[Lab] The Art of Constructing Maps #3

Hello, once again Survivors!

Over the past two weeks, we've talked about how we've been experimenting to create a new standard for making maps. We talked about how we tried to make "Outdoor" style maps to further reinforce the theme, but the playtime was overly long, and how we went back to "Indoor" style maps, but there were divided opinions on the difficulty level.

One of the key things we wanted to deliver in the Early Access combat experience was to "encounter a large number of enemies that feel intimidating" and then "be able to kill them all if you understand and utilize the game's mechanics well enough" - in other words, the "excitement of getting through a seemingly difficult situation" was one of our main goals.

In our earlier experiments, we removed the Caught Mechanic, which made it much easier for players to navigate situations, and the concept of surprised and surrounded increased the amount of unit firepower available to player characters.

While we all agreed that we had created a "simpler, more fun" system, we were divided on what kind of combat experience we wanted to build on it.

[h3]The Battle Debate: “Bland vs Difficult”[/h3]
The argument from those who felt the combat experience was bland was that unless the number of enemies you encountered (assuming you understood the system) was 1.5-2x that of the Early Access version, you wouldn't feel really threatened.

Due to the damage bonus of the surprise system, mobs such as Knawers will not have a chance to react if they are successfully surprised.
High HP enemies can still be killed within the same turn if they are surrounded by pushing, pulling, etc.
Since there is no caught mechanic, if you don't think you can finish an enemy off, you can simply move out of their line of sight and end the turn.

The argument was that given the combat environment above, it's not that hard to clear a stage without taking a single hit with a full understanding of the system, and it's hard to call it "fun" if that's the base experience.

So, the argument was that in order to feel thematically "Threatened" in this situation, there should be a quantity of enemies that you can't possibly take out in a single turn, and that the main combat experience should be how to evade their pressure while still accomplishing your mission objectives and escaping (in fact, the gameplay of the board game Zombicide is close to this feeling).

On the other hand, the "it's still hard" side of the argument was also well-founded.

Removing the caught mechanic and introducing the surrounded/surprised systems was to lower the barrier of entry, so making the level design harder to compensate just seems like going back to square one.
It takes until mid to late game to fully understand all the mechanics behind surprised/surrounded/out-of-sight to not feel threatened, that shouldn’t be set as the “Standard experience.”

So, we decided to expand the number of testers to get to the bottom of these two issues!

We had limited testing of our experiments to those directly designing the combat system and content, but we decided to bring in others from narrative design and art teams to test the “Real-world” difficulty of our “Threatening" indoor maps.

Since all of our new testers had beaten the Early Access version all the way to the Manor House, they had some idea of what the game was going to be like. We decided to use their ratings as a baseline to see if they thought it was "too hard" or "too bland".

And all 3 testers declared... I wanna throw my pc out the window!

More precisely, the feedback was that there were too many enemies in too small a space, and that the system descriptions they were given in manual form (assuming the place of a tutorial), were not enough to reasonably deal with these battles.

The system for evading enemies once you're out of sight was not intuitive to use (even though it was in the documentation), and even then, you had to create space on the map to utilize it, which was not easy to do when you had a large number of enemies to deal with.

We agreed with the argument that enemies should be less dense and started making a number of maps for "continuous play" based on this.

[h3]The question remains: Is this good enough??[/h3]
Reflecting the shocking (?) results of our last test, we've started mass production of the map with a similar enemy spawn density to the Early Access version.

In total, we created three “Small Size” indoor maps and one “Large Size” map to test the sense of “continuous play” with new character skills and meta-games.

The focus of this build wasn't really on level design or combat experience. Rather, it was a situation where the standard experience of level design needed to be determined quickly in order to test other elements (more on those elements in a separate post!).

The enemy spawn density was scaled down to avoid the "unreasonably large number of enemies making progress seem impossible" situation and was expected to be an appropriate level of difficulty for the maps we would initially offer, with playtime of around 20 minutes for smaller maps.

