13 ms·

The Door Problem of Combat Design

281 points by danso 7y ago

akeck 7y ago
My intuition is that one can apply these principles in a flipped manner to design safer schools and other public buildings.
- lolc 7y ago
  Let us all walk around concrete obstacles for fear of an unlikely attack?
  - adrianN 7y ago
    Schools turn into parkour training gyms. Might help against youth obesity (probably saving more lifes than the shooter protection aspect...), but excludes students with disabilities.
- teddyh 7y ago
  My intuition is that the remote and unlikely chance of those designs being needed would make the calculable benefits so small that they would not be worth the trade-offs, both in the immediate construction costs, but also the costs of everyone actually using a building designed with too-long walkways, non-optimized layouts, etc. over the entire projected lifetime of the building.
- thih9 7y ago
  These principles are presented in the context of a game, their goal is to make the gameplay more fun. Applying these to real life seems a long shot. A discussion about real life safety, while important, IMO feels a bit offtopic.
- hosh 7y ago
  If safety is really what people value, sure. But I am not sure I want to have an architectural space that reminds me of living in fear all the time. Besides, architects have been studying this stuff before there were video games. Christopher Alexander made a study of traditional and modern architecture to develop “living architecture”. He defined architecture as spaces that shaped human interaction and emotions. Fear, safety, and security are only one part of the spectrum of human emotional states and concerns. I think I would rather send my child to a school whose spaces are designed towards learning and exploration.
- pjc50 7y ago
  Or you could nerf the shooters.
mrob 7y ago
The fundamental problem is "player benefits from minimizing risk", which is usually boring. It happens in most genres, e.g. it's especially bad in roguelikes, where luring enemies to doors is a common tactic. Of the proposed solutions: cover, hidden information, and enemy leashing are only obfuscating the low-risk path, not actually removing it. A good player is still rewarded for boring play, e.g. bouncing grenades at the leashed enemies. Rewarding risk-taking is a good solution, but hard to implement in a FPS because there are only so many rewards you can give. One-way paths are criticized for breaking exploration, but I think it's possible to get the benefits of them while still allowing exploration. Consider Ninja Gaiden for the NES. It spawns enemies when you cross certain thresholds, and crucially it does this every time you cross them, even if you already defeated the enemies. This punishes retreat by undoing any progress you made. You're forced to take risks, and it's IMO a better game because of it. Some people call Ninja Gaiden unfair, but I think that's because they didn't understand the mechanic. You could get the same benefits while making it easier to understand, and more fair feeling, e.g.: * Clearly mark the spawn triggers * Visually show the triggers activating, e.g. with particle effects flying from them to the enemy spawn points * Don't let the enemies harm the player immediately after spawning, so the player has time to react. * Cap the number of active enemies and the spawn rate from each spawn trigger (Ninja Gaiden has sprite limits, but you can still produce absurd-looking spawn patterns by repeatedly crossing the trigger point). Ninja Gaiden also has time limits, which are IMO an underrated method of punishing boring play. Time limits aren't fashionable in modern games, but I think they should be brought back. They're compatible with exploration by including hidden bonus time powerups.
- teddyh 7y ago
  > The fundamental problem is "player benefits from minimizing risk", which is usually boring. I remember playing the entirety of Doom, and IIRC, Doom II, in a careful, methodical manner, and I never found it “boring”.
  - mangamadaiyan 7y ago
    Ditto quake, and quake II, in my case.
teddyh 7y ago
I liked the original Doom and Doom II back in the day. But it seems that I played them differently than other people, since both the 2016 Doom, and the advice given in this article, eliminates my style of game play entirely. I never played much of the 2016 Doom game as a result – it just wasn’t fun for me. I can certainly accept that it deserved the acclaim it got, since it allowed the gameplay which other people experienced with the original Doom. But not my gameplay style. The article talks about “If I want my friend to fight in the arena” and gives “One way path, with the drop down” as one possible solution. I absolutely abhor arena fights, especially with auto-closing doors or a drop down. I would always try to trigger as few enemies as possible, and would always retreat to fight them safely if possible. Why would you design levels which makes it impossible to play in this style, if some people prefer it? Why would you design a level to force a specific play style, even though they might not enjoy it?
- kaoD 7y ago
  > Why would you design a level to force a specific play style, even though they might not enjoy it? Personally I enjoy being challenged in my playstyle. I don't particularly abhor arena fights, but I'm a minmaxer by nature so if the game designer leaves the possibility of a boring fight open I will probably take it. They're just forcing people like me into challenges. That said, closing doors/drops in 2019 are just lazy design.
  - leetcrew 7y ago
    I also have this mindset. I honestly wish I could suspend it but it's too deeply rooted. in whatever game I play I'll just intuitively find the most OP weapon/skill and ride it til the end of the game.
    - weaksauce 7y ago
      Yeah I tend to do the same. In something like half life 2 I’d just hover around a few weapons and use them for 90% of the time even when a better weapon would be more effective against a particular enemy. The more exotic the weapon the more I will save it for a special occasion but that occasion never seems to arrive.
lolc 7y ago
I've found enemies in shooters to be really weird just idling until you show up in their vincinity. They should know you're there and be coming for you or hold defensive positions. Or they could be unaware and unprepared, running for cover and their guns when they see you. That was twenty years ago. Reading this article made me wonder whether it's still the same today. On second though it's probably about offering a game that allows people to shoot enemies in a satisfactory way. Having enemies too smart wouldn't allow killing hundreds of them because they'd get you first.
