I'd say it might be intentional for ionous's map, but I doubt it for NewHouse - you start the map collecting a ton of ammo for weapons you don't have, and in my case doing so while trying to dodge the shots of one of those flying enemies (i get the feeling that wasn't supposed to happen though).

Later in the map, still with no weapons, I was dropped into a pit full of fiends... I lasted about all of 2 seconds there :/ 

You're simply collecting ammo for later. There are also a lot of powerups lying out in the open, but you're not supposed to take those yet, because there's no one to fight (there's even a message clearly stating that).

Falling in the fiend pit is supposed to kill you. You need to get to the other side without falling. A little unfair, but makes sense. 

http://celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=61350&start=122

He explicitely states he took the player's shotgun away.
He also said a few days ago that he had to cut some stuff off to make the deadline, so if the map is unbalanced it's understandable. 

Well, considering the fact that it seemed to be working as intended... I gave the map another go, and it was great! I did manage to find about 4 secrets, which gave me a few weapons early on and allowed me to kill the fiend horde in the pit (although I also figured out how not to fall in anyway), and after that point I found myself really enjoying the level. Great stuff :) 

Damn, the latter had by far the most Noir title of the lot, it's a pity it's not in there. Will Skacky release it as a DLC later? 

I intentionally removed shotgun, I wanted to player focus more on widowmaker shotgun and more on close combat as much as possible. Every backpack have 30 shells per, which means 10 shots for that gun.

Unfortunately backpacks doesn't look how much ammo player already have, if I could make the same thing with regular shellboxes.. that would be great!

Every Zombie in a city center is sleeping or paralyzed until the Gold Keycard is picked. I wanted to make that place non-dangerous first so player can use their plans how to easily survive in that place.

Nice to hear you gave the map another go* 

Map pack should not come with config.cfg 

I have recorded some demos (Quakespasm), but still fighting with Newhouse's map on Nightmare, almost got it... (will be ready 17.10.2016 at evening)

Demo for Ionous
Demo for Pritchard
Demo for Shamblernaut
Demo for NewHouse

... and even Startmap Demo :D

I'll write few comments tomorrow! 

Startmap Demo (for pervs) 

Demos:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ete5cvsxe4yqz2z/mjb_jam8dems.zip?dl=0

Shamblernaut:

The start map was fantastic and was a great representation of the theme. I wouldn't have figured out to whack the posters if I didn't read the post saying so.

Your entry is e1m3 but with details taken out to become more linear? I am not sure what I am supposed to get here but the black and white do not compliment the map. As dwere said, I was waiting for some twist but no twist comes!

NewHouse:

Holy cow how much time did you put into this? This is a full fledged, high detailed map and there is some intense brutality emanating from the map. Loved the eerie beginning where you can get your bearings and the use of noir lighting was used really well. Actually a bit creepy! Super hard on Skill 2 but the fight with the vores is intense! I forgot to re-record after my third death so unfortunately it ends there...but I did finish it!

Ionous:

Night of the Living dead, I see it but the execution is poor. The use of lighting to make the church dimly lit with streaks of sun spot was well done. I think any map can benefit from music, just pick one!

Pritchard:

Great work, this felt like it used the most of the theme and guidelines to me and thus takes the cake. Great use of breakables, AD entities, and monsters. I can appreciate the early gun map, where the big toughies to a break from once! Strange ending where it seems we are entering a tomb of some sort...it has me intrigued!

Final note:

Great job guys, I would have liked to see more use of the noir theme by some of you and one large disappointment I found is the severe lack of AD in this AD jam. Pritchard's map was really the only one I could tell AD was thoroughly used. NewHouse comes in a close second because there was some good use of breakables in there as well. 

Watching you break every box was pretty funny. I hope you liked my map khreathor, it was good to see how someone else handled some of the encounters. I await your comments eagerly...

I think in the future i'd definitely want to put more health in.... 

Didn't refresh before posting, so i missed seeing Bloughsburgh's post.
I'm glad you liked my map so much! Unfortunately the ending is a bit weird, I basically ran out of time and ideas for how to end it properly. In an ideal world you'd probably be fighting your way out to a car on the street or some other setpiece, but as it is you're just killing the big bad and that's it. (Imagine that they're wearing a tux and fedora!) 

