Okay I took the plunge. I've recorded
some demos on skill 1. You should watch them through as I leave some comments here and there. The play thru is quite long. There are some errors on the map you need to fix but I'll get to that.
Things I liked:
Good puzzles and visual communication with the player.
The scale is huge but it really works in this case. I appreciate the shortcuts. The goal you are telling the players was very easy to understand. I liked the different textures although the yellow caution stuff is way overused throughout. Overall, I really did like this level and you only have a bit of tweaking to do IMO. The lighting is very Half-Life and Quake 2. I think it works for the most part. Some people like that aesthetic.
Things I didn't like:
I didn't like having to jump and (occasionally miss) the ammo and armor. That slowed things down for me and got annoying. Although I really like your puzzles, it was tough to see if the door was open or closed a few times. I played this on a laptop with a 16" screen for example. You could fix this with a higher contrast texture in the open state.
Okay we gotta talk about your cheap deaths. (Silver key in particular.) Not fair, no fun. No more insta-kills, it's bad design and frustrates players. No one likes this. Find someone who does and I'll buy you a candy bar. Seriously.
I assume you are using Quakespasm-Spiked or vkQuake to make and test your level. In Ironwail 0.6.0, I am getting "Sound NotPreCached" errors when stepping on your buttons. Not sure what is supoosed to be playing for the button sounds, but I am not hearing whatever it is. Quakespasm-Spiked "corrects" some of these errors but most other Quake engines do not, so the player is not going to expereince your map they way you intended. Simple fix: don't use QSS for developing maps. Playing? Go for it. Mapping? Skip it and use Quakespasm 0.94.5
One last thing and it's a fine line here. For as big as the map is, there are few monsters. Your set piece moments like the Quad and the area where you drop down after the LG jumping puzzle are great. But I think you can spawn in more monsters in hallways between your puzzles and it would be fine. You certainly give the player plenty of ammo.
Great first Quake map. Oh yeah one last thing. Your map is packaged all wrong and uses capital letters - you should use lower case. I never saw the sky map, since it was in the wrong place. Take a look at these two videos for info:
https://youtu.be/eQ911Wphy0Q - release your map
https://youtu.be/vIXBcMWw_X4 - skyboxes and fog