I took the opportunity to go ahead and play through this one. And it was actually a lot of fun!
I do look forward to seeing the connection between the two maps, and also the greater campaign before and after them. It makes for an interesting release pattern.
While even though I was able to enjoy myself around the map, there certainly were a lot of pitfalls that many users besides me I'm sure will find qualm with and stop playing immediately. The maps produced several intense moments that I enjoyed such as the rushing water in the large shaft, and the floating raft was pretty neat.
That being said, I must say the map is lacking in good lighting, as well as appropriate detail and many other things too numerous to mention. lighting, architecture, and the puzzles could use some work. When talking about story, I didn't feel any whatsoever. The map actually had a nice flow to it with the gameplay, and I didn't feel like it got slow at any one part, but the distraction from not being able to see where I was going sometimes, and not knowing where I was in the world, made it extremely hard to give up my suspension of disbelief about the actual existence of such a place.
Lighting was little to none, and the areas suffer greatly from this. most of the lighting was supported by ambient lighting from the sky, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it didn't contribute to the overall aesthetic of the place, but didn't take away from it either. It was meh. In terms of the level, I felt like I was in some kind of abandoned water treatment plant, but it wasn't obvious, and it is only in retrospect that I can reflect on this. There is a lot of overused textures with maybe a texture pallet of about 30 it seemed, versus some of the variation of textures used in Valve quality maps (usually somewhere around 80-100). So it made the spaces feel very repetitive and boring for a little bit. The catwalk fight and smashing through that window are some of the more memorable points in the map, but the catwalk fight was nothing spectacular, and the smashing window scene, was fun, but I died a couple of times before I figured I could do that at all. It wasn't obvious enough because I hadn't done that before in the level.
The detail in the levels was down to a pretty thin minimum. And I think the map suffers a lot from this. Maybe more so than from the lighting or architecture. The detail focused on what seemed like only gameplay elements, like light models, columns to break up geometry, and table models to hold things. These things are good, but you can support WAY more. I don't mean to clutter your map up with more models, but definitely stay away from having completely square rooms for every space!
Lastly, the puzzles were simple enough, but not entirely obvious and somewhat frustrating. This could be something you were going for, or not, so you can ignore this crit, but I found the first puzzle of lowering that walking bridge to be creative, but not intuitive enough; only because nowhere else in the half-life universe could I shoot at cables to break them. If you want to keep the puzzle in that way, you need to introduce this ability earlier on in the map or maybe one of the earlier maps yet to be built to let the player know they can do this to any cable or special cables only in your maps.
Overall, the maps were fun, but they have a long way to go before they could be considered finished. They're rough, and use of a lot of the effects in Source are lacking. (Yea, I noticed the dust motes around the lights in the catwalk, but those were isolated). Basically you need more detail like that, but on much finer points in the level. It has good gameplay flow going for it, so you can keep the layout of the level, I would just spruce it up a bit with better lighting and a better art pass with more detail and closer attention paid to texture usage and lighting especially. Thanks for posting and good luck!
Blog:
www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn:
Eric Lancon
Twitter:
@Riven202
