Encounter design across different games is a notoriously touchy subject matter. There are a large number of variables that must be accounted for, and these variables change from game to game. Even different balancing schemes within the same game will have wildly different results on how encounters plays out.

For Descent into HELLForge, the first thing I did was re-familiarize myself with the game’s mechanics from a design perspective since I hadn’t played DOOM 2016 in several years.

Major notes taken:

-Melee is the least desired form of combat

-Various weapons affect engagement range with every type of demon, particularly the difference between weapons like combat shotgun and the assault rifle

-Movement while attacking is paramount, particularly kiting, circle strafing, and looping through environments

-Cover is useful but temporary. Demon AI tends to approach and eventually flush out most spots.

'Blobular Design'

The way I view encounter design is as a series of overlapping and shifting ‘blobs’ of engagement. These blobs can be anything from future movement, line of sight, attack range, or they could be desirable locations, resources, enemies/groups of enemies, or whatever is pertinent to the gameplay. In a way, it’s like a shifting heatmap of players, enemies and gameplay components, all sloshing around in the container that is ‘the level’.

The use of these blobs is to help recognize how we, as designers, want players to move and think throughout a space. Enemies, particularly melee enemies, push players around the space. Obstacles obstruct movement of both players and enemies, and affect the danger zones of player and enemy weapons. The crucial thing to recognize is that all of these blobs push against each other to varying degrees. It makes understanding the complex, unique nature of every combat encounter from a player easier. To date, I haven't found a game system that this cannot be readily applied to, top-down isometric games, third-person-shooters, Turn-based RPGs, it works with pretty much everything.

To see it in action, let's dive into the level itself.

SecuriStation Encounter

This encounter starts out with a bit of lead-up. Entering the room, there are a few zombies thrown around the place. They are not intended to be a serious threat to the player, nor to use up significant amounts of player ammo. It’s done for some environmental storytelling and for pacing purposes. Getting the player to engage on a basal level before throwing actual threats at them keeps them from being blindsided, and helps to ramp up in preparation for the real encounter. Once the player wipes out the zombies and progresses into the security room, they are given a shotgun and a switch to activate which will:

1)Unlock the door to the rest of the level

2)Turn off the majority of lights in the room, while also activating several dim security lights.

3)Spawns enemies in the formation on the left

This simple spread of imps and soldiers acts as a warm up, though with some added flavor to keep it from feeling as such. The available cover lets players modulate the difficulty of this first fight themselves. Skilled players will charge forward, dodging fire and getting glory kills to save ammo. Less skilled players huddle behind the cover and take opportunistic shots from safety.

The lights also aid in setting this encounter apart-dimming adds a bit of extra challenge to the room without adding more enemies, and provides a bit of narrative context to the SecuriStation switch.

Once the main meat is mopped up, the player exits the room through a newly opened door-straight into a minor jump-scare of 4 zombies! Again, these zombies are not for actual combat purposes, but instead for maintaining pacing and keeping players engaged with the space. Though I wish the sound occlusion would prevent them from giving away the surprise early with their shrieking through the door, it tends to work well.

Dynamic Duo Encounter

This encounter is the one that went through the most iteration by far. It is surprisingly hard to make a delayed-ambush scenario. A revenant spawns in directly in front of the player with a Zombie Soldier next to him. The soldier is barely another threat in this encounter, but is there to lull players into a false sense of security that the Soldier and the revenant is the whole fight.

When the player shoots the Revenant for the first time it spawns a hellknight around the corner with the ‘Hunt’ AI type, this will cause it to chase the player regardless of distance, sound or sight. This meshes with the Revenant, as the Hellknight bursts into the encounter just as the player is starting to get their bearings with the Revenant. This forces them backwards along the path the player took to enter the fight, avoiding the Hellknight’s melee while dodging the Revenant’s ranged attacks.

This validates a player’s natural desire to back up from melee enemies, and shows off blobs working together. The Hellknight ‘blob’ pushes the player back the way it came. The player’s shotgun, being short range, prioritizes the HellKnight since it’s the closest. The Revenant ‘blob’ interacts with this through its range by adding an enemy to deprioritize and/or dodge while dealing with the Hellknight.

Hellknight Ambush Encounter

This encounter is where I really wanted to push the excitement of the level hard. I wanted players to be both surprised, scared, and have to spike their engagement.

Basic Structure

As the player finishes with the Dynamic Duo, they’ll have to come back around the corner and down the stairs to progress. When they reach the bottom, two unknown demons spawn directly in front of them. These are two Hellknights(Group A), a dangerous foe in such tight confines. 6 Zombie Soldiers are also spawned in; 3 directly behind the player at the top of the stairs(Group B) and 3 more around the corner out of sight(Group C).

Group A pushes the player back up the stairs and demands the player’s attention. This prevents them from looking backwards, meaning they won’t notice Group B until they back up into them. This is done for a few reasons:

Player engagement spikes from the Hellknights, but goes starts to trickle back down from the knowledge they can back away from them relatively safely. By forcing further engagement beyond just the Hellknights, it encourages players to stay engaged with the level and to not make assumptions about it.

When the Hellknights push the player back, the player will move back past the Zombie Soldiers without killing them. This leads to a very nice and also very subtle set-piece of the Zombie Soldiers being knocked out of the way by the Hellknights to engage the player.

Group A and Group B by themselves are not particularly threatening to the player. However, as Group A advances, Group B can be left behind if there’s too much space for the player to back up into. By placing Zombie Soldiers effectively in front of the Hellknights, it makes it more likely that the player will have to engage with both at the same time.

Group C will, after this initial engagement, begin running up the stairs after the players, and will usually reach the fighting after the Hellknights have been defeated. This acts as both resolution for the individual encounter, as they are a weaker enemy that the player can ‘cool down’ with, while also backing up Group B’s Soldiers.