- ozmbie 7y ago
  The scenarios are usually less about creating realism, and more about crafting interesting combat puzzles. “The Last Of Us” does a great job imo. Each fight offers different strategies and paths. And the enemies are usually there for a reason with some explanation in the AI interactions.
- crooked-v 7y ago
  The current Tomb Raider series does a fairly good job at this, with a mix of 'sandbox' areas with patrolling enemies and 'setpiece' areas where they'll actively pursue you or you have to assault a prepared defensive location.
lubujackson 7y ago
An interesting flipside of the door problem is what experience is the mapmaker envisioning? In his first example, why is the default assumption that a player would WANT to enter a map full of enemies? Usually this comes from a half-remembered fun of perfectly balanced battles, surrounded on all sides but managing to wade through them. There is an interesting parallel to game motivations and fiction plotting: the character needs motivation to advance into uncomfortable situations, either pushed from behind or pulled by desire. When you think along those terms, everything else falls into place naturally.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  They're trying to avoid the problem where maximizing combat effectiveness will minimize fun for the player. Even if there are players who have optimal fun by door-cheesing every encounter, you likely want to ensure other play styles are at least as viable so that players aren't funneled into a one-dimensional tactic. Or that players aren't forced to make suboptimal plays just to have fun.
b_tterc_p 7y ago
I believe most like playing intelligently. The goal of the level design shouldn’t be to make the intelligent move less rewarding, but to make the boring move less intelligent. So I kind of disagree with the offered solutions. A more modern set of solutions might be threats pursuing from the rear that make backtracking riskier than pushing forward, mobility or offensive options that favor aggressive moves over defensive moves, or (and perhaps I may only dream) non Euclidean level design such that moving backwards is actually a different area. Situational awareness in competitive FPS is very impressive. I want to know what it looks like in non Euclidean space where assumptions about positioning get an order of magnitude more difficult.
- kemayo 7y ago
  > offensive options that favor aggressive moves over defensive moves Doom (2016) did this fairly well. It had a "glory kill" system, where getting very close to an enemy after doing a bit of damage to it would let you finish it off, and guarantee that it'd drop health for you. It also had a special melee weapon which would guarantee ammo drops when used. Then it also had mostly non-hitscan attacks by enemies, so you could dodge most attacks. This all combined to make a legitimately sensible strategy when low on health and ammo be running in a zig-zag at enemies, and effectively punished you for hanging back and trying to hide behind static cover.
  - teddyh 7y ago
    Cut scenes are boring in non-story-driven games. So when a game has what amounts to very repetitive cut scenes, which you yourself are forced to trigger if you want to get any health, it gets boring and annoying very fast. Add the fact that time passes during these non-interactive cut scenes, and other monsters can gang up on you while the cut scene plays, and you have a very distasteful recipe. It was definitely a large factor in why I never played much of Doom 2016.
hosh 7y ago
This reminds me a bit about Christopher Alexander’s work on architecture and designing living spaces — as places that shape the potential of human social and emotional interaction. Alexander’s pattern language work in architecture came to greatly influence human interaction design and object oriented programming pattern designs.
patsplat 7y ago
In linear single player games lowering the cost of failure is a powerful way to encourage aggressive play. Games like Super Meatboy don't even make the player wait after death, encouraging the player to keep trying immediately. In multiplayer games, looping maps discourage tentative play. Remain in one space too long and get flanked. I like the way World of Tanks discourages cautious play with scouting and artillery
mcphage 7y ago
The author's solutions involved making the open arena more inviting, but another possibility is instead making the hallway less inviting. Maybe an enemy that appears behind you in the hallway, pushing you forward. Or damaging floors, or a laser, or conveyor belt, or something.
- twic 7y ago
  There's a very simple Android game called Very Angry Robots, where you negotiate maze-like levels filled with robots trying to kill you. The robots aren't very clever, so you could clear any level by taking it slowly. Except that there's a slow-moving but indestructible robot which can phase through walls, which enters the level if you're there for too long.
  - mrob 7y ago
    Sounds a lot like the classic arcade game Berzerk, complete with the indestructible wall-passing enemy to hurry you up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berzerk_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berzerk_(video_game)
    - twic 7y ago
      It is exactly that game! I had no idea - that is just a bit too early to have been part of my video game childhood. The Android remake replaces the (apparently astoundingly expensive at the time) synthesized voices with samples of a small child saying "kill the humanoid", which is if anything even scarier.
  - gwenzek 7y ago
    Could you share an URL, I can't find it.
    - twic 7y ago
      Apparently it's no longer available on the store, as it's too old, but here's how it got written: http://blog.badlydrawngames.com/2010/11/very-angry-robots-android-editionupdate_14.html?m=1 http://blog.badlydrawngames.com/2010/11/very-angry-robots-an...
ISL 7y ago
Give the enemies a radio. The player's goals are probably impossible when the reinforcements arrive, so the player must be quick.
- usrusr 7y ago
  Tron 2.0 and some other games by the same studio (No one lives forever?) had "reinforcement buttons" that roughly doubled a monster spawn when one of the first group managed to access the button. Still a far cry from the "direct reinforcements to the rear of the player" option that would end any playthrough quite fast, but a very satisfactory repeated sub-goal.
