FYI I loved the atmosphere of your map. The sparseness of monsters felt right. Lighting and textures are gorgeous. I'd rather play more maps like it than having it changed. 

interesting... i thought the main complaint was the lack of fighting. i can certainly preserve the slower paced gameplay, although i am sorely tempted to do a chthon horde fight somehow. ;) 

Chthons all around the level in the lava!
The thing I found most irritating though was the sparklies everywhere, esp dark areas, since the level is unvised. Did you have issues with vis, or was it just because time? 

tasteful use of Doom textures, I enjoyed that. 

Necros: There's some bezier spline code in the honey progs if you look through it. It's not perfect, but it could maybe be a starting point. 

ptoing: the level doesn't vis because the utility crashes :P i never bothered reporting it to eric at the time because itwouldn't have helped at all since the entire map is basically one giant room and he was working on that tronyn/eric collab at the time.

i've been meaning to send a bug report to him afterwards but kept forgetting...

what might help is changing the walls that contain the map to use a black texture so that sparklies will be less of a problem.

now, from what i remember, sparklies are caused by t-junctions not being created, and there were some problems with that during compilation.

czg: cheers, dude! 

Ah, that makes sense. It still is a pretty damn impressive map either way. And an excellent proof of concept for Warren's OBJ2MAP tool. 

That's in no way a slight against all the very talented people who make these maps. I just find quake to be inherently boring on the gameplay front. The drip-feed of zigg-zagging bullet sponges isn't my thing.

I play these to see new ideas and executions, occasional gameplay novelty and to admire the technical mastery. IMO, Necros, I don't think your map needs to be changed. Especially not on the gameplay front, that would add little to no value to me. That's just me and I believe I'm in the minority on this topic.

Make more lame tech demos, they rock. 

"That's in no way a slight against all the very talented people who make these maps. I just find quake to be inherently boring on the gameplay front. The drip-feed of zigg-zagging bullet sponges isn't my thing. "

I definitely feel that. I love the game and the atmosphere but the combat is just too old to really enjoy anymore. For me, at least.

That's why most of my maps suffer from a lack of monsters or really good fighting spaces ... because that doesn't interest me. :P 

I'm the same way. I don't even put monsters in on "easy" anymore (unless required for progression).

I also tend to think that boss fights and/or big arena fights are old and tired relics from the 90s.

Generally once I get to what is obviously the "big finale", I give it one or two tries then call it a day. 

That's why most of my maps suffer from a lack of monsters or really good fighting spaces ... because that doesn't interest me. :P

I made a map once, it was pretty spaces with obligatory monsters dropped in.

Encounter design is very interesting to me, Quake simply doesn't offer much in that regard.

Doom, on the other hand, has a compelling beastiary on it's own, but when coupled with great maps... hnnnngggg 

 

I play Quake purely for the gameplay, if a map has nice visuals/atmosphere then it's a bonus. What makes the game so fun for me is the physics; doing all sorts of jumps and tricks to gain speed and traverse the maps. I never really cared much for the game before I discovered how to abuse the physics, but at the same time, if it had just another generic sci-fi setting (like Quake 2, for instance), I probably wouldn't like the game as much as I do now. So I guess you could say I enjoy it for the combination of gameplay and style. Always play on skill 3, but arena fights and hordes aren't really my cup of tea - much prefer a well designed layout with thought put into monster placement and which allows for movement/dodging.

Haven't played this jam yet so can't comment on any of the maps. 

what do you think is missing from quake that makes you not want to design encounters for it? 

"I definitely feel that. I love the game and the atmosphere but the combat is just too old to really enjoy anymore. For me, at least." 

That feel when you play a game for 20 years and then realise the gameplay sucks :( 

It didn't suck 20 years or maybe 10 years ago. It just got old and moldy.

But I still like the melee enemies: a circle with two-three fiends or a horde of knights. 

The quake beastiary feels a little homogeneous. The somewhat shallow unit differentiation doesn't demand much from the player. In practice, you only have to "play one way" against pretty much every possible scenario. You master one enemy, you've mastered them all.

Even if there where more specific unit roles, it would be beneficial to lower enemy hp across the board so that you can have more enemies present simultaneously to make use of the new possible unit combinations. IMO, this creates faster gameplay with more depth. Which, to me, is more engaging.

An analogy: the Quake beastiary is comprised of a narrow set of colors, and when mixed, only produce a narrow set of shades. Not very interesting to look at nor very interesting to paint. 

Matthias Worch had a great rant about this one time on Facebook. Basically, the beastiary in Doom is FAR more varied and interesting than in Quake. Different monster configurations require you to switch up tactics and make decisions quickly to survive.

Quake, while an awesome game, doesn't really do that. There's a single flying enemy, for example. And it's basically the same as the land based ones except that it's, you know, in the air.

The fish are kind of pointless, and the only really interesting enemy is the vore as it requires you to manage the projectiles while you deal with other creatures in the room.

I dunno. It sounds like I don't like Quake. Not true! I love it to death. But a fun game to play? These days? Not so much ... still fun to make maps tho. 

So we can organize ourselves and take a deadline 

There is one monster in the bestiary you're all forgetting, and that's the most important one, the environment. The regular monsters' interaction spatially is where the level designer makes them shine. Hope this helps! 

That turd is only going to get so shiny, no matter how hard you scrub. ;) 

Sure, but you can mold it into an astonishing diorama of ancient evil. 

True ... Map Jam 7 : Polished Turds 

sure by today's standards the game looks like a turd, but that was never really what the game had going for it. Yes the game at the time was a technical achievement, but the atmosphere and mod-ability of the game is what kept people interested.

This community owes itself to how well the game can be modded, and to the modding communities creativity.

Think about it this way, this game presents a simple basis to build upon, and is restrictive so that achievements in programming or design can be fully appreciated by any who know the original game.

Maybe because this game is a dinosaur (turd) that we eek out every piece of gameplay interesting mechanic, design from it and feel a huge sense of accomplishment in doing so. I sort of feel in that regard like this community has a lot in common with things like the 64k demo-scene community, or the vanilla minecraft mapping community. Very simple concepts or tools doing amazing things.

On the topic of the mobs being vastly different than doom mobs, sure. The doom areas had large open expanses. How many of those were in vanilla quake? Not too many.

Anyway, I should stop ranting and keep mapping lol.