Demos from me here

http://quaketastic.com/files/demos/Retrojam4DemosZwiffle.zip 

Have some demos!

http://www.quaketastic.com/files/demos/rj4-5thdems.zip 

http://www.twitch.tv/elgu_ 

Zwiff... the end of the demo for my map was funny with the voreball bouncing in and out of the shamblers ass. 

Balls bouncing in and out of Shambler's arse, you say? 

 

 

Minor spoilers below

Ericw: Very intense and brutal, especially on the lowest floor. The upper part was really fun tho.

Fifth: Nice little map. I think spawns were underused here comparing to other maps. It was not that brutal apart from the final battle where shamblers got my ass kicked 4 times in a row until I realised that bridge was my partner and a savior.

Scampie: It was a very well planned map for a speedmap. It has its own idea that is well executed and plays fast and fun.

Skacky: I was always impressed how you could make big maps in such a tiny period of time. Large and vertical map as always with some really cool combat sections.

ItEndsWithTens: This map felt like episode 4 meets doom or wolf to me. Maze-like almost 2d layout that felt confusing at first but turned out pretty obvious in the end. The combat was slower that in most other maps, facing one enemy at a time mostly. The moment when light turns out was superb!! A+ for it.

Text_Fish: I really loved the way this map plays with all those moving platforms, cages, teleporters and other things. I would like to see a proper map of that kind in future.

Zwiffle: Nice looking little map with fancy colored lighting and lack of ammo. Make something bigger next time!

Overall it's a pretty nice map pack with a mixed size and quality of maps, though every map is very atmospheric and enjoyable.
10 spawns out of 10. 

Y'all enjoyed the excuse to use spawns in your maps, didn't you...

retrojam4_ericw

Had a false start where a spawn held me under the lava by the sliver key trap. The whole level had a manic feel generated by all the powerups. I cocked up the stealth section (a nice echo of a classic Pain Maze moment) by not hitting a spawn dead centre, but somehow managed to muddle through. Vital statistic: did 7450 points of quad damage

retrojam4_fifth

This time a spawn did me a huge favour by finding the yellow armour secret, I did figure out the lightning gun myself (eventually). The SNG ambush was effective, the construction means you don't want to sidestep the trap by foregoing the gun. A big long water passage was another nice nod to E4's "special" features, so what else could the vital statistic be than my longest swim: 15 seconds underwater.

retrojam4_pulsar

"You have found a secret spawn" was hilarious, the map was filled with iconic E4 locations, but rebuilt with much greater skill. Combat had a nice ramping up effect, with very sparse, lonely corridors at first and a frantic ending. I didn't notice the pent or the extra nails until it was too late, which would have made that battle much easier. Vital statistic: I turned 18 vorepods against attacking enemies.

retrojam4_scampie

It's nice how a retrojam lets you do a map which would be annoyingly gimmicky in long doses, but works great in miniature. This time I did not screw up the stealth section, and took revenge on the fiends with axe-murdering glee. Didn't dare kill the spawns though, so no 1005 kills. Vital statistic: 100% melee damage baybee!

retrojam4_skacky

A extensive and pretty tough map, the long vertical climbs reminded me of The Nameless City. Loads of visual interest up in the ceilings (although I couldn't figure how to get the quad suspended up there. I like the way that combats would escalate as reinforcements came in just before you'd finished off the previous wave. Vital statistic: Managed to off 10 Shamblers without taking damage from them, although finding the pent secret before the pit fight was a big help, so maybe those ones shouldn't count : - ).

retrojam4_tens

A map which mashes takes the gloomy feel of the Hell's Atrium basement, and combines it with a set-piece from Azure Agony. The gloom also gave the map it's best ambush, with the lights out spawn attack which was very well choreographed to be scary and threatening but not at all unfair. I found the secret lightning gun but couldn't survive the swim, I guess I needed to find my way to the biosuit first. Vital Statistic: Shamblers did 56 dmg to me, 50% of damage taken - particularly the one before the spawn ambush always managed to round the corner and nail me.

retrojam4_textfish

This map captures that E4 feeling of a strange world of which you must figure out the rules. The extending platforms from the Palace of Hate make much more sense over a slime trap. I liked how the combats tied into this by virtue of being dangerous due to the environment they occurred in, like battling a vore from atop a moving platform, so you had to leap for cover, or the fights in the cages. Vital statistic: In one particularly good run of combat I racked up 13 kills unscathed.

retrojam4_zwiffle

A map with a moody, Palace of Hate feeling, but on a rainy day, and some lovely rockfaces. The opening view did a great job of showing you all the important geography, with the coloured lighting drawing your eye to the sliver key door. I had to flee some of the later enemies as I ran out of ammo, but I felt like that may have been by design. I did manage to bate the shambler and grab the last box of shells without him touching me. Scariest moment came when the last spawn had me cornered, I only escaped because scrags spawned and distracted him just long enough, but they still scored the vital statistic of 88 damage. 

I haven't played the maps yet, but based on what I've heard of mine I feel I should say something.