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    Goldeneye on N64 had the alarms which would, IIRC, at least accelerate the onset of enemy attacks but I think also increase numbers of attackers.
    - blattimwind 7y ago
      Project IGI had local and global alarm systems. E.g. with two bases on the map, alerting the first base would spawn a massive number of soldiers (a regenerating pool of 4-~15 soldiers) and some other stuff, e.g. tanks, while increasing patrols in or around the second base or turn NPCs from an idle pose to a searching pose.
- OJFord 7y ago
  Assassin's Creed Odyssey (and perhaps others in the series) has a brazier on top of each fort that occupants try to reach and light to signal for reinforcements if you're spotted. It encourages stealth, or at least stealthily reaching the brazier first to set a trap.
  - heavenlyblue 7y ago
    Far Cry had this. In every Far Cry game, by about 30% of the game I would eventually have enough weapons go take out an entire base without a blimp. So I would go stealthy - in a few more rounds I would learn how to headshot every enemy at the base. I would then consider it a loss if I would not one-shot everyone at the base. Then, I would consider it a loss if I could not knife everyone without a warning. I have to admit I don’t get why people don’t make games with exponential skill required. But I still can’t finish Super Meat Boy’s boss having finished every other level at perfect time and score, so what exactly am I talking about?
SubiculumCode 7y ago
As a player I prefer to think of it as the door opportunity.
dexwiz 7y ago
Reading this article made me think of many of the boss encounters in the first Destiny. Levels were usually a long, multi part corridor for the first half and a bullet sponge boss at the end. Many of the boss arenas were poorly designed with so many spawn points that most cover was nearly ineffective. So the optimal game play was to stand in the entry way, funnel trash mobs into the entry and kill them, go out and shot the boss for a bit until the next wave of trash spawned, retreat to the entrance and repeat. They did get better with design and started dropping you into arenas to remove the doorway. I think the designers did fill the arenas with these mechanics to make them interesting. But so many of the main objectives included a bullet sponge enemy, that while you were addressing the objective new trash mobs would spawn in unpredictable places, and usually more than one wave would spawn during the objective. This made most of the cover feel worthless. Instead it was just as viable to fly around with you jet pack or super jump, keep moving, and hope to dodge random enemy fire.
n3k5 7y ago
Exploiting choke points to optimise your tactical positioning is a recurring trope. Some games just expect you to do that anyway. As mrob mentioned [0], roguelikes are notorious for this; but I wouldn't call that bad. It's more a matter of taste. Particularly in roguelikes, you'll also encounter situations where the tactical advantage is subverted by enemies that can teleport or spawn minions behind you. One common, but somewhat clunky countermeasure is to start the fight only once you're inside an arena and lock down the exits until the adversaries are defeated. It's present in many genres, from metroidvanias to ostensibly tactical action (e.g. the Metal Gear Solid series). In a Quake-style FPS, having power-ups not just available, but regularly re-spawning in exposed locations is a tried and true mechanic that maintains an exhilarating ballet between risk and reward. But how could one translate the elegant flow of this gameplay loop to a more realistic (or less artificially 'gamey') setting? As Andrew says in the article, you could make more linear and scripted encounters. Which is fine for story-driven games, but limits player agency. If you'd prefer more organic, emergent game-play, there are other options. Instead of initiating combat only upon the player approaching a set piece, opening a monster closet, or crossing a trigger, you can instruct enemy AI to patrol the potential avenues a stealthy player might take and guard the choke points a speed-runner might attempt to barrel through. From there, you can temper the utility of the player retreating. There could be speedy mobs you wouldn't want to turn your back on. Level design that enables flanking — implement a nav mesh that guides your agents to split between chasing the player down and heading her off at the pass. But none of that is objectively superior to more predictable fights. Nor is it guaranteed to to be perceived as more enjoyable than comparatively random encounters. Ultimately, what you really should avoid is a ruleset that keeps players from having fun because the interesting game play loops you intended to happen end up being trumped by dominant strategies that are obviously better for approaching the victory condition, but more boring and tedious to execute. The actual problem isn't with players figuring out how to exploit doorways. It's rather that moment when they resign to repeating the same move ad nauseam. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20663044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20663044
cmroanirgo 7y ago
To be frank, I thought this article would be discussing the 'other' door problem, which arises in multiplayer scenarios. It's also called 'first to the button' (or post or flag). The basic premise is: there's a button on the wall and two players are running toward it, one has higher frame rate the other has lower latency. Which one wins? It's a problem that's been around forever & I assume it's taught at uni these days. Ironically, I didn't find much on Google (nor gamasutra), here's a similar (but not exact) real world prob: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6241377/multiplayer-whiteboard-race-condition https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6241377/multiplayer-whit...
- leetcrew 7y ago
  isn't this basically a solved problem (if tricky to implement correctly)? you have a game simulation update rate that is decoupled from the graphics framerate and give a local timestamp to every update. then the server compares the timestamps to decide which action occurred first and updates game state accordingly. if you make the simulation logic simple enough or pick a conservative update rate (I believe battlefield is or used to be 10 Hz), you can ensure that even min-specced machines almost never have to skip a simulation frame.
