Platforming in Doom/Hexen: A brainstorming thread

[RockstarRaccoon]

So... My current map project involves lots of minor platforming sections between the major areas. ('cause it's Metroid, and I enjoyed the platforming in Metroid Prime) I'm having trouble finding any advice on the subject, even outside of the Doom community, and I'm worried I'm gonna run low on good ideas though, and I want them to stay fresh. I'd also like to have a list for anyone else who wants to have that sort of thing in a map: games like Hexen and Metroid Dreadnought really lend themselves to this thematically. I'm going to start listing my advice and ideas for platforming sections in Doom engine maps here, and if anyone else has any, I'd really like to hear them.

Here's what I can think of...

==== General Advice ====
Know what you're doing - Before you try your hand at jumping puzzles, learn about your distances. How high can the player jump? How far? How simple or hard is it to clear certain gaps? I highly recommend playing around with this in a few test maps before you actually attempt to make difficult platforming the focus of a real map. I sat down with the Dreadnought mod and made a couple areas which I tweaked a few times to see how they worked with and without the space jump before I started trying to incorporate platforming: it needs to feel natural and straight-forward, and that's really something a mapper needs to get a grasp of for themselves.

Use Sparingly - There is a reason we don't see many First Person Platformers, and that the Doom community seems to avoid them. While advances in engines have made platforming better, it's still a clunky interface.

Don't use standard jumping mechanics - Make sure you're doing something to give the player more jump height and air time, because I think that was a major factor in why games like Metroid Prime and Jumping Flash weren't super annoying: platforming in first-person is difficult, mainly because it's difficult to judge where the player is and where platforms are when trying to jump between them. Things like the ability to look at your feet and having a bit more hang-time to correct issues can ease alot of frustration.

Spread it out - Once again, use sparingly. The original doom has some platform-y sections, like the boxes in the Deimos base or the ramps at the beginning of E4M2-Perfect Hatred. Same with Hexen, my favorite Doom game. They worked because they were novel within their levels, and, in Hexen, actually added to the feeling of being a fantasy hero. The novelty wears off though if we're expected to play through 20 minutes of heavy platforming at once.

Stop with the death-pits - A common mistake newbie mappers make is looking at the part of Guardian of Fire Hexen with that instant-death pit, or the pit at the beginning of Doom's E1M3-Toxin Refinery
, and filling the level with them. There is a reason why those examples are so specific: they are very novel points within their levels, meant to provide a sense of fear or suspense. When you put them everywhere though, it loses its impact and just gets annoying. John Romero actually wrote a set of rules (which all mappers should read), in which he outright says not to have any pitfalls that the player can't escape from. Good first-person platformers like Metroid Prime use bottomless pits as scenery, and just put you back on the ledge if you fall in.


==== Common Platforming Elements ====
Pillars - This is pretty simple: you have some pillars that the player has to jump from one to the other to get to the other side. Everyone's seen these. They even had them in E1M9 of the original doom. I wouldn't recommend making them a major puzzle, because they are boring, but they are easy to do, can make traversing a large area more interesting if done right. Bonus points if you vary the height and distance for a little more complexity, or if you incorporate elevators like in the next one...

Bobbing Platforms- The player needs to jump between platforms which move up and down, which adds a timing mechanic: players have to get on one elevator, then ride it while they wait for the next one to come into range. This can be a fun way to add a simple timing-based platforming area, which can look really nice, and could be used to get the player up to higher areas without the boring nature of an elevator ride. The drawback is that these sections can bore the player more than a long elevator if too long or overused: keep it to a couple elevators, don't make the elevators too slow, and don't have too many in one map

Ledges - Those bits where you have a narrow ledge against a wall and you have to sort of slide along them? I'm really surprised at how novel they still feel to me. They obviously don't feel amazing in the Doom engine, but if you get them right, they add a new level of complexity to a map. I'd say that Doom actually uses this concept alot already, you just see very wide ledges, and that looks pretty good.