I really wanted to add more small details like newspapers and more cardboard boxes(those would be breakable).. Though I wanted to keep these boxes I used in map unbreakable, otherwise it would be too easy to just break everything in your way and not requiring jumping skills that much (I like jumping), but that is just my opinion. Some people really do like breaking things* 

I must say, the textures look about as rough as I expected.

Grey blood makes it hard to see if you're hitting anything, and subconsciously looks like nothing takes any damage.

I'm almost compelled to pick this thing apart to try and remedy the aforementioned issues, but I'm not sure it would be worth it, considering that there are only four maps, two of which don't even follow the theme.

In any case, thanks to Shamblernaut for organizing this thing, and I hope to see at least a few more maps of this kind in the near future, as it is a very interesting and unexplored theme indeed. 

Things like, when you hit breakable walls there is different colored effect from it, couple people didn't realize they were doing any damage to some brick walls (semi secrets/secrets). With colors if you hit breakable wall (brick wall), there is brown smoke thing coming out after hit. In regular walls case the color is just grey. 

I can't speak to the other's work, but you can remove the palette file from gfx to play my map in colour (I built it with regular textures rather than desaturated ones). I almost prefer to do that, just because, like you said, it can be hard to make out details otherwise. 

Well in my case, it should be easier to play in a normal way.. though it will be a bit of stylished because I used desaturated textures. But everything else is colored: enemies, effects.. and these effects especially:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwxYkKdSD855Q1RrWHJGcDdtVFU/view?usp=sharing 

The sole reason why I included it at all was because we only had three entries by release date and I wanted the jam to have some padding.

I was just using it to play around with the idea of (quite literally) linear gameplay.

It was never actually intended to be released :) 

Tried to play this jam in Darkplaces but it doesn't seem to load the palette. Do I need to put it in \id1? 

Palette hacks are for us 8-bit old farts. True color replacement graphics won't be affected. 

Your demo is uploaded, see links above.
All demos are on nightmare.

I will upload them on youtube too. 

I felt like I didn't' give your map enough credit from my initial post.

You use AD entities well when it came to ambiance. Plenty of light sparks, breakables, models to show for it. I think the centurion and the zombie knight are the only AD monsters seen however.

I also found you could get stuck in a few places if you try to backtrack (I make note of some on the demo) 

Thanks for your words.

It surely is possible that I wasn't able to find all of the places where you could get stuck. I want to point out one thing though, in ionous stream he simple didn't notice he could break bricks that were in front of one secret gun (plasma gun). And also after breaking one secret wall inside that old factory, even if you fail trying to jump to other side where quad damage was, stair bricks push out from wall near this yellow armor secret so player can jump up back by using those.. but I am sorry that I didn't lit it well enough for the player.

Another thing I want to point out is that.. I couldn't use this ganster/mafia theme because it doesn't fit together with my upcomming whole lenght episode... so I made something I could use even..

So I really hope it could be possible quake future city like ones in doom2, remember downtown map and also map from the plutonia experiment "Odyssey of noises". Unfortunately that was maybe too much, there wasn't enough time for the bigger map 

Playing my map on Darkplaces is not good idea unless you will not get mad that I used invisible textures at least in one place, because the simple skip texture give me so much trouble to place between one button and bricks. 

Some very impressive work, but:

a) what happened to those grunts-with-fedoras (I think khreathor made them)? They would have worked really well in Pritchard's map.

...and, more importantly:

b) I don't get the whole business with using desaturated textures AND a custom palette. I found that *almost* everything is improved by deleting the palette file: the contrast between the b&w visuals and the coloured HUD/enemies/pickups is what makes it work; if everything is grey it just becomes oppressive. Pritchard's map looks better in colour (without losing any of its "noir" vibe).

The only exception is the start map: why oh why was it textured only partly in b&w? As is stands, either you have to play it with the palette, in which case the desaturated textures are pointless, or you delete the palette and it looks bad, because it wasn't consistently textured in b&w.

I'm sorry if this sounds negative. There is a lot that is very impressive here -- that start map is beautifully made, for instance -- but it could have been so much nicer...