less familiar
- change textures and specials, like you start with a yellow door, and you go and find the yellow key, and when you come back it's a blue key
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circle of destruction: i kind of want to make this more of a "castle of illusions" thing. remember this is where the "episode" ends, and the player pushes the button that lets all the human ships take off. i think there should be a lot of portals from hell and back here, somehow, and you move between two parallel versions of the same general area
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betray: i think this is gonna be holodeck (ps import it!). needs a cool secret exit from map02, and needs a more specific theme going on of what you're doing and what your reward is. this will be pretty early in the game so it should be fairly easy but can give you a cool weapon early
- finish the shell casings
- look into making voxels for all the custom objects? like just try one or two to see if it's feasible