Tightrope Walking - You have a narrow bridge, usually over a pit of lava or a bottomless pit, and the player has to somehow navigate over it. For added difficulty, maybe it's not entirely straight, or there is a fight going on at the time. This slows down an inexperienced player, forcing them to carefully align themselves as they go along.

The Loop-around - This is stupidly simple, but I felt like I should mention it, because I really like the way it comes out: you have a high-cielinged hallway which the player walks through, then they go up to a higher area of the level, and they're in another, perpendicular hallway, which doesn't connect completely. The player has to time a jump to get over the gap in the floor, or fall back down to the previous hallway. Like I said, simple, but it does have the effect of making you feel like you've progressed, and lets you look at the same place from different perspectives.


==== Full on Area Concepts ====
Multi-Step elevators - A tall room where the player jumps between multiple elevators to get to a higher altitude. I'm currently into hexagonal rooms where 4 walls have piston things and 2 walls lead to doors: you jump on the pistons to get from the lower door to the upper one. This is done in Metroid Prime 1, where the end of the "Firey Path" involves this when heading back to the Chozo Ruins from the Magmoor Caverns.

The V-Shaped Canyon climb - A canyon ends with a narrowing corridor, which (in my map) ends with a cave going down into another area. On the sides of the V-shaped chasm, are ledges. You can't jump high enough to get to the next ledge on your side, but you can make it to the other one. As the player gets further, the ledges get closer together, but also higher compared to each other, making for jumps which change each time.

Shifting Platforms - A series of floating platforms, probably 3D floors, and a series of switches. The player hits the 1st switch, which brings the platforms to a position where they can reach the first one and jump across to a 2nd switch. This switch re-arranges the platforms, allowing them to jump from the second switch to the 3rd switch. The 3rd switch re-arranges the platforms in such a way that the player can get from the first switch to the end of the room, and the switches are deactivated because this was a one-time puzzle. This concept could also be used to alter the possible exits from a single room.

Elevators going in and out of Lava - In a volcanic area, there is a room with a big pit of Lava (using a 3D floor to add depth), and the player has to jump across. The only way across is a series of pillars rising out of the lava. The scary part is that, due to seismic activity, the pillars rise and fall under the level of the lava, meaning if you stand on one for two long, it will dunk you into the lava for a few moments. I'm planning on using this in a map I haven't gotten out of the graph-paper stages of, and I think it's probably one of the most interesting things you can do with ZDoom maps and elevator platforming.

The Icon of Sin - I felt like I had to mention this: the Icon of Sin from Doom 2 is a iconic, but it's actually a really annoying boss battle to me. You have to wait on this elevator, and then fire a missile at its head at the right moment, and then do it again 2 more times. Still, that's a clever bit of platforming they did there to get around Doom's limitations and make the final boss seem completely different from the other stuff in the game...

[DavidN]

I like your line of thought I've only played Metroid Prime briefly, but now that you mention it, its floaty gravity probably did wonders for making the jumping less annoying.

Something else I'd bring up is to know the difference between an obstacle that's a challenge for the player, and a terrain that you're going to be going back and forth between a lot. If you're setting up a challenge, allow the player to open up a route that skips it once they've completed that challenge - avoid repetition when a player has already overcome an obstacle.

Relatedly, don't make individual platforming sections too long - if a player falls off near the end, make sure they have a way to get back to where they were fairly quickly, rather than being in a completely separate area and having to go all the way back to try again! (Although quicksaves in Doom alleviate this.)

[RockstarRaccoon]

Something else I'd bring up is to know the difference between an obstacle that's a challenge for the player, and a terrain that you're going to be going back and forth between a lot. If you're setting up a challenge, allow the player to open up a route that skips it once they've completed that challenge - avoid repetition when a player has already overcome an obstacle.

Which is aided if you get an item like a Key to bypass the area, or a special ability (like Space Jump) which makes the platforming no longer necessary, or you have the switches thing I was talking about set the heights in a way you don't have to redo the puzzle for.

