another interesting idea would be to make use of the side effect of picking up many different mega healths.

in case you aren't aware of it, each time you pick up a different MH, the 'tick down' effect is added, so if you pick up 2 mega healths, your health ticks down twice as fast. if you pick up 10 MHs, you health will drop very quickly back to 100.

imagine a shambler like lightning attack but with a longer 'charge up' time.
the attack only hits once, but hits for between 150 damage.

NO armour is provided and should be stripped away preferably with a lot of trash fights with lots of health but not much room to avoid damage before entering the fight with the boss.

basically, another arena fight but with mega healths placed evenly around on fairly long respawn timers. (say 30 seconds).

the trick is that you want to make sure you are topped up with more than 150 health at all times so that you don't get instantly killed if you don't dodge the attack. the problem is the more MHs you pick up, the faster your health ticks down, so eventually you'll be picking them up faster than they respawn. the only thing is that if your HP drops below 100, the tick down effect is cleared, so if you do get hit and you are over 150 hp, the health 'degredation' is cleared and you can slow down the rate you pick up MHs. 

then there's this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsbcC8qd7Zw
i won't explain it right now, because i'm curious to see if anyone can figure out what's going on. o.o 

i welcome interesting boss fights. When designing them, you should be asking yourself what it means to the player -- what strategy is needed to win? Is it possible to figure out, and is it fun to actually do it? And does the boss really need to be that complicated to achieve that gameplay experience.

For example, your first boss takes 3 paragraphs to explain, and the resulting player strategy is just "blow the shit out of the guy, but save your rockets for use only when he's healing."

Okay, that sounds interesting but maybe a simpler boss design can provide the same strategy, and as a bonus will be easier for players to understand. For example, bosses in quake don't have visible health meters, so any healing effect won't be clear to players.

How about a group of like, 5-10 enemies, and if any of them are dead one of the other bosses will periodically attempt to ressurect any fallen comrades, and an explosion will interrupt the spell. Resurrection is visually very obvious (unlike healing) and the spell-casting effect could also be pretty obvious. The only thing that might be hard to guess is that explosions are necessary to stop the spell.

Now, you could communicate health if you had a series of like, 8-10 pain skins, each where the boss looks more damaged than the last. Then when he heals, there is a visible reversal of the damage. 

actually... i've been thinking of just making a sprite that looks like a health bar that hovers over a boss' head... o.o 

There was a "health bar above monster head" mod at Inside3D about 4 years ago. 

those skingroups that are being discussed in the modelling thread to implement damage skins? Possible? 

No, because they automatically animate - like a flip book. You can't control when each skin in the group shows up, other than controlling the timing of the frames. 

We were thinking of having pain skins, but there's multiple gameplay problems (no technical ones). It drags up locational damage and stuff counter to immersion. At least we're all used to not being able to blow a grunts arm off.

Shooting a Q2 enforcer in the legs to have his head vanish is still goofy.

Granted that's model changes, but the same applies to the Q2 pain skins. 

Having a 'health crystal' lodged in the bosses forehead that changes colour is pretty straightforward, though more arcadey.

And nope, they only automatically animate if part of a skin group - they can also be separated into different groups in the same way as normal frames. 

Quake 1's weapons are sufficiently lacking in finesse [no sniper rifles etc.] to get away with general blood spatter and changes in facial expression on the skins. Bullet holes would indeed be somewhat jarring though. 

Is there anyway if incorporating a health bar as a gif in the HUD? Or, how about something like the flickering skull that appears in the upper corner when Quake is running s-l-o-w? The background could fill up slowly with blood as damage is dealt.

BTW, the Anubis-mummies in Hexen 2 would lose limbs and still cahse the player around. 

grrr... 

those would be engine modifications, sadly, and beyond the scope of what i would be willing to do. 

How about destroying a background environment as the boss dies (takes damage). So background cliffs would collapse the lower it's health got.

A similar idea, stolen right from Mario, is reducing the playable area the longer the fight goes on.

For Quake I always thought it'd be reducing the amount of cover. Tried it in warp for the end battle (compeltely different to what ended up) but the Vermis couldn't break stuff.

Back to the question at hand - I'm thinking something like the pack complete map of rapture, lava etc. but with the player pretty much shut in with the boss. Each time the boss reaches a health threshold a load of scenery collapses, until by the time they kill it the player is left looking at some impressive skybx and open area. Time for a cinematic cam? 

But in RQuake Team Coop, whenever you're fighting Shub or Chthon, the health remaining is centerprinted to all players. Maybe that could be done instead.

If you didn't want to display the actual numbers, then you could show a percentage, or even NetHack-style descriptions: "Shub Niggurath is barely scratched" etc... 

