by Diode » Wed Nov 15, 2017 7:40 am
So, last night gave things a second shot, and had a much better experience once I started tweaking rendering options to try and up the contrast and make things stand out a little more. Items started becoming easier to find pretty soon after I did that, and I was able to make my through all three levels.
I still experienced the problem of the skinny grey enemies blending into the background whenever I was moving at speed, and it was a great annoyance to continually be taking hits from easily missed enemies with the fastest, hardest to spot projectiles in the game. Just to see what it'd be like, I went and blew the saturation up, which, amusingly, made things look a lot like that menu screen art, and that solved the issue instantly. It pissed all over the art direction, but it was without a doubt the most easily playable experience for me.
I don't expect you to go combing through your .pk3 and tweaking all all your art assets saturation and contrast, but I figured this might be helpful information for you anyway, since it basically took the game from something I wanted to like to something I actually enjoyed. Perhaps just putting those knife throwers in coloured outfits might improve matters? They're really the most annoying, most dangerous enemy of all.
Beyond that, suggestions are:
- Notify the player when they are near an item that's readable. Unreal does this through the translator beeping, but since you don't have a narrative tool like that, perhaps show a symbol on screen? Would also cut down on the time I spent attempting to read everything that looked like it had a chance of being readable.
- Some collision radii on pickups might be worth tweaking. I often had to jump ontop of tables and shelves to pick up items on the edges of them even when I had my face pressed up against them.
- key/door designs. I know doom-style brightly coloured keys and doorframes aren't going to be something you'll be willing to do, but it's a drag not being able to readily identify which key corresponds to which door from any real distance. This isn't too big an issue, and it becomes less of one the longer you play, but it might help players get good first impressions.
- Map markers. Yes, the player can place their own, but this probably such a rarely used feature in doom that I suspect most players are either completely unaware of it or simply don't have it in their gameplay vocabulary. It often took me longer to find my way back to objectives than it did for me to get the items needed to complete them due to forgetting where exactly they were. It'd be an idea if these things spawned map markers when they were first interacted with - either the standard map marker, or a map-visible thing. I think there's a variable for showing individual things on the map this but I forget what it's called.
-The first level could do a better job of communicating what you expect of the player. Before you give players a task of wandering from one end of a maze to the other and back again in search of items to use with things, have them perform the same task in a smaller, simpler environment. Starting with having the player engineer their escape from a tiny area at the beginning of the first level would really do a lot to communicate the kind of things they should be looking for in the environment, and the kind of applications those things have.