DRL > Requests For Features

New Ideas for Special Levels

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Klear:
Sounds interesting. If I may, I've been thinking about special levels and here's what I came up with:

A lot of the special levels are somewhat build around particular enemies:

Hell's Arena - Cacodemons, somewhat (more so on HNTR)
The Wall - Knights/Barons
City of Skulls - Souls/Elementals
Spider's Lair - Not sure
Unholy Cathedral - Melee enemies - Lost souls and demons
The Mortuary - Arch Viles

What I'm getting at is that IMO there should be a mancubus Special level. And maybe a revenant one as well, but a mancubus-themed level sounds really nice to me.
It should be designed to play into their strengths. Maybe they could be able to release additional enemies by destroying walls with their missed shots? I haven't given much thought into particulars, I'm just throwing this out there.

Creaphis:
Interesting idea, but you've overcomplicated it in ways that just restrict build and strategy options.  The only characters that can beat this as written have:
- A very high knockback weapon to get the boss out of the circle
- High DPS weaponry to kill the boss once he's outside
- Very high passive resistance (from traits, armor, medkit supplies) to survive all the abuse you'll suffer standing between the boss and the circle.
- Some unspecified artifact (probably from another special level, meaning that skipping that level is not an option)

Interesting level design is design where there are a number of ways to beat any challenge, and it's very important in a class-based game (which DoomRL kind of is) that every class should be able to use their own strengths to get by. Below I've posted some revisions to your idea. Note that I don't intend for my design to be taken as the Right design - there are infinite ways to design any game, and the only thing that matters is that it's fun to play.

- Remove the requirement for a special artifact. We already have the Hell's Arena -> Chained Court -> Vaults dependency, we don't need to restrict player route options even more.
- Remove the instant 100% heal the boss gets when returning to his circle. This would only be a frustration for characters strong enough to fight the boss head-on, and would make the fight impossible for characters that have to wear the boss' health down more gradually.
- To make the fight possible for characters that can't deal knockback or that rely on active defense (or both), the boss should have slow move and attack speeds, and its attack should be reasonably dodgeable. There should be a good supply of napalm barrels in the level. The careful player could push these into the boss' circle while dodging its projectiles and then trick it into blasting itself out of the circle by shooting a barrel at close range. This would also destroy some of his safe zone by replacing it with lava.
- The theme for the level could be changed from Greek mythology to some sort of tech theme, to explain the presence of napalm barrels and the accompanying environment survival gear (boots and envirosuits) that might need to be placed on the level. The boss' safe zone could be technological, eg. a "force field," and this invulnerability could also extend to the player when he's standing in the field, depending on if this makes it more fun without completely nerfing the challenge. Then, the first stage of the boss fight would be challenging but non-fatal, like sumo wrestling.


I'm looking forward to seeing the new special levels. I'm not sure that revenants or mancubi could support special levels on their own, though, as they don't require unique strategies to defeat. The problem is that there aren't any reliable ways of fighting them safely without corner- or radar-shooting, so a level built around them would likely end up as another cornershooty experience like the Wall. If it were up to me I'd have designed the revenant and mancubi with reliable ways to avoid their attacks without cover, eg. a left-right-left dodging pattern for mancubi (as in Doom 2) and some way to redirect or destroy homing revenant missiles, to allow these monsters to be used in more interesting ways.

Creepy:

--- Quote from: Klear on May 18, 2012, 11:57 ---Spider's Lair - Not sure

--- End quote ---

You, sir, have made me giggle most heartily.

But yeah, I like the idea of a Mancubus special level. Or rather, the idea of a Mancubus level gives me the fits and I think that's exactly the response you'd want from a mancubus level. Releasing things from pillars though... that'd make it hard to 100% without asking the fatties for help, making it less about killing the fatties and more about manipulating them. Also, that's vaguely mortuary-ish; we've already got a level where the enemy is giving itself reinforcements all the time.

Maybe something more akin to a "storm the beach" thing, where you're trying to deal with the Mancubi fire with cover that's constantly disappearing (because of mancubi fire). Or something?

Ander Hammer:

--- Quote from: Klear on May 18, 2012, 11:57 ---Spider's Lair - Not sure

--- End quote ---

*snrk*


--- Quote ---And maybe a revenant one as well

--- End quote ---

Have you ever been to the Vaults? That's all about Revenants exploiting funky level layout. Unless you're boring and just shoot into the dark and hide behind corners.

Klear:

--- Quote from: Ander Hammer on May 19, 2012, 18:51 ---Have you ever been to the Vaults? That's all about Revenants exploiting funky level layout. Unless you're boring and just shoot into the dark and hide behind corners.

--- End quote ---

I guess. I think I'm still in the HNTR mindset - even though I play on UV these days, I often avoid either CC or Hell's Arena.


--- Quote from: Creepy ---Maybe something more akin to a "storm the beach" thing, where you're trying to deal with the Mancubi fire with cover that's constantly disappearing (because of mancubi fire). Or something?
--- End quote ---

That sounds nice. I'm not sure if it is possible to design a level to make cornershooting at least a little risky, especially since the mancubi are so slow to move. There should be some scripted twist, have the walls disappear gradually or some teleporter shenanigans, though that is already used to nice effect in Spider's Lair. Maybe there could be barrels near all the walls (far enough from each other not to cause a chain reaction) that would explode randomly during play or something like that.

Edit: Another idea - have the player start in a small room/arena with a mancubus and no exits. Should be easy enough to kill it before it starts to move. Once it dies, most of the walls of the room lower and reveal a larger arena with more mancubi. Few sections of the walls remain and give you some cover, though not perfect and not from all sides at once. Killing these mancubi repeats the process - the walls of the bigger arena lower and uncover more mancubi in a bigger arena. (Not sure how many times can this happen - that depends on the size of the map, obviously.)

The enemies in the Anomaly for example are trapped in their starting spots so that once the walls lower, they are always at the same place. In this level, I'd let the manbubi wander through the thin hallways between the arena walls, so that every new arena would present you with several mancubi in different places in each playthrough and inadequate cover.

It would suck to be a pacifist on this level though, much like it does in halls of carnage - I'd make the walls of the arenas destroayble, so a pacifist (and other clever doomguys) can break through to the larger arena spaces without killing the initial mancubus (either rockets or by dodging), thus making their life a lot easier with plenty of cover.

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