Map a dream

Holy damn Skals.
Just wow.
The kinds of things you pulled off in the goldsource engine... I have to say i am VERY impressed!

Architecture is phenomenal throughout. - 5 stars there
Texture work is great as well - I noticed a few mis-aligns here and there (vents, some pipe work) but over all 4.5 stars
Gameplay was there too. Idk why everyone was having so much trouble, i got through fine. I played on normal difficulty and it was challenging but not too hard.

I really didnt get what was going on in the dream.. but there were the "wtf?" moments and a few that made me jump.
And the shattering glass effect in that bathroom was incredible! didnt see that coming at all.

5-stars my friend, and good luck in the compo!

Alright wow I checked it out. Its super late so I won't write tons. The part where the alien slave was walking towards you was by far the most dreamy and awesome. It felt as if my heart was actually pounding hard with the sound. And those ground punching effects gave the beast so much more power and strangeness. It was really cool. As was the bathroom parts. The only thing strange about the bathrooms were the scale and that the reflection was reversed but maybe it was intentional because it is a dream.

Your use of textures and brush work with faded textures really made some of the hallways feel more source than gold. The g man scenes were pretty interesting too. I think the second level was pretty interesting too but it shifted to more of a halflife battle game than a dreamy atmosphere as you achieved in the first level. The xen style islands and everything in the sky were really cool but I oh so badly wanted to go to them. I thought that once I turned all the valves the water level would rise and I could swim to them but when I had to go into the hole I was a little dissapointed at not visiting the sky land but your intention must have been to create interesting vertical relief and a neat distant place you couldn't reach. Which you did such a good job that I wanted to go to it and party above death crater.

At one point a turret was shooting a gargantua for like twenty minutes straight which was so rediculous I started laughing because they can't die besides by explosion. I loved the way you allowed the player to come back to the same areas more than once making the levels feel ever so changing and bigger as in real life. I didn't however think gameplay should have been such an important aspect as it derives the audience's attention away from the dream itself. Especially when bombarded by tons of aliens from every direction. I did the same thing in my video game remake entry and realized that its kind of annoying. But you helped it by allowing ways for the player to simply escape the alien rather than having to kill them all which was pretty nice. Oh yea, the fat rope that didn't work pissed me off because I had to keep walking my happy a** precariously around those cliff edges without falling into the icky slime, but i'm sure it was a simple glitch. It seemed that instead of making a thicker outer rope into a func_ladder you made it a func_wall. And it took me a good few minutes to find that the button in the control station temporarily opened the door but I think you left a sign that said control door or something so if I had been more observant I would have found it more easily. Which reminds me. The metal beam to connect the broken wire was super awesome! Definitely something newer to me than the simple move the box from the previous room to acces a small height. I just think this old trick is funny because in real life you would just jump and pull your self up though its a great classic that forces the player to take in the surroundings and interact with them a bit more.

So as for the dreaminess, the firt level was almost astonishing. I just wish the entire thing was like it. The same goes for the final level. It just could have been more dreamy. It seamed that the quality of the bus tunnel was less than that in hl1 made how many years ago. You have the talent to do so and could have made the tunnel longer with better textures. Distant blue lights. Blinking old lights with sparks trickling down and bouncing off the track into the darkness. Its understandable that this was simply an outro to make the maps make sense but an intro would have been nice too though probably kind of hard to do in this case.

To sum it up. The dreaminess in the first level is still making me happy. It was really cool and inspirational. The end was negatively affected by over gameplay but positively affected with complex curiosity aroused about what the alien slave actually was and what he had to do with gman. Overall it was pretty interesting and a joy to play. I love great competition and im glad its out there. While I did point out some flaws, it has to be understandable by the audience that these maps were created with a deadline in mind that had to be met. You could make the maps better unendlessly so for the time you had you did great. Good luck! Ok yea I did write a lot sorry lol...

Wow, thanks a lot guys, I wasn't expecting the comments to be this good!

I was under the impression your compo entry could not be in mod format.

Great work, loved the alien slave in the mirror, was very creative.

For the rest of the mod, architecture was nice and HL-ish. The floating Xen platforms at the last part was very cool and inspirational..

Although the last battle with alien grunts was bugged... when I saw him teleporting in. I tried to make a run for it and got stuck in a func_wall_toggle, probably it was placed there so i couldnt escape from the battle. You might want to check the timings in the manager. Anyway amazing stuff

I found it all too possible to jump out of the tram at the end and take in the lack of clipping and the nulls. Also I think you can find where you put the levelchange, so you can be jammed into the void.
Though yes, this is quite surreal. Very nice feel to the place at times, like the hallway with the vort and the area with the water above your head, others... not so much.

I know this Darkie, I did not clip the train because I had no time, and same for several of the other bugs in my map pack everyone else experienced, sorry guys! Thanks for the good comments though Darkie and Sajo!

Wow I've just played your Compo entry. If you ask me it was much more than just a compo.. Damn this was an entire mappack a short one maybe but still a mappack or even a mod since you've used custom textures & retextured models etc. The mapping and texture usage & architecture were just fantastic and well placed.

I guess I don't need to say much here all important things has been said by
Tetsu0 & zeeba-G.

The mappack was just awesome and you really created those high quality maps in such a short time that's even better.

