Jam SM220 - Prototype Jam 3 : Copper Edition!

Serious show of strength for the community as a whole. The amount of maps, Kebby's impressive custom skins and hud, the custom music on many tracks, and that hilarious start map. Even with some of the weaker maps, it's hard to give this anything less than a 5.

Tons of really fun maps with plenty of horde combat to go around. It's hard to judge a pack of this size with a single score due to how diverse many of the entries are but I'd recommend it to anyone who's looking for more Quake gameplay.

So many maps! This was fantastic. Special mention to Mazu's basement, all of which I loved. Rocketeer was probably the hardest combat encounter I've done in Quake, Vault made me a little better at jumping, and Missile Base/Voidance were both incredibly fun, filled with all the things you expect from Mazu maps. I also loved that the Missile Base had a bit of a narrative thread, complete with visuals for the missiles. Thank you Aleks too for organizing this, and Kebby for the fantastic models etc., those explosions in particular are great.

9h of pure joy. Amazing effort by the community once again. Lovely to see some new mappers with some decent first efforts and some veterans with some of the best maps I ever played.

Some standouts for me are the maps of: @4LT, @adib, @Fairweather, Missile Base X7 Sabotage by @Mazu and Omni.

But honestly there's maps which compete with the quality of these as well. Also there's a good variety of gameplay style, jump maps, exploration maps, puzzle maps, combat maps, horde maps you name it, it's there. So there's something for everyone!

A great showcase of talent from new and old mappers alike, it's always crazy impressive to see what everyone comes up with in such a short time. Some of the architecture and detailing on display here is awe-inspiring, despite it all being built from simple shapes and basic colors. There's strong points and weak points (I personally struggle with the slaughter maps), but overall this pack should provide something for everyone - and hours of entertainment if you play through everything. The addition of Kebby's outstanding prototype UI and models make this a particularly memorable pack that I'm sure will have lasting effects on future jams as well.

textures where?

Do you know what also distinguishes "arcane dimensions"/"retrojam"/"xmasjam" and many others from this jam? So-called "Order" and "Harmony". They achieve it either through sticking up to a set theme/rules, or they care about the overall presentence of their maps in the jam.

This jam has broken both of these rules. And compared to the previous "prototype" jams, this one was the worst. I only enjoyed " Exit Interview" by @Krak, "Qaizometry" by @Nostalgick and a bit less "Into Madness" by @Nolcoz. The rest was boring for me. They were rather proof for me that the quake has become a brainless shooter, where you touch the trigger and the enemy spawns... I am the kind of person who values exploration, and this is what I missing in most maps. Many maps had their own songs, but the problem with them was that they were simply not matching the environment I think. These would rather fit in the process of mapping and not the process of enjoying the map. Lots of monsters to kill... Even AD has fewer monsters to kill, I think. I am not a professional level designer, but I think that putting monsters into every place that you could imagine, makes the map predictable, and by that so boring.

Saying that this jam is a showcase of the community's strength is a misinterpretation, I think. In my opinion, the community was rather some kind of an echo chamber, where if someone drops some anime, everyone will start to repeat it... I simply thought that there wasn't any individuality there. The extension of a deadline, because of making sure that the people enjoy making their maps, was some sort of a socialist/populist move, which broke most of the maps. Deadline, effort, situation, anything that is on the mind of the mapper somehow gets itself into the map in small or a big portion, but that's what makes the maps human-like. I don't want to say that imperfection is what makes something good. But I just think that this decision has allowed people to make their maps so much pimped up, that they have become trash.

Anyway, that's what I think about this jam. You may hate me for this opinion, but I say that just to at least let the people know, how it was, from my perspective, hoping in mind that the quake community will not end as same as the population from the mice utopia experiment.