HERE BE SPOILERS

In my defense, the lightning gun in my map is not meant to be a trap, or a secret that punishes the player. I added a fiend to a secret area in my Jam 6 map, since I thought people playing on Hard would enjoy the challenge, but it was a poor decision and I wasn't trying to do anything like that here. This time it was just a terribly presented idea. The hope was players would see the length of the hallway, think "I can't make it there and back without drowning", and then remember the biosuit they'd seen earlier.

If I'd added a func_illusionary to the top of the lightning gun entrance, it would have helped to not only keep the secret secret, but I imagine also put players who ventured beyond it into the mindset of "tread lightly, you don't know what's down here", making them that much more likely to reconsider swimming for the gun. In my haste to get the timing down on the biosuit air supply, however, I managed to legitimately forget that func_illusionaries even existed. Adding more lights to the long hall would also probably have helped emphasize its length, through excessive repetition.

I only added that secret because I couldn't resist the temptation of creating some playful misdirection, by having a biosuit near a slime pit but intending it for use elsewhere. Nonetheless, surely it's left a bad taste in players' mouths, and it's a darling that should have been killed. I'm sorry if it seemed mean of me to put in there.

As for my texture scaling, well, that's for two reasons: one technical, of minimizing BSP chops, and the other artistic, of making the texture tiling less objectionable. The textures get less detailed, sure, but I'm one to paint in broad strokes, and I find the overall look of lower detail with reduced tiling preferable to the detailed but more repetitive result of leaving them all 1:1. Especially with a texture of giant stone blocks, I figured stone blocks that were 1.5 times giant-er wouldn't look too bad. I understand not everyone shares my preference, but for the record I wasn't poking fun at Mr. Petersen's aesthetic sensibilities. There's some lighthearted, friendly ribbing in my map for sure, but the textures weren't part of that. 

amazed at what everyone did in such a short time! demos: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/demos/retrojam4_ericw_demos.zip 

Nah, screw it.

Eric, your demos taught me something about Quake! Apparently a trigger can be fired from the opposite side of an edge where two brushes meet. That door with the "opens from the other side" message isn't supposed to open just by walking into the darkened alcove; the corner of the alcove happens to meet the corner of the trigger in the adjacent room.

Glad to see my map doesn't completely fall apart in cases like that! Also like that you stumbled into my little E4M3 tribute at the exit. :) 

Yeah, at first I thought I hit a secret switch in that alcove, but then I re-read the message and realized it was probably a bug. Sorry, I should have tried looking for the proper route in the next demo, but for some reason I kept redoing the exploit route ;).
Anyhow, enjoyed your map a lot!

It was especially fun in this retrojam to notice all of the references to specific details e4 maps that people put in. Love those underneath-lit staircases. 

Love those underneath-lit staircases.

Me too, so much. 

I tried all of the maps and recorded skill 2 demos. Some maps I didn't want to finish because I didn't feel like fighting a lot of spawns or miscellaneous hordes. Apologies to mappers who download my demos only to find I give up too easily! I do complete several of the maps also.

In Fifth's map, if I remember right, it took several tries to get past a certain trap without taking too much damage, so I ended up not recording all the attempts. There's a small skip between two demos because of this.

I hope I didn't screw up the demos in any other way while recording them. Here they are:

http://www.quaketastic.com/files/demos/retrojam4-demos-pekka.7z

Recorded with the newest Quakespasm on Windows and packaged with 7-Zip.

Thanks to all the mappers who took part and Onetruepurple for organizing the Retrojam. People got the E4 vibe down very well in many ways. 

http://www.twitch.tv/tddaz 

Daz beat my map on skill 2. Without dying once. 

http://scampie.net/etc/douchespam.png 

demos of most of my runs (Missed a few, sorry! They are in my stream vod that will be on my youtube channel in a bit)

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/33279452/daz_retrojam4_demos.zip

So good to get a whole bunch of levels that really scratch the "actually hard on hard skill" itch.

I have no idea how I survived Skacky's level.

Fantastic turn out! Thanks to everyone who went and mapped! :) 

...getting my arse kicked on these is fun! Tens, awesome! 

What a fun-packed pack! Many thanks to everybody who made and played, and especially OTP for running it. Hoping the DLC comes true. :)

<href="http://www.text-fish.co.uk/mappingstuff/retrojam4_demos_tf.zip">here</a> are my terrible demos! I forget to quicksave, so there is a lot of repetition, especially in Skacky's map which repeatedly kicked my arse! I also included a 100% nightmare run on my map, for anybody who's curious about the RoS secret, as I've yet to see anybody get to it.

I was going to pick a favourite but I actually can't, they all thoroughly entertained me in different ways. :) 

 

Text_Fish: you can avoid URL troubles by just directly putting the link to your post and letting the board software make it a link. Like so:

http://www.text-fish.co.uk/mappingstuff/retrojam4_demos_tf.zip 

I haven't played all the maps (properly) yet, but I just wanted to express my appreciation for Fifth's map - this actually feels like Romero guest-authored an E4 map, and the unused id textures really make it something special.