i'm there :) 

demo: http://shub-hub.com/files/demos_singleplayer/whiteroom_spirit.zip

This map steams with atmosphere and flawless execution. 

Aww shucks! 

Lighting looks quite cool from the shots on the white textures....
I'll try it soon - Im gonna go for a lunch break now so I'll do it... 

I respect your artistic vision, and don't take this the wrong way, but I think the visual style is absolutely horrid. That's pretty much all the negative I'm going to say about it though.

Considering you're from Epic, the minimalist approach is something unexpected and bold. I haven't played it yet, will try to tonight, so I can't comment on gameplay (no shots with monsters?)

Also: even though you went with an extremely experimental and 'abstract' approach, you still have crates in your map! :P 

Hey, crates are Quake and Quake is crates. (say that 5 times fast) 

Oh, and you might appreciate the style more in motion. It looks cooler when you're running around. You may still hate it, and that's fine, but don't judge it entirely from the shots. :) 

Shots look interesting: gonna play that now ! 

Woah that was cool, really liked the transition to textures and the atmosphere with the writing on the wall and the dead bodies lying around. (Gotta learn how to implement those myself) I will check out your source for sure. Really enjoy your maps! How do you make them so fast? I would like to see you record a desktop video of your process.

Demo: http://www.st3ady.com/files/whiteroom_st3ady.zip 

loved it. Very fresh, very crisp and clean. Reminded me od a traditional japanese house interior. Was there a Q3 map that fully went for that style?

I like how the textures draw attention to the brushwork, which was very clean and solid. It seems that you've deliberately avoided crazy Geocomp style architecture, and that makes the experiment more interesting I think. More restrained than I would have expected.

It's a good reminder that quake can in fact handle bright colour palettes. I can't remember a level since http://retroquake.planetquake.gamespy.com/blog/?p=103 that that tried it.

The one jarring thing is that standard quake items and enemies don't fit in visually, but that's not a flaw as such, it's pretty much an inevitability.

After not playing quake for a while I always forget how much I enjoy the movement and the gameplay, jesus christ. For me, the gameplay and the mood of quake have always been equally strong reasons why I love the game, but I've never felt them to be strongly linked together, just two separate things that a lot of us really like that come in one package.

A lot of people call the gameplay 'visceral' but I'd say it's really quite quite cartoony: it's run and gun, shoot and jump, bounce dodge and weave. It's mechanical and fun, it's almost like a sport. The style is a mixture to be sure, but its muddy and foreboding, Lovecraft and strange ancient evil, and that style screams Silent Hill gameplay, it suits survival horrors with clunky controls and a sequence of terrifying scripted events (by Lemony Snicket).

I don't want to rant and derail the thread, but this project got me thinking (as successful experimentation should I suppose)... to me, the Quake gameplay made a lot of sense in this abstract stylised setting. Team Fortress 2 springs to mind - they essentially realised that it doesn't make sense to have guys doing rocket jumps when it looks like they're from Call of Duty 8.

In a further possible tangent, I know that we always talk about the "Big Community Project" and it never happens, but if it did, and it wasn't to be a scene-by-scene recreation of Quake that no one else would play, it seems clear to me that we should take EITHER the gameplay or the style and run with that, and make the form match the function.

In conclusion, (and slightly back on track) this is an abstract theme, and it's an abstract game. It's very obviously a game too, it never attempts to be realistic, and that's especially obvious if you've been away from it and playing modern games for the past few months.

Hopefully this starts a trend for maps with abstract visuals, it seems like there's definite potential there. 

86/86, 3/3.

I liked this because it was very unsettling as a whole. The "holy shit, where am I and what is this" feeling kept increasing as I progressed further and further. It was a definite plus how every other room had its separate sub-theme, made the map more memorable as a whole.

The ending was the best example of this. Gameplay-wise it needed to be more intense, it kind of felt unfinished (too short and weak). The texturing however was brilliant.

Seeing zombie dogs bite zombies to death would have been a great scene but it was something of a missed opportunity ):