Halls-o'-Win (hwjam3_artistical) - Cool idea, but why the fuck I keep falling to my death and just dying from no particular reason after falling onto these black bars? Is that intentional? Looks like utter bugs to me. Especially that you die from falling on the floor right after teleporting into minotaur-shambler section, YET NOT DIE WHEN FELL INTO THE VOID UNDERNEATH IT.

US (hwjam3_quasiotter) ok

approach of the second sun (hwjam3_entsoy) - whoa, actual horror! I like black and white, fog-induced eerie cubish aesthethic. I understand the appeal of it, probably black and white filter like in noir film jam could work even better to turn monochrome also mobs and projectiles. Mobs in suspended animation work well on the level's summary atmospere. Frying shambler with living bombs felt satisfying, as well as amount of other infighting involved.

Problems: 1. Doors painfully jam you if you slam into them in midair. 2. Where the fuck should I go next?!

Untitled (hwjam3_vbs) - Industrial Theme? Nonlinear progression? Big open spaces? JUMP BOOTS? Now we're talking! Now THAT'S what i'm talking about! Most of the spawn triggers can be easilly avoided, but that's not a complaint, more like reward for tricky and not boring/obvious exploration routes. Very good job. Especially this lagless on such big open map [looks at other ones with disdain]

The Apothecary (hwjam3_nyo) - poor shambler... whoever let him into this dangerous moving gears place isn't a good person and not a good dungeon keeper! Sometimes I feel like i've being bombarded by poison wizard out of nowhere... Those are BIG buttons, I like it. Overall simplistic, yet fun to play map.

The well of damned souls (hwjam3_greenwood) - It's cool that traps work on all enemies as well as on you, very convenient. Love the subtle humor in environmental storytelling. Somehow, this map reminds me of An Outhouse from yesteryear halloween jam. Good job.

A Dead Man's Favor (hwjam3_mh) whoa the narrative! The mechanics! The details and overall effort put in! Great work! That's a cool neat level, but I got a problem with protection rune, I did jump to it with grenade launcher, but there's no way to get out of there without another jump, maybe grates could open up a bit after picking invuln up. Also I believe I've seen mobs telefraggin' each other right at the spawn near widowmaker.
Also there's a lot of places at the surface that all the enemies can get corner you in, maybe it's not good and more open spaces would be cooler.

The Banquet (hwjam3_xeo) - Cool artistically, simple in mechanics, fun has been had.

Necromanser's swamp (hwjam3_shadesmaster) - Now that's some poisonous swamp fauna you got there, feels like I'm back in Na Pali from Unreal. I never thought a single spider could have so many blood hemolymph in it. By the way, can these spiders poison ogres so i could one-shot them? Fuck I would ADORE if some lil jumpy boi reduced a damn Judicator to a one widowmaker shot, cutting his hp to 10%. I love the spacing, overall combat setups and map feel, some obvous borrowing from necromancer's keep but if it works it's fine. Very good job here. But as with most Shadesmaster's maps they're too doomish and horisontal, I would add one more walkable floor on a top of every unreachable pillar/wall and it would be much funnier to traverse. For example, this roof and the top of the rock here https://imgur.com/a/WEtSfbM
One more bug, Judicator at the end crashes level with "program error" at the gaunt summon phase. https://imgur.com/a/HeHEBPu
By the way, these new knights are so nice and all, but can @bal now turn gaunts into some kind of cyber-angels from Urdak at this point for them to suit into overall theme?

The Vileduct (hwjam3_makkon) - Very comfy, almost like somthing from Townscaper. Pretty laggy though. After "the chapel is now craven" message i didn't understood where to go next. After about hour of wandering i've noclipped on the blue bridge, so didn't finished map the intended way.

Blackvenom Retreat (hwjam3_pinchy) - Yay, lots of infighting! That's a fun one.

Abbeytoir (hwjam3_strideh) - Very beautiful artistically. Neat, satisfying level design.

Overall jam is good, AD just got on a whole new level with this 1.8 update and I feel this jam is just small example of what's to come next. 

This one is my favorite, by far, in the whole pack. Maybe it needs some music track...

I even played it with AD 1.71 and works great (I know you guys hate that, but then so what?). 

You played an AD 1.8 map with AD 1.71.

Well done. 

Please stop. Many maps use 1.8 features and you'll literally wreck the levels by playing them in 1.7p1. What is your actual problem? Do you intentionally do this to annoy people? Nothing can be more simple than putting the fucking folder into your quake directory. How do you fuck this up. 

This is my thing dude. I love to see how nice maps behave under other mods, even if I still play them in their original mod too. So why do you bother? I just don't care about YOUR opinion on MY way to have fun with Quake, fw.

It's even my way to express my grattitude to some maps that I love, since I'll never bother doing this with maps I don't like. Duh!

I know how to install mods properly, this isn't an issue to me. But I like to export maps in other environments, and no, I'll not stop doing this. Especially if it annoys your anus, fw! 

Fine, that's your right!

But could you stop posting about it! That would be fair to EVERYONE! Yourself included ;)

Peace 

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/783747144

I got through all but 3 maps. It's a hell of a long stream. I couldn't figure out Makkon's map properly, and two other maps I couldn't play cause it got a bit late. But otherwise I mostly had fun. I think I liked MH's map the most in terms of concept and I really enjoyed Strideh's map too.

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Mobin. 

1.) These maps are made for AD 1.8. As may be inferred from deductive reasoning, AD 1.8 is a newer version of AD 1.7. If you run maps designed for 1.8 with 1.7 loaded, you're not seeing how they "behave under other mods", because it's the same mod, just an older version with fewer features.