Is a bit invasive though. You know the final idea/plan for shub.

As to a classic boss being damaged visual / audio clues are always better I find.

Apart from in arcade.

A perfect Quake boss for me would vomit blood and limp whilst injured, or better yet, detroy the player's static defences. Pretty much what I was getting at above. 

a health bar at the top of the screen, or in the HUD, would seem to break immersion less than a bar over a bosses' head.

Or, taking inspiration from oldschool gaming... have the enemies get darker/more red as they take significant damage. Bosses change attack patterns and/or move faster when they get closer to death.

I've been having a resurgence of love for Super Metroid, and so I've been thinking about ways to incorporate that style of gameplay into Q1. That is to say, item-based non-linear progression. The multi-level hub system may remain out of reach, but I'm thinking about exploratory puzzle solving based on weapons you have. Like, door won't open unless you shoot explosives at it, or you have to shoot lightning down a tube to hit a switch. Too bad the environment suit can't be saved for later or made permanent (or can it? lol varia suit). 

A super-metroid style quake mod would be awesome. In a way that is what metroid prime is, but putting it on the PC so you can use WASD+mouse would be even cooler -- it would allow tougher combats, and more complicated secrets.

You could even split it into multiple levels with backtracking, since one of the cornerstones of the "metroidvania" genre is the respawning enemies. So no need to worry about saving level state (means your interactive objects like doors and bridges can't save state either, but remember: the point is to use weapons/items as gating factors, not doors and lifts.)

I guess you'd want SOME permanent changes across level loads, and you could use the serverflags variable to store them -- maybe 1 bit for each boss you want to stay dead, and then 1 bit for any other special one-time events or changes in the environment. 

I always thought it would be nice to have something in the level which would give an indication of the health of the boss. Like if you had an array of statues overlooking the arena you fight in, and as you do damage to the boss, they shatter one by one. Or some kind of plinth that decends into lava as you do damage. Perhaps if the whole floor was to descend, it would add an additional challenge to the fight - sections become seperated by the lava as it falls.

The other advantage of that is that it's easy to accomplish in quake, where additions to the HUD are more difficult. I suppose the most important thing would be to make the connection explicit between the damage taken by the boss and the changing environment. Perhaps by making sure that the changes occur in delineated "steps", and that the boss goes into pain each time it happens. 

You know the final idea/plan for shub

Yeah. Lots of damage, and avoid everything that it shoots at you, while at the same time also trying to not die to everything else that's in her pit. Or fall into the lava. At least you respawn after you die... 

don't confuse quake with a puzzle game. It's not.

I, for example, have zero fun playing puzzle games. Everytime some random puzzle flash game comes along, it bores the fuck out of me. I don't want to figure out stuff the designer made up. Even games like Commando (1) feel the same: I just need to find out the exact sequence the designer made up to beat the game.

I never quite got the console boss fights, because in their stereotypical form they're just puzzles.

An example: had to refer to a walkthrough to find out how to kill the robots in bionic commando that are only vulnerable on their backs. I just couldn't figure it out. I tried any combination of weird fighting moves, tricking them into positions where I could use special moves, etc., but looking at their backs (or shooting at those) just didn't occur to me as plausible in the game world. Nothing else I had ever had to look behind before.

So be careful with them. Charon (?) had those quake buttons that you had already pressed dozens of during the game, and I'm not sure i ever completed shub before I know the secret. 

Saying Charon (who's a very good Q3 mapper) in place of Chthon tells me you're not as anal retentive to worry over these details. But at the same time you say you hate flash puzzle games is a bald faced lie. If you hated them, you wouldn't knew they existed.

Reamek Quake will never be a puzzle game. As much as I liked liked the metroid series, it'd never get to that state of bar battles either.

You fire enough rockets at the thing, it dies. I always like having weak points for the savvy (remember the shambler has, inverted) but health bars and so on aren't for me.

I try not to be an arsehole with RMQ's design, but there's still stuff that's been negotiated that I want to scrap over.

Fuck. Ignore this post. Fell off the wagon. 

A super-metroid style quake mod would be awesome. In a way that is what metroid prime is, but putting it on the PC so you can use WASD+mouse would be even cooler -- it would allow tougher combats, and more complicated secrets.

You could even split it into multiple levels with backtracking, since one of the cornerstones of the "metroidvania" genre is the respawning enemies. So no need to worry about saving level state (means your interactive objects like doors and bridges can't save state either, but remember: the point is to use weapons/items as gating factors, not doors and lifts.)

