How to make movement speed important in first person (mainly) melee game?

As the title says. I'm just starting with unity and trying to make a game that takes place in relatively small spaces, but it introduces hazards that slow movement speed while the player is on them as time goes on. I want the change to be significant enough to make the player actively avoid creating them and eventually be forced to the next level when enough accumulate, but I also don't want to harshly punish the player for accidentally stepping on one. I'm not sure what balance of the player, the enemies, and the movement speed penalty that would require.

 

This sounds like you will need to balance it from gameplay testing. Make the variables public so you can adjust them on the fly, & make sure when you are happy you test with people that haven't played it for hours & hours like you have.

 

Context is king. There are plenty of times where having some status effect won't matter, while at other times it will be a matter of life or death.

 

Seems like a spreadsheet problem to me.

 

Maybe just slow the player down enough so he's hit only once, not a major penalty but still nothing good comes out of hitting one of these hazards. To get the perfect balance tweak variables like tedthebug said, keep adjusting the players speed, the enemies attack speed, and everything involved until everything feels perfect. And as for wanting to the player to care about avoiding the hazards, as long as they're associated with something negative (slowing down, getting hit, losing health) the player will probably automatically add that to the list of things to avoid in your game (like enemies and stuff) and view it just as another thing to avoid, even if the penalty is low its still negative to the player