Except the few bugs which already has been mentioned here I have nothing negativ to say. I haven't tested any other Dream compo entrys yet so at the moment your mappack is my favourite and in my opinion you deserve place 1. However due to the remaining bugs and unfinished stuff it's hard to judge if you can really deserve it. Would be unfair against other people their productions in which everything works and maybe is finished.
One thing that was annoying however was the scene where you restored power to the fuel machines with the broken cable how were I supposed to go around the Alien grunts and Gargs ??? In the end I had to use noclip. To reach the elevator. I mean all other exits were closed by now.

My favourites scenes were the Alien slave in the mirror - the alien slave ghosts near the end and the talking Nilianth. That put a lot into the atmosphere. In the end it really felt like a weird dream. Great work.

Just make sure to release a final bug free version of this mod pack when the compo is over. And when that is done construct a small mappack unrelated to any compos you have the skills to give the hl1 community some new stuff to play with.

Pretty damn good.

+ VM work was mostly outstanding
+ Choice of textures was outstanding
+ LOTS of variety in textures
++ The transition from the first stage to the second, hyper-surreal area made me jizz my pants.
+ Surreal lighting effects and sound effects throughout made for a convincing atmosphere.
+ Scripting was top notch.
+ The consistently changing environment was very cool.

+/- The surreal feel wore off in most areas in the second stage. Other than the central area with the "liquid" sky, it wasn't very dreamy at all.
+/- The bar that connected the electrical wire lied perpendicular to the wires. It never actually bridged the gap in the wire.
+/- It was easy to be distracted by something like a headcrab or a button when something important was happening elsewhere on the screen.

- Scaling was off in a lot of places, most notably the bathrooms and most of the doors (they were VERY thin or VERY wide). The scaling didn't contribute to the surrealism, so I can only assume you didn't do it on purpose.
- Those sinks deserve a special mention. Sorry, they just looked terrible.
- A few bugs meant I had to restart a few times. I once got stuck in a situation where I had to take fall damage to proceed, but couldn't sustain the damage without dying.
-- I was able to jump out of the tram at the end. I know you didn't have time to, but hey. It's not something that can just be overlooked.

Just barely shy of 5 stars in my book, mostly because of some frustrating bugs.

So what was "the truth"?

Lol thanks for the comments 23-down and Soup miner, If I had more time I would have added the bug fixes, at the moment I don't want to cheat by making my map slightly better than it was in the actual submission.

As for the truth; that's up to you to decide. It's a dream so it could be a lie!

Nao, the dream is not cake.

Everything I can think of to say has already been said.

@23-down: there is a hidden ladder in the vent at that point.

Great map - nothing to add that's not already been said.

A really good map, i enjoyed running trough it

I dont like to write much, so yeah, cool map

Wow this looks impressive from the screens and all the comments! I'm gonna try a new, disorganized review sytle, by just writing down my first impressions as i play.

+beginning sequence is cool, nicely executed.
-scale in the bathrooms is WAY off: sinks come up to my eyeballs, and i can't even reach the light switch! =)
+cool use of friction to simulate slippery water
+Everything looks nicely detailed and textures
+I'm starting to get the idea how this is exactly like a dream, how you jump seamlessly from one setting/theme to another =)
+Some great/creative transitions! i just had the vortigaunt approaching me and i had the feeling i was paralyzed! Then, falling down the elevator shaft at the last moment... well done! =)
+nicely constructed rooms with good use of effects for the most part!
-those bubbles are getting a little old now, but maybe you'll tie them in to make more sense at the end (not that a dream has to make any kind of sense i guess)
-in the room with the broken bridge where you can push crates into the water, i can't figure out how to proceed. i'm noclipping around now trying to find the route (i ended up noclipping up the elevator shaft)
+nice use of the gman and another transition
+nice how the rooms change while you are in them just like a dream.
+use of pushes to constrickt/paralyze player is nice and dream-like
+xen-ish area is quite nice!
-can't figure out how to get out of the xen area but it looks dam cool!

It's at this point that i have to pause and complete another time!

5 stars for a tremendous amount of work! I'll play the rest and update my comments. GReat stuff man!

*****

heh, thanks, on the water with crates area, you have to push the crate into water to use it as a stepping stone to get onto the other platform and go up the lift, but if you're pro at jumping you can jump across without the crate anyway ^-^

And in the xen area, in some places there are like switches that you need to activate, that will tie in to the final scene where you meet your friend

Two of the switches are at the starting area, as you leave the spawn point of second map, go right and turn around the corner of the canyon, there is a passage there to the first button, then, ignore the other door in the canyon, use the jumpy pad to get back to the upper level of this canyon and use the bridge to get into that small building and activate another, and then u will have to click a button and run to a door underneath the bridge before it closes, from there on it's pretty much a straight path again.

I think I added like a text document to the zip file with info on each trap in case people get stuck.

8D

I like. Very nice work, I felt like I was playing the original half-life. Great brushwork and texturing. Well done.

this is pretty much what i thought a dream map should work
A simple environment that changes unpredictably as you explore it, the dream is as intriguing as it is changing. And there's combat too, so that makes it an actual mod that I have already seen featured on the other modsites that I frequent. Expect alot more people to play this than you can see here!

Definitely worth to play surrealistic puzzle game. Sometimes scary, sometimes hard, sometimes fun.

By the way, I found a working download link here:
http://hl.gamebanana.com/maps/162091

It's pretty bad, tbh