I thought adding "goodies" to a level just encouraged the attraction.

Pentgram is a heartbreaker, and sureley it unevens the balance of a level, but then again if you make account of the func_lift only opening after 3 min the challence of the level gets stronger.
Same goes for another cache with a QuadDamage.

Strikes out the amount of players when there are so many spawns. 

Decent foundation but could stand some reworking before being made pretty.

Thoughts and musings in more detail in demo format:
https://dl.dropbox.com/s/uwx2gsuo5w5dfd9/hellvert_lurk1.zip

Briefly:
1. Hallway lengths and general walking about rhythm are OK, but pent area is far too cramped and most hallways could benefit from a slight widening.

2. Pent should be removed. if I see an item in a DM map, I expect it to be obtainable somehow. This one shouldn't be obtainable (too unbalancing in a small map), so it should go. Also, it confuses bots.

3. I don't like the teleport destinations (into doorways of the hub room!?). One-way teleports to alcoves would be an improvement, but 2-way teleports (teleporters linking to each other) would be ideal.

4. Yellow armor should be downgraded to green and moved elsewhere.

5. Red armor should be moved further down its tunnel or moved to a risky 2nd floor jump in the central area.

6. More ammo would be nice. I played a 4p match where single shotgun was almost the only weapon getting any use.

7. More could be done to allow players to read each others' intentions and cut them off. Right now the focus seems merely on responding to immediate threats and a more cerebral duel play doesn't seem particularly possible. But on the other hand, the map is cramped and in general too closed off (essentially only a single floor to the central atrium) to allow manic free for all. 

Invulnerability sort of defeats the purpose of a shooter. 

was done right in Terracity. It's a good gameplay device when placed properly, it will break any standard gameplay map though. 

thanks lurker for the in depth demo / commentary

I've re-designed a bit of the map and will look at re-designing the teleporters and widening hallways where I can.

I'm still not sold on the two way teleporters, but I will fiddle with the teleporter destinations to make them better. It might be a bit tricky to keep the circularity and move the destinations... I'll see what I can do...

Visibility is a thing I should be able to improve, but having it balanced is going to be tricky.

Again, thanks for all the commentary, (I'll also fix the powerups)

Thanks again,
Ben 

Invulnerability sort of defeats the purpose of a shooter.

Dunno, if it's temporal it gives incentive to cull as much baddies as possible for it's duration. Also can get you through a hairy situation when low on ammo etc.
And sometimes being superman and having pent+quad+sng just mowing down some hordes for the heck of it feels kinda nice.
A fun exercise could be to spawn in a room without any ammo and having to use the pent + inter ranks agression to kill some key monsters (which opens a door to a ammo stack, etc). 

Ahoy, I did a bit of tweaking and redesigning. I feel like I addressed a lot of the things that lurker mentioned in the demo. I feel like I have lost a little bit of the flow in the map, I may be able to recover that with further tweaking.

Anyways, If you guys could share your thoughts on the gameplay again that would be terrific.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/108695968/hellvert_rev2.zip

-Ben 

I'm only a DMSP2 player and this level is very unfriendly for that mode of play, but then one would expect a decent 1 on 1 level to be exactly that. The number of spawn points means that the same type of enemy spawns at the samw spot in DMSP2 and that's not ideal. Nonetheless, I could see this becoming a popular duel map. One suggestion is to not to forget to put a bloodsoaked texture at the bottom of the spike pit :) If you could orchestrate some spatter on the walls that'd be good too. Big up! 

Monolithic Brickwork 

sweet :D 

 

V.2 comments in demo:

https://dl.dropbox.com/s/wbnjb6zbrx2j95q/hellvertv2_lurk.zip

Briefly:
1. I've enjoyed my duels on this one. Thanks for the changes!

2. There is a leak above the lightning gun.

3. Bars at green armor area need a clip brush.

4. Nailgun ammo is a little tight in 3P.

5. MH alcove probably needs a back, as the MH is too close to the RA right now.


Keep it up! 

looks great.
The wind tunnels are made of bricks? It works. Like the subtle custom textures, the simple quasi-metal/industrial grillwork.
Is that a fog laden abyss below the wind tunnels?

Really nothing to criticize, for me, except that the bottom area, if it is a pit, is very flat, if that makes sense. Like some kind of downwards protruding structures there would make it look better, imo. 

yeah the wind tunnels are made of bricks which is stupid, but I wanted to stick to the brick theme and not get back into metal. This is a screenshot of the skill selection area, the abyss below is deep, but the fog does not work well at distance fading to black. I like the idea of stuff protruding below. 

it looks pretty good with bricks. At first I wasn't sure. Might be divisive, but it doesn't seem *wrong*. 

in the first wind tunnel, have some bricks broken off the tunnel visually... and then as the player takes it, have some bricks fly by his vision inside the tunnel 

As he exits the tunnel there's an ogre, who gets a brick in the face. 

But I think it's something to do with the way Quake skews the textures on angled surfaces that makes it feel odd. 

The vertical parts with the brick don't look too bad. Do you horizontal scale to compensate for stretching? It's hard to tell in the screenshot.

Where the top part angles out is a Quake texture alignment nightmare, I don't think there's any way to make that look right. 

I see nothing wrong with bricks for a "wind tunnel"

Quake has the same thing. 

@scampie, that is the sort of stuff you should put into a speed map! :)

@ijed, I love it, a brick to the face of an ogre! for some reason I googling brick to the face and got some funny images! :P

@Rick, this is me being lazy, I have fixed the texture stretching on the pipe 45 angles. I did not do a final texture pass. The screenshot is one big climbing frame, just stuff for the player to explore while deciding which skill to pick. 

I kept thinking of the pain animation where he sits down and then gets back up. 

When you have surfaces at 45 degree angles on every axis texture alignment hopeless.

I've been doing a sort of Doom style texture wrapping where it makes a difference, but in many cases it's not much improvement. 

I Wasn't Being Critical

I took no offense by your comments, I have a very thick skin with regards to internet feedback. I always prefer people to be critical of my work because 'no comment' is not much use to me.