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Well my Ericw/Tronyn video is in several pieces, and will need some TLC to be ready for public consumption. The first two are done, though, so I've decided to upload and post these a few at a time. Keep an eye on this Youtube playlist, I'll update it over the coming days: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoGPuWBXfT0e_7Tebm1-vkckkykG1OEbf
Adib ---- I played the maps in order, and as I've said I was a bit out of sorts at the start, so I have to apologize; though I suppose some criticisms are warranted, my difficulty playing was mostly on me. As others have noted, it's a little hard to jump from some of those rocks, and the map was a bit cramped for my taste, but it's an interesting style being so up close with enemies like this. I got a huge kick out of seeing your stalactites, I've always loved what people would build out of func_doors, trains and the like in Quake. Vehicles, brush based monsters, falling rocks, it's fun to see what mappers can invent with these tools. You've got a gorgeous skybox, excellent choice, especially in combination with your lighting. The fade up to blue toward the top suits your sky exquisitely, and the color still has me almost thinking the rock walls are bump or normal mapped from a distance. http://youtu.be/RWZ_pcrvn6A Breezeep ---- "My map's gonna suck", are you kidding me? I'll grant the theme wasn't as strong as some other entries, but this was a beautiful map with a more than solid design. Architecturally I love the nice, cozy feel of the place, I got a great sense of "arcane library" from your brushwork and lighting. The texture choices, too; I was particularly struck by the handful of empty shelves, I feel like I never see that in videogame libraries. Makes the place feel more alive, like it's still being filled up. I haven't played this Contract Revoked everybody's talking about, but I'll be getting around to that post haste after seeing what it inspired. If I had a criticism, I guess I'd like a little more vertical progression. I feel like that's become a lot more common over the years, and I've seen a lot of it in these jams, but I'm not tired of it yet. There's something immensely satisfying about a good climb. http://youtu.be/q34LNuO8zz8 @Spirit - Your play through was thoroughly enjoyable. I am going to have to adopt leaving comments on demos. I can not believe the little touch to adjust the height of the alter after the first elevator to let the dogs hit the player actually helped kill someone! Also... mad grenade jumping skills on the platforming section to recover from the "lie". It was so funny how you almost saw two secrets with megahealth in your playthrough but also missed most of the health packs by not looking directly at them. Super surprised that you got past the (MDK) maze with only 3 health EVERY SINGLE TIME. Fun demo.
@Tens - The map punishes rushing which got you a few times (Skip enemies in a loop and the next time gets harder). I gasped every time you backed up towards a shear cliff edge during your demos. I don't think you realized you do that a lot. I also saw you twitch when the dogs startled you. Awesome. Thoughts: - The map needs some tweaking and expanding - Some things are broken/exploitable - Dogs == Least expected and least noticed enemy chipping on players health (yay!) - Encounters play out differently in each demo - Everyone kind of freaks out the first time an enemy jumps the lava pit in the hub - Everyone's demo so far had a WTF moment when something I planned to create that reaction works as expected. Mission accomplished. Probably an hour or two of working on finishing my jam6 map, then finally playing jam6. I haven't played any of the maps yet, so have mostly been avoiding this thread.
http://www.twitch.tv/ionous What a great pack. Uploading demos as I type.