cousin_it 7y ago
Nuclear Throne solved this problem by having enemies drop health and ammo pickups which expire really fast. So if you stay at the door and keep taking potshots, you'll just run out of ammo. The only way is to rush in, shoot, dodge and pick up stuff at the same time.
m3kw9 7y ago
Make them surprise spawn in like Doom
ErikAugust 7y ago
I made my way through GoldenEye on 00 Agent this way. I am not sure how else it could be beaten.
anthrojikolp 7y ago
The real problem isn't the level design, it's that the enemy AI in such games is not smart enough and as a result can be defeated by simple tactics.
friendlybus 7y ago
Article gets the perspective completely wrong. A space has meaning because a mind interacts with it. If you see the player as the only mind in a single-player game, then go make design hurdles and obstacles like an olympic sport. But videogames can have fake AI minds. If you design a room from the perspective of a dog that needs to maximize it's needs/wants/goals/skill/desire, from the perspective of it's mind, then designing terrain so that the dog can pursue those goals in a way that is fun for the player and for "the dog" is much more intuitive. The only conflict you need to focus on is the intersection between the dog's goals and the player's story-line through the world. Presuming your game is based on combat, then designing the space so the dog can maximize (or just play) with it's abilities and perceptions in a fight and making the room play in fun way becomes more straight forward. You look at the room you are building from the perspective of 4 paws on the floor and build a nice overhang or a cheekily placed box so that when the dog breaks it's normal goals to pursue the player, the most common response from the player (look at it, or whatever) will be intersected or guided by a fun piece of world matter. There is nearly no meaning in his world, it exists only to express the skill of playing a game with no minds, so an emphasis on map control and resources control becomes more important than interacting with a meaningful behaviour the game actors produce.
localcdn 7y ago
I couldn’t find a recording of the GDC 2019 talk about non linear level design the article mentions. Anyone know why GDC doesn’t post all talks online but rather uploads a subset of talks seemingly at random?
yason 7y ago
I recognise the situation but I've always considered it part of the gameplay. I mean, how else would you play when the enemies are tough? In nearly any shooter you will soon learn that if you run into an open space carelessly you're likely to trigger lots of monsters/enemies at once and that means you're going to suffer from it. How do real-life special forces infiltrate a building with armed enemies? Very carefully, and with lots of cover. Similarly, in a game you want to kill the enemies in small batches, ideally one by one, to minimise the risk of getting too much damage. And isn't the point of an FPS to map the whole level, corner by corner, without taking too much damage and successfully killing enemies until none are left? You can balance taking damage with trying to speed up the game if you don't feel like going slow and secure. And you will learn places where it is worth taking a bit of damage to obtain more benefits. That's what you will be continuously balancing as a player, depending on your mood and how well you've been playing so far, and that's one element to it. Playing the level the first time generally means slow and conservative gameplay. Further sessions in the same level will obviously make the player make more educated tactical choices. A good level will only reveal itself over multiple rounds of gameplay, and ultimately remain a good level. In fact, tricks to prevent the player from finding cover by doorways or other obstacles are usually just irritating. You know it's going to be a hard battle in that big room ahead, and you know you can't back out to relative safety after dropping down to the lower level from that higher-level balcony you're supposed to use to enter the room. In all battles you want to have, at your disposal, some nearby place that you can retreat to, if you want, if you're low on armour or otherwise beaten down. If you're doing well you are likely to be impatient enough to stick with the safe routine by the doorway. This will let the player balance how conservatively he wants to play at any given time. It's good to force the player to move around, though. Sprinkling ammo and health-ups around the level in small batches helps. A traditional scheme is to make the player fight for optional aids: going down a passage to get the big health pack or more ammo also means risking hitpoints and using nearly as much existing ammo to compensate. If you play good, you'll be rewarded with more than you had before. If you play bad, you just make things worse without getting any further in the level. But this shouldn't be used as an excuse to eradicate the locations of relative safety such as doorways that are really handy indeed when you need them. Instead of forcing the player to fight without cover your level is much better off by being of non-linear nature in the first place, allowing the player to roam to any direction and choosing which sections to take out first and which accompanying enemies to trigger in each location, because that also gives enemies some routes to wander behind the player's back. Some of the enemies can be made to hear fighting and start finding their way to the player while others can be kept to wait until they see the player. The unscripted arrival of extra enemies wandering about will make the eventual game dynamic much more random and convoluted, and opens more choices for the player to make. For example, "go through the easy wing to find yourself in more trouble at some point later" vs "start taking the hard enemies down first with less ammo to avoid the level collapsing into a hellhole later". Any level should try to maximize the player's ability to balance between different tactics. Sometimes the player wants to finish off quickly, sometimes he wants to kill each and every enemy and collect all power-ups and secrets. A level can become totally different based on how it's played, and a good level doesn't force that "how".