Stairway Encounter

This is where Blobular Design is pushed to its extreme. There are a lot of things going on here, so I’ll break it all down carefully.

Basic Structure

When the player enters the room, they start at the top of the stairs with enough resources to nearly fully replenish themselves and prepare. The door behind them immediately locks, and two Pinkies spawn 2/3rds of the way down the staircase. A Cacodemon then fills out the airspace, blocking movement and providing heavy ranged support for the Pinkies. The Pinkies will immediately charge up the stairs, and the Cacodemon will approach the player slowly and shoot.

Subtly Guiding Player Action

To survive this encounter, there are two general options that players need to take. The Pinkies, if not avoided, will outright crush the player against the locked door. The Cacodemon, after enough time, will become impossible to avoid. Trying to kill any one demon without avoiding damage is fundamentally impossible here, as they all have too much health to allow for it.

The two ways to escape this and win are:

-Jump over the Pinkies and go under the cacodemon.

-Kill one of the Pinkies and slide around the side of the other.

Both of these options are completely designer intended, but they are done subtly enough that players believe it to be their own strategizing. This makes players engage with the encounter even more, as they believe that their actions and plans have consequences and power in the space.

Pacing & Difficulty

This is a spike in difficulty, and a point of high engagement following a slight dip when the player picks up and uses the Heavy Assault Rifle for the first time. It also gives the player room to use the Heavy Assault Rifle to its best: fighting enemies at medium range. This drives home the fast-paced nature of the level by consistently ratcheting up intensity with only small breaks between. This maintains the players’ engagement from those earlier highs, and preps the player for things to go even higher later by showing the design intent to not slow down. We’ll see this come into effect in the Waves encounter.

Waves Encounter

After surviving the stairs, the player is presented with health and ammo front and center. This is a mild calm before being thrown back into a combat encounter with the following enemies:

Wave 1: 3 Revenants, 3 Melee Imps

Wave 2: 2 Hellknights, 2 Hell Razers, 1 Mancubus (spawns after 1 or more revenants dies)

Wave 3: 2 Mancubus, 2 Revenant, 2 Melee Imps

Each wave serves its own purpose within the grander scheme of the room. Because the waves are spawned at random locations, the ‘blob’ design methodology has to be modified a bit with understanding from how players act.

From my own testing and examining gameplay from others, players loop around circular rooms after first contacting enemies. This information is usable to create an interesting encounter.

Wave 1 is meant to set the stage and begin the ramp up process. Melee Imps close the distance while the revenants pepper the player from afar. This mirrors a lot of what the level has already been showing, namely melee and ranged enemies working together to create a more dynamic fight.

Wave 2, spawning in the middle of Wave 1, acts as a catalyst for changes in player behavior. During the first wave, players could consistently dodge by kiting consistently and shooting the Revenants. However, with the random spawns of Hellknights and Hell Razers, players must adapt their strategies on the fly. The Mancubus also caps things off by introducing a new enemy, and serves to supplement the Revenants, since they are likely already damaged.

Wave 3 is a normal wave, spawning after all other demons are gone, and is designed as a variation on wave 1 with heavier enemies. This wave is intended as a wave to test ammo conservation while going through the same ‘avoid melee, kill ranged’ gameplay that the level has already tested heavily up to this point. This wave changes tone drastically as demons die, as players usually save the Mancubi for last, leaving the fight as a fairly simple mop up. This serves as a slight resolution to the encounter as a whole, ratcheting down the tension just enough to even out the experience for the player.

I'm going to take a moment here to go over a very relevant topic I haven't touched on yet:

Dynamic SubEncounters

Something that all my encounters have in common is that the demon choices and their placement was planned such that the pacing of the individual encounter was taken into account alongside the overall level. For example:

The Hellknight Ambush was planned so that the soldiers are fought last, as reinforcements and as a resolution to that encounter.

The Stairway is usually concluded by a singular Pinky or Cacodemon from moderate range.

The SecuriStation Encounter is followed by a mild zombie jump-scare before the Dynamic Duo encounter to raise tension for the player.

These sub encounters are entirely dependent on player choice, but have nonetheless been accounted for through looking at how players react to certain elements within each encounter. Player behavior can usually be boiled down to far fewer options because of the circumstances they are put in.

Mega Pickup Room

The biggest and most pertinent example is the Mega Pickup Room, which is connected to the Waves Encounter. At any point during the waves, the player can come here to be completely replenished of all their health and armor. However, when they do so, they put themselves into a dangerous chokepoint that they must fight their way out from.

HELLForge Encounter

The final encounter was, funnily enough, the first one I designed. I originally intended it as the climax, but after building out the Stairway Encounter, I figured that it would serve even better as a high-energy resolution to the even higher energy Waves Encounter.

The fight follows my earlier Blobular Design principles, essentially squeezing the player into positions where they are forced to relieve the pressure themselves and in predictable ways. The player could kill the Revenants, the Cacodemon, or the Pinkies. Regardless of which they pick, a path will open up and the remaining demons will force the player to move into it or to continually dodge. Inevitably, this results in some circle strafing with the last few demons, with the central platform acting as a shortcut should the player desire it.

Post Mortem

While I am overall extremely happy with the outcome of this project(outside of some minor hiccups with the DOOM SnapMap, pretty much everything went to plan), there are some areas that I would like to examine more closely. The map is very 'condensed', and doesn't have much exploration, which I usually like to incorporate into my level layouts. My prior projects are far more open-ended than anything I got to do with this project. I would like to stretch my pacing structure as far as I possibly can. I know that while this is solid, there's so much more room to improve.