Three things stood out with this jam: 1. The theme-adherence is superb. Everyone put the effort in to capture "fire and brimstone" in their own way. 2. The theme-variety is superb. Everyone has their own different interpretation while sticking to the theme well. From subtle hints of lava to all out flaming volcano-fests, base to medieval, indoor to terrain. 3. The "new" mappers all did the theme really well in their own ways AND all of them show great potential for future maps, whether they had a simple but refined design or a crude but epic idea, the potential quality is there for all to see. jam6_adib
Lovely little map. Quite cartoony lighting but nicely done overall. Cool gameplay and design. jam6_breezeep Good style and designs, solid gameplay, quite boxy but shows a lot of promise. Secrets desperate. jam6_daz Very cool, great arena, love the exploration and nooks and crannies. Needs more octagonal rocks. A pleasure to wander aimlessly around. jam6_ericwtronyn The usual demented cacophony of textures and proportions married to a fantastic design and scale to provide another unrefined but butt-numbingly irresistable epic experience. jam6_exhelzar Good theme/textures. Real nice lighting. Quite simple (gameplay too) and boxy but the "dark castle" style could go far. jam6_ionous Very refined and stylish. I like the contrast of it being "lighter" than other maps. Cables were very cool. It perhaps didn't have as strong a hook as it could. Gameplay rocked. jam6_matecha Good style, proper fire and brimstone, kinda messy / unpolished designs, again shows good promise. jam6_necros Holy fucking terrain batman! Stunning little design. A bit dark and needed more gameplay but the style is great. jam6_rick Cool epic designs, got a good feeling of being part of somewhere dramatic. Not sure about purple fog. Died twice trying to get back from SSG, and once just running through, so gave up! jam6_scampie Absolutely wonderful. This really felt like a true early level in a proper Quake/Q2-style game, loved it. 98% perfect, throw in a couple of Vores near the end and it would be 100% jam6_shotro Some good ideas although too big and incoherent. Would have been good to stick with a smaller area and refine it. jam6_tens Bonkers. Cool rockwork, cool OTT-scale arena, interesting combo of designs, a bit random though. Head with nicely done but didn't really fit. Industrial stuff better. Showed a LOT of promise, you could do wonders with this start. jam6_warrenm Love the rocks - mesmerising. Upper area very cool and atmospheric, lower area seemed a bit of an after thought. Good fun gameplay. The file is intact and I can download it fine. Please post anything you can think of as factors in https://www.quaddicted.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=266
exhelzar
ionous ItEndsWithTens ---- Shambler: You are the first I've seen to not kill the Cthons, congrats on unlocking the pacifist achievement! ItEndsWithTens:
I really liked you map. The lava fall receding was genius, as was the giant googly eyed thing. I don't think I've ever laughed as much at geometry in a quake map before. Gameplay was solid, although I sort of felt that there was something missing tying the areas together. I dunno, let me think on it, it might dawn on me what it is. Great work! Matecha: Neat and short little map. Design was nice, although the mob glitches were strange. The light plinths although novel confused me as I had just played maps that have plinths as switches (not that you could have known this). Difficulty was not very challenging on normal, I didn't play on other difficulties to see the scaling. I probably would have died more (like my axe skills? lol). A "the pentagram portal has been activated" message would have helped idiots like myself who missed the exit. Otherwise, excellent map, love the first area and the last area. The lava pit area felt a little lacking in comparison. awesome work none-the-less. Rick: Lighting and mood is A+ for this map. A minor criticism, that others may disagree with is that falling into lava (near super shotgun) is waaaay punishing. Shallow lava here would have given the player the punishment for failing without death. But I suck at platforming in 3d games, so there is that :/ That aside, if I didn't feel constrained by time to play everybody's levels I would play the shit out of this level, or even a bigger variation of it. Excellent mob placement, I felt that the ogres could have been placed a little closer to the door. Perfect vore placement, this is serously my most hated enemy alongside those blue blobby things. Love the falling fireballs, I ended up finishing the level after this record. I ran out of ammo