281 points by danso 7y ago

My intuition is that one can apply these principles in a flipped manner to design safer schools and other public buildings.

lolc 7y ago
Let us all walk around concrete obstacles for fear of an unlikely attack?
- adrianN 7y ago
  Schools turn into parkour training gyms. Might help against youth obesity (probably saving more lifes than the shooter protection aspect...), but excludes students with disabilities.
teddyh 7y ago
My intuition is that the remote and unlikely chance of those designs being needed would make the calculable benefits so small that they would not be worth the trade-offs, both in the immediate construction costs, but also the costs of everyone actually using a building designed with too-long walkways, non-optimized layouts, etc. over the entire projected lifetime of the building.
thih9 7y ago
These principles are presented in the context of a game, their goal is to make the gameplay more fun. Applying these to real life seems a long shot. A discussion about real life safety, while important, IMO feels a bit offtopic.
hosh 7y ago
If safety is really what people value, sure. But I am not sure I want to have an architectural space that reminds me of living in fear all the time. Besides, architects have been studying this stuff before there were video games. Christopher Alexander made a study of traditional and modern architecture to develop “living architecture”. He defined architecture as spaces that shaped human interaction and emotions. Fear, safety, and security are only one part of the spectrum of human emotional states and concerns. I think I would rather send my child to a school whose spaces are designed towards learning and exploration.
pjc50 7y ago
Or you could nerf the shooters.

mrob 7y ago

The fundamental problem is "player benefits from minimizing risk", which is usually boring. It happens in most genres, e.g. it's especially bad in roguelikes, where luring enemies to doors is a common tactic. Of the proposed solutions: cover, hidden information, and enemy leashing are only obfuscating the low-risk path, not actually removing it. A good player is still rewarded for boring play, e.g. bouncing grenades at the leashed enemies. Rewarding risk-taking is a good solution, but hard to implement in a FPS because there are only so many rewards you can give. One-way paths are criticized for breaking exploration, but I think it's possible to get the benefits of them while still allowing exploration. Consider Ninja Gaiden for the NES. It spawns enemies when you cross certain thresholds, and crucially it does this every time you cross them, even if you already defeated the enemies. This punishes retreat by undoing any progress you made. You're forced to take risks, and it's IMO a better game because of it. Some people call Ninja Gaiden unfair, but I think that's because they didn't understand the mechanic. You could get the same benefits while making it easier to understand, and more fair feeling, e.g.: * Clearly mark the spawn triggers * Visually show the triggers activating, e.g. with particle effects flying from them to the enemy spawn points * Don't let the enemies harm the player immediately after spawning, so the player has time to react. * Cap the number of active enemies and the spawn rate from each spawn trigger (Ninja Gaiden has sprite limits, but you can still produce absurd-looking spawn patterns by repeatedly crossing the trigger point). Ninja Gaiden also has time limits, which are IMO an underrated method of punishing boring play. Time limits aren't fashionable in modern games, but I think they should be brought back. They're compatible with exploration by including hidden bonus time powerups.

teddyh 7y ago
> The fundamental problem is "player benefits from minimizing risk", which is usually boring. I remember playing the entirety of Doom, and IIRC, Doom II, in a careful, methodical manner, and I never found it “boring”.
- mangamadaiyan 7y ago
  Ditto quake, and quake II, in my case.

teddyh 7y ago

I liked the original Doom and Doom II back in the day. But it seems that I played them differently than other people, since both the 2016 Doom, and the advice given in this article, eliminates my style of game play entirely. I never played much of the 2016 Doom game as a result – it just wasn’t fun for me. I can certainly accept that it deserved the acclaim it got, since it allowed the gameplay which other people experienced with the original Doom. But not my gameplay style. The article talks about “If I want my friend to fight in the arena” and gives “One way path, with the drop down” as one possible solution. I absolutely abhor arena fights, especially with auto-closing doors or a drop down. I would always try to trigger as few enemies as possible, and would always retreat to fight them safely if possible. Why would you design levels which makes it impossible to play in this style, if some people prefer it? Why would you design a level to force a specific play style, even though they might not enjoy it?

kaoD 7y ago
> Why would you design a level to force a specific play style, even though they might not enjoy it? Personally I enjoy being challenged in my playstyle. I don't particularly abhor arena fights, but I'm a minmaxer by nature so if the game designer leaves the possibility of a boring fight open I will probably take it. They're just forcing people like me into challenges. That said, closing doors/drops in 2019 are just lazy design.
- leetcrew 7y ago
  I also have this mindset. I honestly wish I could suspend it but it's too deeply rooted. in whatever game I play I'll just intuitively find the most OP weapon/skill and ride it til the end of the game.
  - weaksauce 7y ago
    Yeah I tend to do the same. In something like half life 2 I’d just hover around a few weapons and use them for 90% of the time even when a better weapon would be more effective against a particular enemy. The more exotic the weapon the more I will save it for a special occasion but that occasion never seems to arrive.

