The "Level Design" section of their description is the best. 

He made a 2D version of Doom? When Doom already is 2D... 

Watched the Hellbound kickstarter video now.
Seriously, if a developer has a thick foreign accent, he shouldn't try to talk in a video explaining the game. Not without subtitles.

The weakest point of the Hellbound kickstarter is the same of the Hellscreen kickstarter: No classic level design at all. The Hellscreen kickstarter at least claimed to want to have classic level design (without any proof of concept), but the Hellbound kickstarter doesn't even acknowledge anything about level design; only about environment art. And none of the team members is a level designer.

Which is a bit of a shame, as the art and the music are great. 

Art looks great if only they created an actual level for it rather than a shitty survival chunk of dirt surrounded by a lava map. 

i guess its the only guy in the team that can speak in English well enough for that. And that is no accent, is what happens when you aren't accustomed to speak in English. I heard people saying that its like a vampire talking, but never understood it neither never heard that vampires talked in a different way.

It loks like they don't intend to make levels and only if they are very successful with the campaign, so this will be like Devil Daggers with more money on the graphics and Serious Sam style instead of a creepy one. 

And that is no accent, is what happens when you aren't accustomed to speak in English.

I'm not a native English speaker either, and I never actually talk in English. What happens when I try are tons of mistakes, a very limited vocabulary and an extremely irregular rhythm with some words taking very long to come out. It's like I suddenly become mentally disabled.

The main challenges for people who writes in English but don't talk in English are to remember every word, every sound that they make and every vocal muscle movement (chords, lips, tongue, etc.) needed to speak those words. And to remember all of it in realtime.

The guy in the video doesn't have trouble with that. But it's very difficult for me to understand all he says. 

Played the demo of Ion Maiden. Like any other recent Doom/Build mod with tons of graphical effects etc. it's not gonna run "efficiently", but aside from that it is extremely legit stuff. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZtDNrio240 

Even skipping through that was painful. 

Find funny how the guy gets all fired up so much, even when nothing happens.

The layout is the same simplistic thing as the one i played some months ago and doesn't look like there is big changes, save for the motion blur that prevented from strafing that looks like is fortunately out now.

If the motion blur is definitely out this could be good if they got a level designer. 

The level designers definitely didn't do a block-out first. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwHRPVrZVgM

seems more doom-like than quake-like but i saw a little bit of 3d/jumping in there. 

Not sure what the design goal of the game is... basically looks like Doom 3 with the resolution of Doom 1. 

I don't like the hud overlay but the pixel rendering of 3d objects adds a bit of a gritty feel to me. I like it. 

" It reaches the quality you expect from a AAA experience while adhering to some of the aesthetic technical limits of older hardware."

Funnily enough you useless mis-guided cocksuckers, "aesthetic technical limits" were in no way what made old skool games great, they were a necessary evil to put up because they were just fucking limits. 

One could argue that the limits imposed by old tech forced developers to focus on other things than visuals, and also allowed for faster production cycles.
Example in our context, the time it takes to make a Quake map, vs the time it takes to make a level in some modern game. 

An incidental silver lining benefit, not a fundamental positive to having lower quality graphics. 

(^ "bit" in the title is also said Cockney glottal-stop style)

It's actually very complicated with lots of variables jostling with each other. E.g. crunchy software quake at low resolution looks amazing and immersive and strangely rich with detail for some reason, but those exact same environments in smooth GL on a modern monitor look like bland, barren shite. You're no longer squinting at it and your mind doesn't have to fill in the details, and the magic is gone.

Other things: tools were primitive which probably hampered asset creation times substantially compared to what we can do now with all our spanky new Trenchcoats and Mayos and whatnot. 

Many games, even some modern ones with big budgets, choose a specific quality of visuals with this in mind.
Biggest example recently that comes to mind is the latest Zelda game, where they tried to go more realistic but realized how much extra work it meant to look right, so decided for a simpler more stylized look.

To me one of the big reasons I love Quake is it's low-fidelity, and what that means for gameplay and extra content creation. 

Previous post was in reply to Shambler not Kinn. 

But yeah, many of the things we love about 90s FPS level design - multiroute, exploration, secrets, optional bits etc - exist because you could afford to make them back then. With the cost of real estate in modern FPS, the optional bits are the first to get binned when production reality kicks in.

Things seem to be improving again, I think we're over the worst of the "linear" era and developers are making more of an effort in this regard, but certainly post 90s there was a long stagnation period when all FPS releases were little more than on-rails games. 

Yeah, WTF.

So they've made an FPS that looks like it came from the mid-2000s, then stuck it in a screen resolution that comes from the mid 1990s.

I've seen enough of these sorts of indie developers to think that maybe we should just gather them all up, dump them on some remote, isolated tropical island somewhere, and just let them make all these incongruous eyesore games amongst themselves, well away from the rest of us, and then meanwhile in the world of normal people with actual taste, we can all eventually, in time, just pretend that these awful things don't exist. 

Thread conclusively answered. 

I thought the main reason that old maps had so many different routes was because they also had to function as deathmatch maps. 

The big hope, apart from maybe Witchfire which I'm worried might have a great theme and gameplay that is the worst of Painkiller meets the worst of Bulletstorm, is of course the semi-home-grown (i.e. half of terrafusion is working on it) 3DKillpixelRealms "#RetroFPS #PixelShooter #indie #blocktober #PartyLikeIts1996 #quakekiller #lowpixel #RetroPoly #pixelpoly #polypixel #QuakeLikeQuakeDidIt #pixel #ALLTHEPOLYGONS #8bitIndieDev #tastethegiblets #oldskoolpixeltretropoly"

But any more to consider....??