'nother Generic Element I remembered: those anti-gravity things in Rise of the Triad and Quake 3 where they fire you up into the air. I've never used them, but I bet they make an interesting element for this...

[jpalomo]

A few tips from experimenting with jumping in ZDoom a while back:

• Use lower gravity. The default gravity is a little too fast for dedicated platforming sections.
• Give the player some indication of where (and possibly when) they will land using shadows, sound effects, etc.
• Air control. Again, the default setting is not good for platforming. About 0.75 (75%) should feel good.
• Avoid making the player multitask while navigating difficult platforming sections.

I suppose the best not-Doom-but-close-enough-to-Doom example I can give is Wrack.

[RockstarRaccoon]

[*]Give the player some indication of where (and possibly when) they will land using shadows, sound effects, etc.

Hard to do well in Doom: I'd alternatively suggest making sure your platforms are big enough that the player can tell that they're landing on them. A hint for that is that Hexen got it wrong: those floating blue things are way too small for a good platform section...

[*]Avoid making the player multitask while navigating difficult platforming sections.[/list]

Not precluding easy platforming sections: putting a boss fight on a platform over lava is a good way to add nuanced difficulty to it in vanilla-ish Doom levels.

Wrack.

Looking this up...
Oh wow, that intro story... and that sword... o!o;;

This reminds me of some of the less inspired Quake levels: they're aware that jumping is a thing in this game, but they don't really do anything novel with it... Unless there's a specific level you're thinking of?

[The Second]

The key reason why platforming in fps games is difficult is because you're dealing with a two dimensional representation of three dimensional space.

In the real world, when judging the space between two platforms, we use motion parallax to gauge the distance. This works because having two eyes creates two overlapping points of reference which our brain automatically merges into one. This and experience can tell us exactly how wide a gap is.

The probkem with '3d' fps games is that we have only a single point of reference - the view of the game presented on the monitor. This tells us that there is a gap ahead, but telling how wide it is without the help of parallax is more challenging. Add in the fact that many rendering engines (doom included) have some form of axis shearing which adds another layer of difficulty.

To make platforming bearable, you need to overcome these issues. In addition to making jumping more 'floaty', the designer can use paterns to aid the player in judging the distance between platforms. For example, using a grid texture on the surface of the platforms gives the player an additional frame of reference for judging distance. Staggering the heights of the platforms slightly can also help. Decorations such as torches, barrels, and other objects with a fixed size add a third point of reference.

[RockstarRaccoon]

Good point there Second.

I just made a video of me doing some random platforming in a section of Norion in Metroid: Doom, which is the mapping project I made this thread for. You can see the section I was talking about with the jumping across the divide in the second half.


Edit: For the record, I need to fine-tune that cliff-climbing section.

Edit 2: Well would you look at that... Looks like the Strife team thought the same way...
https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Friction#Strife

[DavidN]

Looking great! I would perhaps make gravity a little slower still, and the player's jump strength just a bit more (or lower the maximum height you have to jump during the cliffs section, like you mentioned) - it's hard to tell without playing it, though.

[RockstarRaccoon]

Looking great! I would perhaps make gravity a little slower still, and the player's jump strength just a bit more (or lower the maximum height you have to jump during the cliffs section, like you mentioned) - it's hard to tell without playing it, though.

Keep in mind, this is before they get the Space Jump (actually, it's in that Chozo Temple at the end), and I'd like it to be at least SOMEWHAT challenging to make some of those jumps without it. Also, the back-wall of the cliffs means the player can just run and hurl themselves without worrying about falling if they go too far, so that's also a consideration I made about it. Really, most platforming is about traversal, rather than actual puzzling situations.

I'm actually a little hard-pressed to think of a good setup where the platforming is the actual puzzle and not just a method of getting around... Maybe just having a confusing or half-hidden section counts?