lolc 7y ago

I've found enemies in shooters to be really weird just idling until you show up in their vincinity. They should know you're there and be coming for you or hold defensive positions. Or they could be unaware and unprepared, running for cover and their guns when they see you. That was twenty years ago. Reading this article made me wonder whether it's still the same today. On second though it's probably about offering a game that allows people to shoot enemies in a satisfactory way. Having enemies too smart wouldn't allow killing hundreds of them because they'd get you first.

ozmbie 7y ago
The scenarios are usually less about creating realism, and more about crafting interesting combat puzzles. “The Last Of Us” does a great job imo. Each fight offers different strategies and paths. And the enemies are usually there for a reason with some explanation in the AI interactions.
crooked-v 7y ago
The current Tomb Raider series does a fairly good job at this, with a mix of 'sandbox' areas with patrolling enemies and 'setpiece' areas where they'll actively pursue you or you have to assault a prepared defensive location.

lubujackson 7y ago

An interesting flipside of the door problem is what experience is the mapmaker envisioning? In his first example, why is the default assumption that a player would WANT to enter a map full of enemies? Usually this comes from a half-remembered fun of perfectly balanced battles, surrounded on all sides but managing to wade through them. There is an interesting parallel to game motivations and fiction plotting: the character needs motivation to advance into uncomfortable situations, either pushed from behind or pulled by desire. When you think along those terms, everything else falls into place naturally.

hombre_fatal 7y ago
They're trying to avoid the problem where maximizing combat effectiveness will minimize fun for the player. Even if there are players who have optimal fun by door-cheesing every encounter, you likely want to ensure other play styles are at least as viable so that players aren't funneled into a one-dimensional tactic. Or that players aren't forced to make suboptimal plays just to have fun.

b_tterc_p 7y ago

I believe most like playing intelligently. The goal of the level design shouldn’t be to make the intelligent move less rewarding, but to make the boring move less intelligent. So I kind of disagree with the offered solutions. A more modern set of solutions might be threats pursuing from the rear that make backtracking riskier than pushing forward, mobility or offensive options that favor aggressive moves over defensive moves, or (and perhaps I may only dream) non Euclidean level design such that moving backwards is actually a different area. Situational awareness in competitive FPS is very impressive. I want to know what it looks like in non Euclidean space where assumptions about positioning get an order of magnitude more difficult.

kemayo 7y ago
> offensive options that favor aggressive moves over defensive moves Doom (2016) did this fairly well. It had a "glory kill" system, where getting very close to an enemy after doing a bit of damage to it would let you finish it off, and guarantee that it'd drop health for you. It also had a special melee weapon which would guarantee ammo drops when used. Then it also had mostly non-hitscan attacks by enemies, so you could dodge most attacks. This all combined to make a legitimately sensible strategy when low on health and ammo be running in a zig-zag at enemies, and effectively punished you for hanging back and trying to hide behind static cover.
- teddyh 7y ago
  Cut scenes are boring in non-story-driven games. So when a game has what amounts to very repetitive cut scenes, which you yourself are forced to trigger if you want to get any health, it gets boring and annoying very fast. Add the fact that time passes during these non-interactive cut scenes, and other monsters can gang up on you while the cut scene plays, and you have a very distasteful recipe. It was definitely a large factor in why I never played much of Doom 2016.

hosh 7y ago

This reminds me a bit about Christopher Alexander’s work on architecture and designing living spaces — as places that shape the potential of human social and emotional interaction. Alexander’s pattern language work in architecture came to greatly influence human interaction design and object oriented programming pattern designs.

patsplat 7y ago

In linear single player games lowering the cost of failure is a powerful way to encourage aggressive play. Games like Super Meatboy don't even make the player wait after death, encouraging the player to keep trying immediately. In multiplayer games, looping maps discourage tentative play. Remain in one space too long and get flanked. I like the way World of Tanks discourages cautious play with scouting and artillery

mcphage 7y ago

The author's solutions involved making the open arena more inviting, but another possibility is instead making the hallway less inviting. Maybe an enemy that appears behind you in the hallway, pushing you forward. Or damaging floors, or a laser, or conveyor belt, or something.

twic 7y ago
There's a very simple Android game called Very Angry Robots, where you negotiate maze-like levels filled with robots trying to kill you. The robots aren't very clever, so you could clear any level by taking it slowly. Except that there's a slow-moving but indestructible robot which can phase through walls, which enters the level if you're there for too long.
- mrob 7y ago
  Sounds a lot like the classic arcade game Berzerk, complete with the indestructible wall-passing enemy to hurry you up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berzerk_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berzerk_(video_game)
  - twic 7y ago
    It is exactly that game! I had no idea - that is just a bit too early to have been part of my video game childhood. The Android remake replaces the (apparently astoundingly expensive at the time) synthesized voices with samples of a small child saying "kill the humanoid", which is if anything even scarier.
- gwenzek 7y ago
  Could you share an URL, I can't find it.
  - twic 7y ago
    Apparently it's no longer available on the store, as it's too old, but here's how it got written: http://blog.badlydrawngames.com/2010/11/very-angry-robots-android-editionupdate_14.html?m=1 http://blog.badlydrawngames.com/2010/11/very-angry-robots-an...