again, still couldnt find the nailgun, lol. I ended up making the ogres kill the shambler. Excellent work :) Scampie: I felt the whole time like I was playing an Id map. I felt the map was a touch too easy on normal difficulty, until I reached the turret. That turret destroyed me. I still don't know what I'm supposed to do with it. I dunno man, just a solid solid map, and I didn't even finish it. It really has that, "hell on earth" feel. So yeah, that's all the feedback I can give really. Great work! Shotro: I have a bit of constructive criticism for this map. First let's go with the good stuff, I love the individual themes. Really like the ogre / scrag / pillar area with the blue key, love the village (although this could use a little more variety). I dislike pitch black areas in maps. In reality, if there is even a small amount of lights in a room, you'll be able to (just barely) make out the shadows. Having said that, the maze area is excellent, so take what I say with a grain of salt here. I like the early arena area, but hate the transition between that and the blue key area. I don't feel like enforcers quite fit the theme in this map, but having said that they do add challenge that soldiers don't provide. The map itself lacks polish in many areas. Obviously there were time constraints and a map this large is going to take a lot of time to get the finish correct. I feel like you've got a lot of good concepts in this map which each would make excellent maps in their own rights. However because of the feel of each section are so different from one another the transitions between them are clunky. The map is hard, I ran out of ammo on a few occasions on normal. (maybe I should have played on easy ;) I really want to play this again with the lighting smoothed out, geometry polished and the area transitions fitting the areas a touch better. With a bit more work this could be a really excellent map. Necros: Excellent excellent map. The obj2map capabilities really shone through here. Maybe I should say your ability really shone through here, lol. Really balanced gameplay and feel. I played on normal and thought it could have been a touch harder. The shambler fight was a bit obvious and a bit easy, kind of fish in a barrel stuff. Otherwise I loved every part of this level. Excellent work. WarrenM: Probably my favourite map of this jam. I liked how the skill jumps don't overly punish you for failing. I like the non linearity of the level. The map is balanced and gorgeous. Only criticism is that it's too easy to exploit the line of sight on the last two shamblers. I want to play more of it! Nothing more to say, awesome work! Demos of me failing and rage quitting your maps: https://www.dropbox.com/s/k6m75376di6vwb6/jam6.7z?dl=0 That turret destroyed me. I still don't know what I'm supposed to do with it.
Don't worry, some others had some issues too. It's a bit of a stretch on my behalf to try and make people recognize exactly what this enemy is, and even that it is meant to be an enemy in the first place! He is meant to be a miniboss. This is the sort of thing I try to do in a mapjam, trying to make a unusual trick work. I am mostly hoping players recognize that he is an oversized brushmodel version of the Dalek robot monsters from Rubicon2, and that they realize that shooting it will eventually kill it. Strategy wise, the intended way you fight it is to simply strafe back and forth behind the boxes shooting it. The lasers shoot at where you are, but generally if you just keep moving, they won't hit you. The unintended scum strategy is to get behind one of the boxes, and slightly back up until you can see the top of Megafloyd's head, but he can't shoot over the box, and just cheese him to death. I have now played every map and recorded demos. Some maps took multiple tries, and have thus multiple demos. Demos that end in letters QL are continued after a quickload instead of starting from the beginning.
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/demos/jam6_pekka_demos.7z I used a Linux command-line utility to create this archive. It should be compatible with the Windows 7-Zip program, but if you have any trouble, let me know. Mappers who don't want to download and extract an archive of about 32 MB can e-mail me instead. My address is in my profile. Mail me, and I can put just the demos you want for upload somewhere else for a short period of time. (Not that I think 32 MB is troublesome for anyone.) The contents of the archive are: Testing j6adib_pekka1.dem Testing j6breezeep_pekka1.dem Testing j6daz_pekka1.dem Testing j6dericwtronyn_pekka1.dem Testing j6dericwtronyn_pekka2.dem Testing j6dericwtronyn_pekka3.dem Testing