#6
Posted 23 April 2011 - 06:25 PM
I gave it a try, and I liked it to a degree. There are good points going for it such as: it felt original, it had nice contrast with lighting, as well as flickering lights and lots of explosions, it was kind of big, and it was 'detailed'. I could tell you spent a lot of time on that so well done. Also the level of difficulty was great. There was a good monster-ammo-health balance, and it wasn't too hard (wasn't really the challenge you said it would be but it wasn't easy either), combat was enjoyable.
But now for the bad points.
>It was too random, there wasn't much structure to it, as in it makes the player think "what is this doing here?" or "why are all these in the same place?" because it doesn't make sense. I'm not just talking about detailing and spritework but the overall layout of rooms and areas. The entire map generally suffered from all kinds of aspects of this and there's too much to go into detail about. Of course there were times when it did make sense such as the sign saying to leave your carts, and there were a bunch of carts, which was good.
>Texturing was a bit dodgy in places. Walls weren't aligned properly, and a few texture choices were questionable. There were a lot of doors that didn't look like doors at all, so it didn't occur to me to use them, and when I did use them, they opened up funkily with all sorts of textures moving which shouldn't be moving etc... note that walls can be auto aligned by pressing 'control' and '.' at the same time.
>Water problems. There were a lot of water areas which didn't have the water lo-tag, so it didn't act light water at all. It is generally expected that liquid textures on the floor should act like a liquid in Duke maps. Also there was a time when I dropped into a puddle of water, and could step out of it sideways into air. This is bad because the game retains the underwater palate until the player resurfaces, so everything looked a bit blue when it shouldn't have, unless that was an intended effect in which case well done.
>Got stuck. I had to cheat a few times to get keys and to reveal the map. There were a lot of walls that could be blown up that I couldn't see a crack for, which is a bit unfair. There were also a lot of masked walls, and I don't know if those were for secrets or not, but ideally they should only be used to hide secrets and not the main path. Also couldn't find the keycard.
Now it's likely that if I played through a second or third time I'd see a lot more stuff which I didn't the first time around such as keycards and cracks and things, but I only played it once and commented to the best of my ability. I honestly enjoyed playing the map, it was a weird, surreal experience, but I had to suspend my disbelief on a number of things and a lot of players might not be willing to do that.
I'll finish up by saying that all mappers started with lower quality maps, and the more you map, the better you'll get, until you reach an extraordinary standard. My first map was kind of like this one in style, so maybe that's why I liked it so much. Anyway if this is your first map than it's not a bad effort. No doubt your next map will be better, and hopefully you've taken some of the negative criticism and used it as a learning experience. I'm not a fantastic mapper and I've still got a way to go but I thought I could help you out with those things. Good luck.
This post has been edited by Micky C: 23 April 2011 - 06:28 PM
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