Welcome to the ZDoom Forums!

http://www.filedropper.com/showdownload ... skofstrife



I'm having trouble with enemy placement; am I putting in too many, or too few?

All zombie riflemen, with only two imps at the bottom.

when thinking about monster placement, think about what sort of experience you want to give the player. Do you want them to feel pressured or do you want them to charge ahead with something of a warm-up to keep their blood pumping? Or maybe lull them into a false sense of security? Monsters affect the sort of threat the player will face at any given time, more than any other map feature, though traps come in second after that.

DoomRater wrote:when thinking about monster placement, think about what sort of experience you want to give the player. Do you want them to feel pressured or do you want them to charge ahead with something of a warm-up to keep their blood pumping? Or maybe lull them into a false sense of security? Monsters affect the sort of threat the player will face at any given time, more than any other map feature, though traps come in second after that.

I want to lull them into a false sense of security, and maybe feel pressured.

For pressure you could use monsters who aren't particularially threatening but placed in sniper points so the player needs to spend a little effort to take them out.

Though I wouldn't recommend getting carried away with the sniper thing. I think it gets really frustrating really quick.

For monster placement, the stretch between "too much" and "too few" is a far one. There are all sort of monster amounts and monster type combination that range from chill slaughter to apocaliptic. that particular map looks like it beggins smoothly, those zombiemen are taken out like nothing. I would recommend giving a shotgun right away anyways.

Zombiemen are too weak to post much of a threat by itself unless there are a lot of them, or the ammo and/or health is heavily restricted, or the map itself poses a threat. If you want to use only these in your map, then I'd say give the player maybe 1 stim pack in the entire map, and not any other weapons. Right now I count 13 Zombiemen, or a total of 260 HP. That's ~26 bullets you need to give the player to kill all of them, so starting ammunition would be plenty. As for health, I'd say starting health is plenty.

When if you're placing such weak monsters, try to make use of the map to threaten the player rather then just the monsters. Set up ambushes (not too many or it gets old real fast) such as teleporting in the monsters, or hide them into a chamber normally hidden by a wall then pop open, or is a false-wall. You can also make use of flashing sectors that from complete dark to bright periodically or randomly making it harder to shoot them. Using the Deaf property and/or block-sound line specials so monsters aren't immediately alerted while hiding them in a corner will also be effect at making them harder the player.

Also, on a side note, try not to use just fully enclosed rooms separate by doors. It's a common thing for beginners to do, but try using verticallity to separate areas, and having rooms that you can easy move from one to the other thru openings instead of repeatedly hidding doors will help flow a lot. Finally, make use of diagonal sectors, and not all right-angles on the map, as it gets to be repetitive if the entire map is simply room-door-90 degree turn-door-room-repeat.

Nevertheless, I still think giving a shotgun at the beginning is better. having to shoot so many times at the weak zombies is also frustrating. I think the pistol is meant to be used to kill the first couple of monsters and then remain as a last resource option (if you ain't got no chaingun). I feel it more cinematic that way: you arrive with a piece of junk pistol you found, kill some bad guys and find the perfect piece to start a modest massacre right away.

EDIT: for example, I would put the shotgun near the opposite door of the room with the first 2 zombies

Lycaon wrote:Nevertheless, I still think giving a shotgun at the beginning is better. having to shoot so many times at the weak zombies is also frustrating. I think the pistol is meant to be used to kill the first couple of monsters and then remain as a last resource option (if you ain't got no chaingun). I feel it more cinematic that way: you arrive with a piece of junk pistol you found, kill some bad guys and find the perfect piece to start a modest massacre right away.

EDIT: for example, I would put the shotgun near the opposite door of the room with the first 2 zombies

You mean like this?

No, i meant the other end of the room, if you put the shotgun there, the player will never use the pistol.

Lycaon wrote:No, i meant the other end of the room, if you put the shotgun there, the player will never use the pistol.

Oh, gotcha.

bump.

What? We already answered your question

I tried re-skinning the shotgun by changing the sprites, yet they still remain as default. What'd I do wrong?

EddieMann wrote:I tried re-skinning the shotgun by changing the sprites, yet they still remain as default. What'd I do wrong?

Try Putting Them Between S_START And S_END With The Other Sprites.

enderkevin13 wrote:

EddieMann wrote:I tried re-skinning the shotgun by changing the sprites, yet they still remain as default. What'd I do wrong?

Try Putting Them Between S_START And S_END With The Other Sprites.

Those other sprites are for modded weapons, it won't work.
I tried to do what the IWAD did and did this, and the custom sprite still doesn't appear.