@negke, thanks for the demos and feedback. To be honest, I was not expecting a comment from you about this map as I did not think this would be your kind of cup of tea! Shambler on the other hand I assumed would be loving it because of the crazy amount of secrets!
The pit of death by the bridge is something that was in the original Henrik map. I designed the combat (flying monsters) to make sure the player would be looking up and not really paying attention to the floor. So I suppose it sorta worked as planned!
Imagine a whole game with levels like this one
I am still not convinced Quake maps need to be this big. It certainly involved a lot of time and effort to create and there is always technical issues to solve because they are often breaking limits all the time.
Normally, the yellow windows and book shelves are unbreakable, except a selected few can be destroyed for passages
All the bookcases which don't look obviously breakable were not player interactive and only breakable by monsters. Eventually I decided this can be frustrating because the monsters don't always break things with a good impact. So I let the player break them as well, which as you said does lead to inconsistency.
The rusty key reward came in handy in the end, although I was at a miss as to where I could use the key (easily missable message btw)
This is essentially Quake, when locked doors are opened, there is just a small top left message (and console) and nothing else. It is not always obvious you have the right key or even have used it. I think this is a flaw of Quake TBH, it still expects the player to keep an eye on small irrelevant messages and the console.
I have added a text based
Inventory screen for the next patch which might help some people keep track of Arcane keys more easily.
It seems there's a lot to say about this, but I dunno - speechless
Probably explains the lack of feedback, oh well, next map then!