ISL 7y ago

Give the enemies a radio. The player's goals are probably impossible when the reinforcements arrive, so the player must be quick.

usrusr 7y ago
Tron 2.0 and some other games by the same studio (No one lives forever?) had "reinforcement buttons" that roughly doubled a monster spawn when one of the first group managed to access the button. Still a far cry from the "direct reinforcements to the rear of the player" option that would end any playthrough quite fast, but a very satisfactory repeated sub-goal.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  Goldeneye on N64 had the alarms which would, IIRC, at least accelerate the onset of enemy attacks but I think also increase numbers of attackers.
  - blattimwind 7y ago
    Project IGI had local and global alarm systems. E.g. with two bases on the map, alerting the first base would spawn a massive number of soldiers (a regenerating pool of 4-~15 soldiers) and some other stuff, e.g. tanks, while increasing patrols in or around the second base or turn NPCs from an idle pose to a searching pose.
OJFord 7y ago
Assassin's Creed Odyssey (and perhaps others in the series) has a brazier on top of each fort that occupants try to reach and light to signal for reinforcements if you're spotted. It encourages stealth, or at least stealthily reaching the brazier first to set a trap.
- heavenlyblue 7y ago
  Far Cry had this. In every Far Cry game, by about 30% of the game I would eventually have enough weapons go take out an entire base without a blimp. So I would go stealthy - in a few more rounds I would learn how to headshot every enemy at the base. I would then consider it a loss if I would not one-shot everyone at the base. Then, I would consider it a loss if I could not knife everyone without a warning. I have to admit I don’t get why people don’t make games with exponential skill required. But I still can’t finish Super Meat Boy’s boss having finished every other level at perfect time and score, so what exactly am I talking about?

SubiculumCode 7y ago

As a player I prefer to think of it as the door opportunity.

dexwiz 7y ago

Reading this article made me think of many of the boss encounters in the first Destiny. Levels were usually a long, multi part corridor for the first half and a bullet sponge boss at the end. Many of the boss arenas were poorly designed with so many spawn points that most cover was nearly ineffective. So the optimal game play was to stand in the entry way, funnel trash mobs into the entry and kill them, go out and shot the boss for a bit until the next wave of trash spawned, retreat to the entrance and repeat. They did get better with design and started dropping you into arenas to remove the doorway. I think the designers did fill the arenas with these mechanics to make them interesting. But so many of the main objectives included a bullet sponge enemy, that while you were addressing the objective new trash mobs would spawn in unpredictable places, and usually more than one wave would spawn during the objective. This made most of the cover feel worthless. Instead it was just as viable to fly around with you jet pack or super jump, keep moving, and hope to dodge random enemy fire.

n3k5 7y ago

Exploiting choke points to optimise your tactical positioning is a recurring trope. Some games just expect you to do that anyway. As mrob mentioned [0], roguelikes are notorious for this; but I wouldn't call that bad. It's more a matter of taste. Particularly in roguelikes, you'll also encounter situations where the tactical advantage is subverted by enemies that can teleport or spawn minions behind you. One common, but somewhat clunky countermeasure is to start the fight only once you're inside an arena and lock down the exits until the adversaries are defeated. It's present in many genres, from metroidvanias to ostensibly tactical action (e.g. the Metal Gear Solid series). In a Quake-style FPS, having power-ups not just available, but regularly re-spawning in exposed locations is a tried and true mechanic that maintains an exhilarating ballet between risk and reward. But how could one translate the elegant flow of this gameplay loop to a more realistic (or less artificially 'gamey') setting? As Andrew says in the article, you could make more linear and scripted encounters. Which is fine for story-driven games, but limits player agency. If you'd prefer more organic, emergent game-play, there are other options. Instead of initiating combat only upon the player approaching a set piece, opening a monster closet, or crossing a trigger, you can instruct enemy AI to patrol the potential avenues a stealthy player might take and guard the choke points a speed-runner might attempt to barrel through. From there, you can temper the utility of the player retreating. There could be speedy mobs you wouldn't want to turn your back on. Level design that enables flanking — implement a nav mesh that guides your agents to split between chasing the player down and heading her off at the pass. But none of that is objectively superior to more predictable fights. Nor is it guaranteed to to be perceived as more enjoyable than comparatively random encounters. Ultimately, what you really should avoid is a ruleset that keeps players from having fun because the interesting game play loops you intended to happen end up being trumped by dominant strategies that are obviously better for approaching the victory condition, but more boring and tedious to execute. The actual problem isn't with players figuring out how to exploit doorways. It's rather that moment when they resign to repeating the same move ad nauseam. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20663044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20663044

cmroanirgo 7y ago

To be frank, I thought this article would be discussing the 'other' door problem, which arises in multiplayer scenarios. It's also called 'first to the button' (or post or flag). The basic premise is: there's a button on the wall and two players are running toward it, one has higher frame rate the other has lower latency. Which one wins? It's a problem that's been around forever & I assume it's taught at uni these days. Ironically, I didn't find much on Google (nor gamasutra), here's a similar (but not exact) real world prob: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6241377/multiplayer-whiteboard-race-condition https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6241377/multiplayer-whit...