j6exhelzar_pekka1.dem Testing j6exhelzar_pekka2.dem Testing j6exhelzar_pekka3.dem Testing j6ionous_pekka1.dem Testing j6ionous_pekka2.dem Testing j6matecha_pekka1.dem Testing j6matecha_pekka2.dem Testing j6necros_pekka1.dem Testing j6necros_pekka2.dem Testing j6rick_pekka1.dem Testing j6rick_pekka2.dem Testing j6rick_pekka3.dem Testing j6rick_pekka4.dem Testing j6scampie_pekka1.dem Testing j6scampie_pekka2ql.dem Testing j6shotro_pekka1.dem Testing j6shotro_pekka2ql.dem Testing j6shotro_pekka3ql.dem Testing j6tens_pekka1.dem Testing j6tens_pekka2ql.dem Testing j6warrenm_pekka1.dem Testing j6warrenm_pekka2.dem As you can see, I added a superfluous d in front of [d]Eric's name. That was accidental, but since I only noticed afterwards I let it be. I enjoyed myself a lot playing these. I started using saves and loads towards the end because I wanted to get them done today, but I will definitely want to revisit most of the maps to hunt for secrets and explore the parts I didn't get to explore properly. As usual, I was really bad at finding the secrets in my first runs. I really only get a couple here and there. I even forgot some of the ones I watched Daz create during his mapping streams, so good work, self. Some of my favorite parts were: Dropping the rocks in Adib's map. Seeing afterwards that I could have dropped a few of them earlier for more effective results. Monsters jumping to join the end fight in Daz's map. Rocky formations in same. Wondering if that thing up there is level geometry or skybox in EricW & Tronyn's map. It was of course part of the level. And then there was more. Using the rocket launcher in the same map. Ionous' map had a good feel to it, and some delightfully tough combat encounters. Probably my second favorite of the bunch. Maybe a tie with Daz's one. Necros' map looked good, but was a bit too dark in some parts. Rick's map was fun to play. I ran out of ammo on my first try, so I tried to be frugal in further runs. All kinds of things happened in them, but I enjoyed it all a lot. Scampie's map is probably my favorite in this pack. It flows well and has some unexpected twists in just the right places. It looks great. While some maps might lack polish, they all have good parts and I enjoyed myself a lot. Thanks again to everyone involved. Also, I think I should've been signaled that the doors were locked. Some people seemed to think that the escape was to figure out how to go through the doors rather that shoot MegaFloyd. Possibly didn't help that I had earlier introduced the concept of shooting a button through a door to lower a platform (which I intended to do more of, but never got to it)
There were some vis-related artifacts at the very beginning of Daz's map, and I spent a few moments lining them up and looking at them. They might be engine-dependent, so you will perhaps not see them.
I was confused by the key requirement message at the end of WarrenM's map, and thought I didn't pick up the Gold Key at all. I went back to look for it, and then thought for a while I had somehow lost it. Slight criticism to some people. I ended up luring Fiends into lava here and there, but they did not die because you did not add a trigger_hurt to simulate monsters burning in lava. Shame on you :) Yeah, I dunno
Finally played all maps, what an amazing pack!!! Started recording yesterday, finished just yet..!
So many new mappers, i am both amazed and surprised by the number of finished entries here. So basically all was said before, i can only repeat starting with: Adib: Nothing but a beautyfully strange place! The mechanic of breaking the seals wasn't clear, i managed to do it:) Love the style throughout, map more! Demo.7z Breezeep: Knave? Oh yeah, this is good! Knowing your DOOM stuff, waiting for more Quake! Incredible for a 1st release! Go map! Demo.7z DaZ: I wanted to join the Jam, glad i didn't. My map would have totally looked like yours. Without all that glitchy stuff of course:) Loving the variety of all the loose bricks, rocks look ace! One of my favorites! Oh, and neat startmap too! Now go map! Demo.7z EricW & Tronyn: OMFG! What an incredibly huge and evil place! I managed too beat this! Mhahaha. Still a bit high from playin, must have been the weed secret.. I liked the progression, the ceiling seems to never end, at every roof another vista opened up. I am deeply impressed how you fit this into the bounds. The skybox/lights worked well, the lava was too bright in places but i cannot really say anything bad. I had no performance issues btw. One of my favorites, and one of my favorite Tronyn maps of all times! This had me quite entertained, yeah! I don't know how much you did Eric, this goes out to you