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Underwater Map Jam - Release
Get your fingers wet in these 9 awesome water themed maps! Big Thank You to mappers:

Bloodshot
Giftmacher
ish
JCR
muk
MUZBOZ
nyo (Nyoei)
Pinchy
Pritchard

We have few new mappers here, so give them a warm welcome :)

Enough of talking: Screenshots

Download here: Mirror 1 Mirror 2
[Including 7 meg of screenshots you can view above]

Have fun and don't forget to record some demos!
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Yay! 
Glad to have participated. Looking forward to getting a chance to play everyone's maps - I hope you all enjoy mine :) 
Good, Good 
hoping that this jam provides the first underwater maps ever. As far as i know there has been only flooded ones and only a few in the void/space. 
Like Clockwork 
Announced: July 17th
Released: August 17th

Demos coming soon! 
Like Clockwork 
Original Deadline: July 31st
Extended Deadline: August 11th
Released: August 17th

Stream coming at some point! 
 
I had a lot of fun working on this one- learned quite a bit too. Can't wait to play everyone else's entries! 
Demos 
Thanks guys. A lot of beautiful, tough and unusual maps.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3li06myS1r1S1djOVIzdnFpLUU

Sorry ish, couldn't finish your map. Was drowning or getting killed over and over.

Underwater focused levels sure do play different. Vor projectiles become a threat again for example. 
WOOt! 
DL'ed, ready to install...

Quick, slightly OT question: are jams not numbered anymore? 
 
Ever since episode 1 I've loved me some water in a Quake map. Of course the trick is how to use it for a new challenge or movement mode or atmospheric element WITHOUT adding unfun levels of I-don't-want-to-drown urgency.

I yoinked this off of Quaketastic last night when I saw it had been uploaded, and got through the first few maps...

Bloodshot's was a great start to the pack. Nice use of, and careful introduction of, several of the mod's features. A great sense of exploring and moving between distinct areas. Fun combat, spooky vibes, just nifty all around. Between this and his Egypt-jam map he's doing cool stuff. Maybe the only critique I have is about a biosuit that should have been marked or messaged in some way to point out that it was a respawning item.

Giftmacher's map started to edge into requiring too much low-oxygen swimming IMO. And the last fight was either trivial or complete bullshit, depending on whether you happened to swim left or right when you're dropped into the room. On the upside though this map creates a great sense of drowned ruins, and of depths opening up beneath you.

Like the anon post, I didn't finish ish's map. Too much drowning or eating underwater vore balls. It had an intriguing opening though.

JCR's map has some nicely crazy climbing and falling. Just cool spaces in general, good use of height and angular constructions. I usually go through Quake maps like a roomba, carefully covering all paths before proceeding, but in this case I felt like I was kind of just tumbling ahead into whatever was next & that was fine! I did die at one point where I hadn't saved in a while, so I didn't finish it, but I'll come back to it.

muk's map was a good contrast to follow JCR's: squarely compactly constructed and trimmed metal-map biz. Like other mukmaps it bends back in and over itself, so you get glimpses of places you've been or are about to be, something I like a lot. Mostly fun use of water, although there was one bit of extended underwater swimming to check out various passages looking for just the right one... that seemed too lengthy, and not helped by the passages being populated with sniping zombies. And I didn't find a GL until a later section. That did make it quite satisfying to come back and splort the zombies later though.

That's as far as I got last night. Looking forward to the rest! 
Mugwump 
The normal/retro divide stopped making sense after retrojam 6, so it made sense to abandon it. Also, I cannot divine dumptruck's motivations, but "Jam 10: DM4" would probably have been a major mouthful, and awkward looking. Naming them this way is more interesting IMO. 
K Thanks. 
Though if I may be allowed to play the devil's advocate, numbers are good for collecting. If jams aren't numbered anymore, it can be easy for someone who doesn't keep his info up-to-date to miss a jam and he wouldn't even know it. 
 
maybe letters of the alphabet?

This was Underwater Jam. Next one has to be Vertical Jam, then Wild West Jam, then X-men Jam (use only textures from X-men TC)... 
#11 ==> Vegan Jam 
 
 
Vore Jam, obvs 
Numbering / Naming 
Only recurring, generic events should have a numbering system IMO. Also, there are no best practices posted anywhere. No guidelines etc. There are only ppl who pipe in once someone has made a misstep. ;)

dm4jam described what we were going for pretty well so I didn't even consider adding a number to it. It was a one off. And frankly, I didn't know any better!

I'm not quite sure what the answer is but I don't see any reason to number unique, one-off type of events. Underwater Jam will most likely be the only one of its kind.

One thing to consider, maybe numbered jams inhibit new participants somehow? Not sure, but I suspect there may be something to that. Like moviegoers skipping a sequel with a number because they didn't see the first installment? 
 
Numbered jams might be intimidating to both mappers and players alike, I agree.

I wouldn't call any of the previous jams "recurring events", they were hosted with a very great degree of irregularity. 
 