leetcrew 7y ago
isn't this basically a solved problem (if tricky to implement correctly)? you have a game simulation update rate that is decoupled from the graphics framerate and give a local timestamp to every update. then the server compares the timestamps to decide which action occurred first and updates game state accordingly. if you make the simulation logic simple enough or pick a conservative update rate (I believe battlefield is or used to be 10 Hz), you can ensure that even min-specced machines almost never have to skip a simulation frame.

cousin_it 7y ago

Nuclear Throne solved this problem by having enemies drop health and ammo pickups which expire really fast. So if you stay at the door and keep taking potshots, you'll just run out of ammo. The only way is to rush in, shoot, dodge and pick up stuff at the same time.

m3kw9 7y ago

Make them surprise spawn in like Doom

ErikAugust 7y ago

I made my way through GoldenEye on 00 Agent this way. I am not sure how else it could be beaten.

anthrojikolp 7y ago

The real problem isn't the level design, it's that the enemy AI in such games is not smart enough and as a result can be defeated by simple tactics.

friendlybus 7y ago

Article gets the perspective completely wrong. A space has meaning because a mind interacts with it. If you see the player as the only mind in a single-player game, then go make design hurdles and obstacles like an olympic sport. But videogames can have fake AI minds. If you design a room from the perspective of a dog that needs to maximize it's needs/wants/goals/skill/desire, from the perspective of it's mind, then designing terrain so that the dog can pursue those goals in a way that is fun for the player and for "the dog" is much more intuitive. The only conflict you need to focus on is the intersection between the dog's goals and the player's story-line through the world. Presuming your game is based on combat, then designing the space so the dog can maximize (or just play) with it's abilities and perceptions in a fight and making the room play in fun way becomes more straight forward. You look at the room you are building from the perspective of 4 paws on the floor and build a nice overhang or a cheekily placed box so that when the dog breaks it's normal goals to pursue the player, the most common response from the player (look at it, or whatever) will be intersected or guided by a fun piece of world matter. There is nearly no meaning in his world, it exists only to express the skill of playing a game with no minds, so an emphasis on map control and resources control becomes more important than interacting with a meaningful behaviour the game actors produce.

localcdn 7y ago

I couldn’t find a recording of the GDC 2019 talk about non linear level design the article mentions. Anyone know why GDC doesn’t post all talks online but rather uploads a subset of talks seemingly at random?

yason 7y ago

I recognise the situation but I've always considered it part of the gameplay. I mean, how else would you play when the enemies are tough? In nearly any shooter you will soon learn that if you run into an open space carelessly you're likely to trigger lots of monsters/enemies at once and that means you're going to suffer from it. How do real-life special forces infiltrate a building with armed enemies? Very carefully, and with lots of cover. Similarly, in a game you want to kill the enemies in small batches, ideally one by one, to minimise the risk of getting too much damage. And isn't the point of an FPS to map the whole level, corner by corner, without taking too much damage and successfully killing enemies until none are left? You can balance taking damage with trying to speed up the game if you don't feel like going slow and secure. And you will learn places where it is worth taking a bit of damage to obtain more benefits. That's what you will be continuously balancing as a player, depending on your mood and how well you've been playing so far, and that's one element to it. Playing the level the first time generally means slow and conservative gameplay. Further sessions in the same level will obviously make the player make more educated tactical choices. A good level will only reveal itself over multiple rounds of gameplay, and ultimately remain a good level. In fact, tricks to prevent the player from finding cover by doorways or other obstacles are usually just irritating. You know it's going to be a hard battle in that big room ahead, and you know you can't back out to relative safety after dropping down to the lower level from that higher-level balcony you're supposed to use to enter the room. In all battles you want to have, at your disposal, some nearby place that you can retreat to, if you want, if you're low on armour or otherwise beaten down. If you're doing well you are likely to be impatient enough to stick with the safe routine by the doorway. This will let the player balance how conservatively he wants to play at any given time. It's good to force the player to move around, though. Sprinkling ammo and health-ups around the level in small batches helps. A traditional scheme is to make the player fight for optional aids: going down a passage to get the big health pack or more ammo also means risking hitpoints and using nearly as much existing ammo to compensate. If you play good, you'll be rewarded with more than you had before. If you play bad, you just make things worse without getting any further in the level. But this shouldn't be used as an excuse to eradicate the locations of relative safety such as doorways that are really handy indeed when you need them. Instead of forcing the player to fight without cover your level is much better off by being of non-linear nature in the first place, allowing the player to roam to any direction and choosing which sections to take out first and which accompanying enemies to trigger in each location, because that also gives enemies some routes to wander behind the player's back. Some of the enemies can be made to hear fighting and start finding their way to the player while others can be kept to wait until they see the player. The unscripted arrival of extra enemies wandering about will make the eventual game dynamic much more random and convoluted, and opens more choices for the player to make. For example, "go through the easy wing to find yourself in more trouble at some point later" vs "start taking the hard enemies down first with less ammo to avoid the level collapsing into a hellhole later". Any level should try to maximize the player's ability to balance between different tactics. Sometimes the player wants to finish off quickly, sometimes he wants to kill each and every enemy and collect all power-ups and secrets. A level can become totally different based on how it's played, and a good level doesn't force that "how".