1st run demo http://quaketastic.com/files/demos/thtc_daz.rar

Loved the lighting. especially the light from the lava and some of the moonlight filled areas very nicely. The level in general looked very nice, good detailing but perhaps lacking in overall theme. It felt like 2 or 3 different themed maps had been stitched together (caves, wood/metal castle, and runic catacombs).

Gameplay was a little easy on hard. I had absolutely no problems at any point. The Z-aware and aim correcting Ogre's was an interesting twist. Took me a few minutes to realise how their grenades were always hitting me :)

I think the level never really put enough pressure on me. There was always plentiful health and ammo and it always felt like I had plenty of room to retreat and/or evade if things did get dicey. The only area I had a problem in was the spawn cave near the start :)

I found 6/6 secrets very easily and as I'm sure people in this forum can confirm, I miss secrets ALL THE TIME :D So perhaps they were a little too easy to find? They were cool though!

Thank you for including the .map! I will be having a look at how you did your lighting. 

No secret under the lift though. :P 

Thanks Warren. I love the map ! 

Yeah 'twas pretty cool. Lovely atmosphere that reminded me of Unreal for some reason, good brushwork and great lighting. Combat was on the easy side overall, though I made some mistakes because of some framerate issues (not due to the map so don't fret).

Blind skill 3 demo: https://www.dropbox.com/s/k10b6nnnpk7c77q/thtc_skacky.zip?dl=0 

I don't have a lot to add to Mfx's and Daz's comments. I agree with them. I did come close to dying in my demo, so in my case the difficulty was just spot on for the first play. I didn't actually find any b0rked spots, but there seems to be an oddity in the knight's death animation.

What happens is that there's a jumpy transition from the stunned or stumbling state of a knight to his death animation if you kill one right after stunning him. This is quite noticeable with Quakespasm 0.90 running at frame limit of 72 on my computer. Mostly, it stands out because when it happens it looks different to the completely vanilla knights I've seen die thousands of times. Did you change the knight somehow while modding the monsters?

I see no reason to record and upload another demo, since there's no difference between skills 1 and 2 (so WarrenM says above, and the monster count agrees). I did quite a bit better with the secrets on my second run, so that's at least something.

I would absolutely welcome more releases of this kind from WarrenM. This is a solid and fun map. I particularly like how you have to be more careful of Ogres again. I'm solidly in favor of (sometimes) tweaking monsters to keep the gameplay fresh, and in this case it worked out well! 

Yeah, I buggered the knights anims somehow ... will fix for future maps! 

Not played it yet, don't know when I will have the time to do so, but I noticed skacky's comment about reminding him of Unreal...

The blue fog has a definite Na Pali feel to it, the use of stained glass in one of the shots gives it more of a cathedral feel than creepy feel to me, a reverence that I get out of Unreal personally. Low poly cave scenes are also something I associate with Unreal... Looking at the shots I could actually hear some Unreal music in my head. Shades of Caudle's DM-Gothic meets Myscha's Bluff Eversmoking, yet all still Quake. 

Enjoyed this, thanks! Nice to play a ~15 minute map that's pretty low-stress.
My favourite thing was the cool blue foggy look of the castle interior.
Demos, only died once on skill 2: (I think I got 2/6 secrets and 96/100 kills.)
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/demos/thtc_ericw.zip 

Haha, damn Eric, how do you stay alive? :P You're the most unpredictable player I've seen yet ... nice! 

 

nice cute map, though rather not forgiving in the beginning.
first run demos (i died once)
http://vondur.net/files/von_THTC.zip 

This felt like a test map for something bigger and/or a collection of areas - not as well interlinked as I'd have liked.

But the the style was nice, the moody lighting was nice, and it had sweet medieval designs. Mostly good fun gameplay, hectic in some places but always enough supplies to go for. The underwater maze was the only annoying bit. 

nitin - Just something I noodle with. My own mod, doesn't really have a name. It gives me access to certain things like easily spawning creatures via triggers, arena combat, wandering monsters, etc.

shambler - Follow the bubbles. :) 

They led me into a secret, then when I exited the secret the bubbles took me back to the entrance, and when I went back in I forgot which bubbles were the right way and which were the secret and got lost again... 

Achievement Unlocked? 

Please repackage this. Right now people need to manually move the readme unless they want it to overwrite existing file in their Quake directory or have it overwritten by similarly badly packaged releases later on. In the same step, please remove the screenshots. Also lowercasing all filenames would be a nice gesture to people with case-sensitive filesystems, be it Linux or Android or advanced MacOS users. 

Wait, disregard that readme.txt comment. I thought it was outside the mod dir. 

Was that you or someone else? 

Someone else did it. Which is great, thanks whoever did that! 

I used FQ085 and the skybox didn't load, not that it caused any problems.

I died a couple of times in the big fight, probably just through lack of practice. Also, I came across a shambler who had his back to me and I emptied most of my nailgun into him before he awoke.

Nevertheless, this was great fun and really took me back to when I first played Quake: more polished than then,but for me, really old-school.

Nice. 

I like the map, but it's too linear, too easy. Not enough monsters and secrets (they are too easy to find. I Found them all without cheating). There's only one path possible and it's very short. Can't get lost (even in the underwater catacomb).

After playing the map three times, I feel that I want more ! 

What this map accomplishes, is the dark, wet and claustrophobic feel that is Quake, and it does it beautifully. Nothing more needs to be said, go play this map :) And make more!

I recorded a second skill 2 playthrough demo, because I died the first time by discharging underwater without realizing I picked up a thunderbolt. That was just utterly cruel on you're part. So the second time, I knew where the traps and ambushes were, and better understood the ogres grenade behavior. Needless to say, it went much smoother.

http://qrf.servequake.com/~orl/misc/orl_thtc.rar

Recorded in Quakespasm 

and i forgot to mention. Fix the fish deathframe to non solid.
Please. 

Yeah, that was annoying to watch people suffer through... will be fixed for next map, thx! 

I liked it. Nice to see the old textures now and then. Good lighting.