A couple more:

MUZBOZ - Terrific use of custom voice work and music choices. Fun little scenario! It's pretty boxy -- it's a challenge not to do that for indoor modern-ish maps -- but that's broken up somewhat with the vents/catwalks/stairwells (very Half-Lifey, unsurprisingly). Good fights in the big stairwell and big lift areas. I do think that the ammo is not quite sufficient for hard skill; I made it through, but even using infighting and scavenging for all packs/boxes I still ended up doing some axe-work. The map also probably waits too long to give the player a non-starter weapon (esp. with that many bullet-spongey monsters).

Nyoei - This had some early-quake vibes. Blocky brushwork, no trim, and some out-of-the-usual texture choices and visual language... not bad in a jam and I could dig the retro feel. Fun secrets too. But almost no water! What's up with that my dude?

BTW, something I noticed in Nyoei's map but also several of the others I've played so far: lots of folks using max-height stairs with no clipping. Makes for a very bumpy trip up the staircase. 
Bloodshot 
What a lovely map! Excellent architecture and detailing. All the "outdoors" inaccessible areas give it a sense of huge scale. Great lighting, except for most of the big flames not flickering. I love the mix of tech/industrial & ikblue and the environmental storytelling - special mentions to the intro with the glass tunnel and the Bioshock-like bit in the mini-sub.

I noticed what appears to be a bug with a biosuit constantly respawning (see demo). Skill 2 combat is good, not too hard, but could be a bit more surprising. The only thing I didn't enjoy was the impossibility of backtracking to hunt for secrets, but I understand that it wasn't really compatible with the story.

Note: 4/5. Skill 2 demos, 136/136 kills, 1/4 secrets. 
Giftmacher 
Nice little Koohoo-style map. Good architecture as always, cool puzzles and challenging but fair combat. I've read some who complained about a lack of ammo, I thought the supplies given were enough.

Couldn't find half of the secrets but I'll need to play it again to know if it's because I sucked or because they were too well hidden. Not much criticism except that I noticed a couple flames that didn't flicker and the roof of the start cave could use a little less texture repetition.

Note: 4/5. Skill 2 demos, 57/57 kills, 3/6 secrets. 
Ish 
An interesting map, very respectful of the theme with very little above water combat.

Unfortunately too tough, with a shortage of ammo supplies - I had to spend a good chunk of the map with nothing but the axe & an unusable LG under penalty of instadeath and had no choice but to godmode my way out of the last couple of underwater fights. The shambler at the beginning might be a bit much, even though the player unusually starts with a very much welcome LG.

Couldn't figure out how to open the last secret. A strange bug happened: At the end of the map, my kill counter displayed 96/100 but when I exited, the stat screen said 100/100... WTF?

Note: 3/5. Skill 2 demos, 100/100 kills, 2/3 secrets. 
Glubblub 
ETA Thirty Minutes 
Until stream time.

https://www.twitch.tv/ionous 
Lock-ups On Quakespasm / QSS? 
Just wondering if anyone else has experienced problems with the pack? Lock ups mainly. On Windows 10 and an Nvidia GTX 780. Played thru Bloodshot's map last night in Mark V with some severe frame rate issues in sections where there are a lot of emitters. Switched to QSS - locked up on 2 different maps. Tried QS and had the same thing. Trying to rule out anything with the mod. 
Demos For All, 
I feel like some of the maps suffered from too little weapons/ammo and too many big guys. That said, they were all enjoyable and unique.

Bloodshot
Giftmacher
Ish
Muk
Muzboz
Nyo
Pinchy
Pritchard 
Feedback, Etc 
Thanks Johnny Law,

Yeah, in the day or two after I was finished, I kept thinking, "Ahh, I should have put in EVEN MORE enemies, but also a lot more of the higher end guns and ammo."

I think I started off thinking the map would be a bit longer (maybe 150% of what it is), and that the player would lead up to a Super Nailgun, and a Rocket Launcher, or something... but it never got that far!

I had further thought on have Skill 0, 1 and 2 all being balanced utterly differently, like make it so...

* Skill 0 a game with a nailgun at the start, heaps of ammo, and maybe a rocket launcher you get in the middle... (there IS a super shotgun in the very first secret at the start on Easy, but who plays on EASY????? Not us. :)

* Skill 1 could be what it is now... a science guy having a bad day at work with not much in the way of guns and ammo.

* Skill 2 could have quite a few more high-end tough enemies, but also several more weapons, and some more ammo.

And even shift and change how some of the vents, rooms and keys are located, to change the way each Skill setting is played.

But yeah! IT is what it is. :)

I'd agree with your feedback. I wanted to go with a sorta "hanging on my a thread" vibe to the level. And I think that does work. But... it could have dished up some bigger weapons earlier, even if it meant adding some more enemies to balance that out. :D 
ISH 
I finished Ish's level. :)
It took some time! But I finished it.
Hehehe. 
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