2.) Mappers, including fw who ran this event and created the start map, spend a lot of time employing the features of the mod they'd chosen for their map. Playing them in different mods than they'd worked hard with, is the complete opposite of expressing gratitude, it's a sign of disrespect of their autorial intent. I'm working on a Quoth map right now and the last thing I want to see in the release thread is "I don't care about what you spent the last few weeks doing, I just want AD monsters".

3.) Behaving the way you do towards the mappers whose work you like so much, is a sure way to receive fewer nice maps from them, not more. 

A few of these maps really capture the spirit the jam was meant to convey (Makkon, MH, Strideh, ...)

and

Others look either like first maps or downright jokes (Artistical

Are spot on opinions. 

And maps that used them has unrepeatable spirit of magic. hwjam3_makkon, hwjam3_strideh, hwjam3_mh fnd hwjam3_shades look so unusual that you want to walk around and look at this magical world.
I would like to see Explorejam 3 with Jumpboots in this style. 

 

Perfectly stated. We're really starting to see some wacko behavior now.

The Barnak Effect. 

I've only played 3 maps o far, based on the feedback in this thread.

Loved Mista Heita's A Dead Man's Favor. A brilliant concept perfectly executed. Shows how you can tell a story effectively with quite simple means.

Had the same issue with Makkon's map as @So Rangers name's Jim?, namely that I didn't know how to proceed to the higher level, so I simply stopped there. Nice map otherwise, except that it perhaps didn't feel very halloweenish except for the music.

Strideh's Abbeytoir was solid as well.

Love Makkon's textures, even though I'm a bit miffed that he has blocked me on Twitter.

Oh, and I even played it with AD 1.81! 

I fixed my map by adding a dummy gaunt monster to prevent the endlevel bug, plus moved the hanging boil zombie into the ceiling so he's no longer floating in the air. 

The music btw is the Luke Jansen remix of Heretic's "E2M7" aka "The Great Hall." It's track16 in case anyone wants to play to a different tune, though. There's a bunch of other Heretic refrences throughout in fact, such as the glowing sphere keymarkers and the exit using heretic / hexen textures, despite the Makkon set dominating the map.

After I finish a Prodeus level, I need to use this Makkon set for a WRATH map. It's just too cool. And keep those monster encounters deliberately evil. ;)

(A strong point of me map, according to playthru commentary I've seen)

To quote Civvie on his SIGIL review: "There's a huge difference between incompetent design and deliberate evil. Romero played upon our hubris, and I gotta say - it's a good burn." Tho my DOOM love shows for better or worse. 

Quaddicted release? I just like having my stuff on Quake Injector. 

Actually, on the second run I've managed to finish it. What I've missed in the first one, was the gravestones in the necropolis district. On another note, where's the second secret? I found the widowmaker one, but there remains one more secret. 

Thanks for the tip, I'll jump into it again. 

Can you share fixed version of your map, please? 

I wondered if there would be any tricks or treats this year... and we got this treat, yay!

Of course, this one is noticeably less "Halloweeny" than the previous two, and seems more like a "typical AD Jam," IMHO. Gone are most of the pumpkins and the haunted house. But no matter, it's still great. I particularly like how "Dead Man's Favor" was done... nice use of the invisibility effect.

An idea for next year: explosive jack-o-lanterns. Or better yet, re-skin those Boil guys to look like walking jack-o-lanterns, and have them explode into orange gibs!

Anyway, you guys are awesome for creating these map packs. Thanks so much! 

But I've always preferred Halloween jam to be closer to a Horror jam than anything else. It's unfortunate that most people didn't go for a horror/halloween feel, though.. but that's what I was going for with the start map. 

It should be horror-themed mainly, and you did achieve that in the start map with the mutilated prisoner textures and dark rituals (what exactly were those Knights doing to the Death Knight corpses?) I guess I tend to associate medieval horror with "standard" Quake because it always had that vibe. But I meant this Halloween Jam felt less "Halloweeny" than previous ones overall, not just because the lack of a haunted house in the start map (though I did quite like it.) By the way, I like how you did the gates and made the portals turn red after you complete a map.

Here's another suggestion for next year: make the start map a big spooky cemetary/graveyard at night (full moon skybox, dead trees w/ crows, creepy ambient sounds, maybe fog, etc.) but this time, place the portals to the maps within freshly-dug graves. So instead of climbing out of a grave like in the first Halloween Jam, the player has to fall into one. And after he returns to the start map, that particular grave can either be "filled" or have a marked tombstone to show that it's been completed. 

I didn't mind the music in Shades' level, it reminded me of the Borderlands 2 Halloween DLC (TK Baha's Bloody Harvest), not only music-wise, but also somewhat looks-wise too, sort of a bit "whimsical", even if it's Quake and remix of a Heretic soundtrack. 

It's funny you say that, because that was actually the original idea for the start map. Bal how to drop out due to finishing AD1.8, so VoidForce and I were left with almost no time (my fault, not Bal's) to get something out, so we settled on something easy to produce. The start map was actually a Speedmap, with Void and I passing the map back/forth as we went to sleep (since we live in opposite time zones) so I'm really happy with what we got working.
But yeah, that was genuinely the original idea. Even the "jumping into graves which then fill" part. Great minds think alike mate :) 

Just want to say that Makkon's The Vileduct turned into a brilliant map once I understood how to proceed with it. Plus it was quite Halloweenish at times, so I take back my criticism of it not being enough so.