Black Mesa

Black Mesa

This Is Not a Test!
A little feedback
That was pretty good fun. The environments were creative and interesting to look at, there were some nice ideas for the combat scenarios, pick ups were well spread and I never really had much trouble navigating the maps. There was variety in the gameplay, with some puzzles and navigational obstacles in addition to lots of combat. It was an impressive length, even moving at a fairly brisk pace it took about 45 min.

However the areas felt very contrived, there was no belief that these places would really exist – it was very ‘gamey’. Visually some areas were a little boxy or lacking in detail and others contained too many different light styles. The execution and scripting of the encounters could do with work, I think a lot of them didn’t quite play out how I imagine they should have done. The backtracking parts could do with better sign posting. I came across a lot of rough edges and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ with the map design and construction during play through. I confess I’ve forgotten many of them and it won’t make interesting reading on this discussion board, but will just say overall it needs a good tweak and polish.

Hope that doesn’t sound too critical. They were an enjoyable couple of maps which I would recommend everyone play.
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Showing 1-2 of 2 comments
Grippy  [developer] 3 Dec, 2016 @ 8:47am 
No it doesn't sound too critical don't worry. I mostly agree with you. The place is completly fictive and born from my mind. The second map requires more detailing (beams, props, change in lights) but I was kind of bored to polish the visuals and scripting.

About the scripting, its sometimes not working as intended. But due to modding limitations I was kind of feedup. If you try to do something different than generic fights it requires countless hours for debbuging and change of plans...
The two mains areas that are subject to this are after the elevator and then after the release of the grunt.

The backtracking was effectively not so obvious. There is only one camera that shows that the door is open after pressing the button. At first I wanted to show a sequence where a scientist is closing the door after the attack but I'm touching the maps limits in term of entities.

When you speak about rough edges, you meant it requires more player clipping for a smoother navigation?

Nonetheless, if you had fun I'm happy because that's what I wanted to achieve.

Thank you for your comment.
Last edited by Grippy; 3 Dec, 2016 @ 8:47am
JamaicanDave 3 Dec, 2016 @ 9:58am 
I completely agree that fine tuning scripting and visual polishing is both fiddly and time consuming - not to mention very tedious. It's easily possible to spend as much time on these as it is building everthing before hand. I'd much rather have maps that are fun, which is what you've made, rather than technically perfect and highly polished maps that are dull.

Ah sorry, 'rough edges' is a turn of phrase - it just means more polishing.

You can probably take it as a compliment if someone's principle critism is lack of polish - it means that fundamentally you've made a good map :)

I hope you make more, you've certainly got a talent for mapping.
Last edited by JamaicanDave; 3 Dec, 2016 @ 9:59am
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