too. Awesome! Demo.7z Exhelzar: My first maps looked like crap compared to yours, and i mean that. Solid brim style, had fun! Go map! Demo.7z Ionous: You managed too improve the issues that i had while testing:) Well done, think about polishing the outer areas maybe and adding the "rest"?!? Go go map! Demo.7z Matecha: Another 1st map that promises more. The scale made me feel desperate. Go map! Demo.7z Necros: What to say?!? Awesome geometry combined with base/techy bits, this so much tickles me in the right spots... Gameplay wasn't on my side sadly, i found some places too dark. I died way too early.. Also performance issues. Anyway, I noclipped too every corner of it and had a wank, thats why no demo. Forgive me. Finish this please! Rick: Loving the geometry in this one as well, the fact there are no monsters on easy gave it that special vibe! Go map! Meddemo.7z Scampie: �berfloyds and Chtons in a rubicon-style setting, you made no mistakes here. Its perfect, the pacing, the ambushs, the secrets, hell yeah! My favorite map of the pack, loved every single bit of it. Demo.7z ShoTro: Ambitious. I couldnt finish one room in time, you tried a whole city. This even works in a weird way.. Impressive for a debut appearance. Go map! Sadly no demo, i forgot to record.. Will u/l one later. ItEndsWithTens: This map, OMFG! This map! Technically another level, i really liked the draped skin uses as bridges. Did that thing just looked at me? Wtf? I found the gameplay itself to be not too enjoyable, had to cheat on easy. Way too much spawning in my face, literally. Anyway, so much novelty here, the lavaflow which gets cut for example! Very very impressive.. Go map! Cheatdemo.7z WarrenM: Polished, lovely to look at, what was it, shining through? I enjoyed it a lot! Another fav in style!:) Demo.7z Im dizzy now, wow! Amazing pack, thank you all for hours of fun and slaughter! matecha - Very short, bit too short actually. Great start, hope to see more.
rick - I missed something because I ran out of ammo at the second shambler. I found nails, but no nailgun, so I had to godmode it. Also missed some shells it seems. necros - Awesome looking map, except for the pitch black indoor bits which were a bit annoying. Your obj2map experiment turned out really well, I have to say. Demos: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/demos/mapjam6_sleep_4.7z Yep, it's borderline breakage of the rule that secrets should not be required to finish a map. The nailgun is the one secret. You can get to the end without it on "hard", but making a run for it is often necessary due to the lack of shells.
To be honest, adding the "hard" skill setting was very nearly the last thing I did to the map and it was never actually tested. I just changed a few monster types, threw in some extra scrags and a bit more ammo and was done with it. I have an improved version of the map in the works that should be much better. @enliten - Well, the issue with the abyss is that it didn't get lit correctly at all on the final compile, which is sad, but I am glad people still enjoyed it. You are in luck. I am in the process of updating the map based on feedback and improving the areas I know are disappointing. I just need a whole lot of free time...
@MFX - Thanks. I set some hard limits on myself after trying somethings and failing at them. It is sad but setting those restrictions on myself meant less wasted time and more focus on what I knew I could do. After the release I have learned a ton about how I should have approached those situations so I can push my level further next time. @necros - I opened your map source. Seems that you attenuated the blue lights too much. That blue color would make a nice "black light" sci fi base effect, adding to the Doom mood, if you let them reach further. Also, don't you like ericw's _surface and _surface_offset keys?
Your level is a modern day classic Doom, very well executed. Like a Doom fanfic graphic novel. Your rock test is a big success. I don't care about monsters, my only complain is about dark. @DaZ - The purple haze fits perfect the rock texture you chose, making an amazing kid's fantasy setting. These colors set the level's identity upfront and I found them beautiful. It's like a Harry Potter game, moody and happy. I read a complain about blockiness of this level, but I don't think so: there are good texture choices and enough variation, many different places in the level. There's a giant rock dildo pending from the ceiling when the level begins. I don't wanna know what you meant with that. Just kidding, I was skeptic about the octogonal rocks, but turns out I was dead wrong.
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