However, there was still a sense of "is this really going to be good enough?".

The initial approach we tested was "kill as many of the enemies as you can, then move out of their line of sight and avoid attacking this turn", and the problem was that giving players this many enemies right from the start felt too harsh if not used to it.

The problem was that if the game starts with only enemies who are simple to kill, there was no guarantee that they would learn the patterns by the time we got to the mid- to late-game.

This raised a more fundamental question: "Isn't the rule that you can't be attacked no matter how close you are, as long as you're out of the enemy's line of sight, counterintuitive in the first place?", which led us to rethink our system design direction and enemy population criteria.

Then, a simpler solution was proposed: "What if we made the enemies appear in large enough numbers to be a threat, but easier to kill?"

[h3]Let's make lots more come out, and lots more die![/h3]
Up until now, the HP of the most basic monster object in our level design, the Knawer, has changed a lot. Let's say a one-handed ax with WP 1 has an average damage of 3.7,

To make them even more zombie-like and difficult to beat, there was also a version with a base HP of 40 (!), so you had to really hit them with all your might or run away,
In the early access version, the “Despair” difficulty had a base HP of 15 (which could be killed in 5 attacks on average),
After several tweaks, the final "threat test” (version that was deemed too difficult for inexperienced players) had a base HP of 9.

As we watched the testing up to this point, our level designer thought, "Why don't we just make the number of enemies greater and shrink their HP to make them easier to kill?"

The new maps were based on the following principles.

Bring back the concept of the abandoned Outdoor Map and organized it into something closer to Medium size
Re-utilize elements such as "roamers" and "windows”
Introduce as many enemies as the “Threat Test” version, but adjust the HP of the Knawer to 4.
"Roamers" will have the same health as the original Knawer (HP 9), with some additional stronger enemies (HP 25+)
Varying spawn behavior across buildings, with some buildings spawning tons of enemies and others spawning a small number of stronger individuals

When we removed the out-of-sight evade system from maps designed with the above philosophy, the game surprisingly(?) became much more fun.

Enemies are more numerous but easier to kill, making them less unfair.
The ability to kill two or three Knawers simultaneously with an AoE skill without necessarily surprising/surrounding them has increased the number of options in combat.
At the same time, the value of surprise has increased, as it is now a guaranteed way to kill a Knawer.
The threat and risk of not getting the kill has increased, as enemies still deal the same damage and cannot be evaded.

Since it brings the pros of the outdoor theme while greatly improving the drawbacks of being "time-consuming and frustrating" (the average playtime is around 30 minutes, which is longer than the existing "indoor" maps, but a difference of 10 minutes or so would be a more fun experience), the consensus was that this direction was better suited as a standard.

We also wanted to make sure that it wasn't just people who were already familiar with the system that were giving us positive feedback, so we asked people who had dropped out of the initial "Threat Test" version to test it again, and we were pleasantly surprised to get a "100x more fun than last time" rating.

The art team also told us that the outdoor theme was much more appealing and had a lot more room for expression, so we were able to unanimously set the standard for the new map.

This is the end of a long journey of experimentation that we went through to set the standard for our new maps. There were many points along the way where we wondered, "Do we really need to go this far?", and it was hard when the feedback wasn't great, but I'm proud to say that the results were worth the time we invested.

After this, it's time to introduce other elements that build on this standard combat experience, and after this post, I'll be adjusting my posting frequency to every two weeks instead of once a week for the time being.

The first and foremost reason is that the parts I'm going to be talking about are the meta-game and character parts, which are ongoing trials and errors that we've been going through alongside the map changes.

We’ve been enjoying sharing these posts, but now as we get cracking on putting all these changes into the game, there’ll be less time to dedicate to the dev notes. But fear not! We'll return to a weekly post once we're more organized enough to focus on parts of the game outside of the combat experience.

We'll do our best to bring you more polished content and a more compelling look at what we've been working on as soon as it’s ready to rock.

Thanks so much for your patience and trust in us, and we'll see you back in two weeks for another installment!
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