I guess you'd want SOME permanent changes across level loads, and you could use the serverflags variable to store them -- maybe 1 bit for each boss you want to stay dead, and then 1 bit for any other special one-time events or changes in the environment.


This sounds fucking awesome. You're making this, right? If it helps, I can bring you cups of tea and danish pastries while you work. Team player. 

Continued from

http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=60400&start=100

The map that is scheduled for the next RMQ demo has a pretty brutal multi-element trap at its core, as well as other gameplay novelties that are part of the environment. I didn't make any sketches, I just roughly knew where that trap would be and when I got there, I built that section around the trap. Same for the other, weirder element, which I can't disclose now :-P

I had this rough idea that an environmental hazard is in area X, while a certain form of movement is required through area Y, and some other obstacle might be in area Z. And I just built that while I did the blocking out. These things aren't actually hard to do if you're blocking out anyway. But I think a map should have 2 - 3 non-monster related / environmental challenges, some parts that require alternative forms of movement, plus a couple corners that are worth exploring. That should allow you to halve the monster count while keeping it interesting.

I hate to repeat it, but even without turning it into QuakeRaider, TR games are pretty good sources of inspiration when it comes to traps and non-monster challenges. Watch/hear this guy flip as he plays through the famous trap gauntlet in "The Great Wall":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_dP53CPuk0

It's just trap after trap after trap. You think you're through it, and then you turn around just to see another spiked wall come at you. You stop to calculate distance, but the floor starts crumbling. The secret pickup in the crushers is also a nice detail. This whole thing must have caused countless fatalities, without a single monster in there.

A collection of crusher based traps, and some moving blades/combination traps:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2tgFOIAo2Y&feature=related

Most of the basic elements of these exist in Quake; they have to be built while laying out the level though. Of course Quakeguy is a lot less nimble than Lara; you can't duck, climb, balance, and whatever. hence the traps must be slightly dumbed down for Quake, but not much.

- Doors aka crushers

- small landing spots or thin columns

- nail shooters

- lava or other threat when falling

- rotating entities

- trigger_hurt

These can be combined to create more interesting traps. The basis of these TR style traps are usually crushers, danger of falling, having to land on small spots, and shooters. There are also the good old pendulum traps and rolling blades/boulders/whatever. I find these a bit boring, unless combined with shooters. That's because the player can just stand and wait for the right moment. However, by adding shooters, you can force them to think on their feet. If they stand and calculate for too long, their health gets spiked away. It helps if you can set the shooter's damage (easy to do if you use a custom progs).

Finally, you have breakaway floor with spikes underneath, or just lava. This can be done in Quake, too; there is a testmap in RMQ that does this. Naturally, you could just retract the floor like in e4m3. Best to combine this again with jumping through something that you have to time, because an added timing element makes the trap even more precarious than just taking away the floor. Most traps in Tomb Raider are combinations of something that requires timing (crushers, pendulum, blades) or skill (grappling, wallrunning), and something that reduces the time you have available (shooters, breaking floor, retracting ledge, application of physics). Make the way dangerous, and at the same time pull the floor away underneath them.

You can do these things in Quake, you just have to remember building them in the blocking out stage already. Although to a certain extent, you can use existing corridors as the base for a trap, like they say here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gL71UuPB8Gg

Flak ogres / nail ogres, and other monsters, can be used in place of stationary nail shooters to make the whole thing less predictable and give the option to kill part of the trap to make it easier. It should be obvious that you can use monsters as part of traps or puzzles (like having to kill certain monsters to give you a chance at fighting others / pass a trap).

And so forth. These crusher based traps tend to work well (DOOM did that a lot, too), the crushers just need to be wide enough to counteract the Quakeguy's moving speed. Moving through a wide crusher takes longer than moving through a thin one, thus the crusher has a larger chance to hit. They can be staggered, of course, like in that first vid I posted above.

An element that can be nicely used against the player is that you can't stop immediately in Quake. There is still some movement after letting go of the keys. This makes it that much harder to land on a tiny spot without falling or sliding into the crusher...

It's pretty fun to design traps in Quake. 

http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=49776&end=25

Good point about traps in id1. Seems modern user-made maps are more difficult in general and have less traps.

My favourite trap of all time was the sequential nail shooter from Koohoo that fired in a circular spread until a few buttons were pressed.

All traps and puzzles in all games have a single goal - to make the player feel clever. That shooter from Koohoo made me feel clever because it was itself clever. Deactivating it wasn't, it just gave the time to figure out how it worked.

Simple but the quintessential Quake trap.

The most important thing about it was, I doubt anyone who played the map died from it, although every single one will have perceived it as being just as dangerous as the room with multiple Shambler spawns.