Monster Wave Control

[Moesh-zz]

Summary:

As a designer, I want to control what monsters spawn in the INVASION, FFA, and PVM game modes per wave.

What is happening right now?

Monster types are chosen at random when the world spawn monsters. This leads to

What should happen?

World spawn should poll an easily editable database of monster "waves" to choose want to spawn. These wave are made of up of interesting monster combinations. These waves have an optional name to add personality.

Invasion spawns should respect "waves" when spawning. If it is wave one, choose from a pool of lower-power-combinations of monsters. As players defeat more waves, invasion chooses from more difficult pools, and more custom pools.

• "Secret Service" - 5 Enforcers, 1 Medic
• "Boss Room" - 1 Tank, 1 Medic, 2 Gladiators, 1 Parasite
• "Fuck Your Armor" - 6 Parasites
• "Dogs of War" - 3 Parasites, 3 Mutants
• "Doomed Vanguard" - 12 Gunners (various)

Benefits

• Any designer for Vortex can balance and adjust pseudo-difficulty by adjusting monster combinations and wave amounts
• Waves become more predictable, leading players to begin to concept builds to counter wave styles
• Monster spawns feel purposeful instead of entirely random. This is a benefit because it demonstrates thought and effort put behind design, which can be difficult to achieve with truly random spawns. This perceived thought/effort leads to trust building
• Any community member can concept and submit "wave spawns", leading to positive and healthy community contributions

Negatives

• The switch may cause some confusion in players when it first appears, especially invasion players. My goal with this proposal is to bring the invasion design model more inline with similar wave/tower defense games, such as Dungeon Defenders.
• Some waves may be too powerful or too weak on their own, leading players to believe all waves are imbalanced. We need to address this by vigorous testing and advocating for iterative balancing. Of course, we're not going to get it right the first time, but it will smooth out over time.
• Wave designs get stale, boring, and TOO predictable. Yes, there is a thing as too predictable. Shocking. My counterpoint is that everything is currently too predictable, because it is too random. While all of the monsters are random, the player behavior is to "prepare for anything", when it could be "prepare for [this specific thing]", which could lead to more dynamic behavior. Could. Requires testing.

[Vortex-Quake2]

Version 5.6 will implement something like this. In invasion mode, there is a chance that a special "wave" (invasion level) will spawn, consisting of specific monster types:

1. SET_FLYING_MONSTERS - only flying monsters
2. SET_MELEE_MONSTERS - only melee monsters
3. SET_RAGEQUIT_MONSTERS - gladiators and berserkers
4. SET_TANKY_MONSTERS - tanks and mutants

I like the other ideas and I'm open to more!

On a related note, the special waves only work if the map designer doesn't hardcode the info_monster_invasion entity to spawn specific monster types.