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The copper maiden golem - indestructible, red-hot block of metal, with equally unbreakable will. Slow, silent, can set a deadly trap in atight corridor.

That's awesome but I just wanted to point out that walking a few inches above molten metal which could be 1538C, you wouldn't be able to breath or walk on that metal grate. If that's lava, that's not much better, close to 1200C, you would get cooked in a few seconds. Unless there's some sort of magic stuff in this mission I don't know about, in which case, nevermind. Sweet map btw.

Totally agree with AluminumHaste, I hope you have some lore on why the thief can walk for ages centimeters above open lava, he must have clothes and shoes made of titanium strings. ;D But the design looks very good, one thing that you could do to give the impression the metal is getting hot, is make the side looking into the lava glow a little orange, (material trick, vertex colors could help here). Now a friendly critic on the gameplay, this is only my opinion based on limited information, that being a maze, could feel repetitive after a while, to be walking back and forth, specially if you have no clue where to go and heat doesn't seem to really affect you. To give more "urgency" to the moment, you could try turn this into a more linear thing, with one or two dead ends to spice things up and make it more urgent to the player to get out of there fast or get killed by the heat and the moving statues. I know this is totally different from the idea you are showing there but imo it could be something to consider, at least in this particular situation, you could use your current idea to another area without lava, but the mission is yours and you do what you like.

Superb!

Still have flashbacks of awful motion blur, bloom, HDR in some games. I swear that it worsens my eye sight when done poorly. Some developers don't know the limits.

Very cool gate scene

You know you can just skip this topic altogether right? I'm doing this in the little free time I have. It's meant for those that actually are interested and don't have, miss or forget about the notifications. 600+ views is enough confirmation for me that there is interest. You're always welcome to add your own text if you feel it is needed, criticizing is just cheap and something every rotten apple can do...

Speaking of Carmack and "upgrading TDM", the id4 engine that TDM uses is actually special because Carmack coded a unified lighting system, and he himself claimed it was the most elegant engine he's ever coded; more so than the Rage engine. A lot of other engines use mixed approaches to lighting. Since light is so fundamental to our gameplay, having a unified system is pretty cool for us, and we'd lose that "upgrading" to a new engine. Id4 is also really modding and scripting friendly. I guess Unreal is too, but the point is we already have that now. Oh, and id4 is still built around brushes, whereas most new engines are being developed around modeled architecture. That makes a big difference when we're talking about individuals making single maps within a few months. Id4 caters pretty well to that, whereas newer engines cater more to 100-people teams with million dollar budgets and decades of man-hours of work. I mean the id4 engine was in a sweetspot between advanced enough to look really good but not so advanced that it's prohibitive for individuals to make good maps by themselves. AND we have the opensource sourcecode to upgrade by ourselves (which we've done for things like soft shadows). We're still not doing too bad sticking with id4, even speaking of relative merits with other contemporary engines and we pretend it wasn't prohibitively difficult to port.

If you would like to, go for it! The accent I had in mind was something like Edmund Blackadder, one of Shakespeare's villains, or one of the Thief aristocrats. As the description goes, "this is a character fit for a sinister nobleman, a corrupt merchant, a crime boss or an evil mastermind. He is sophisticated, pretentious, ruthless towards others, but cowardly at heart. He is given to dark, brooding thoughts, and feels at home in the City’s shadows."

First of all, this issue coming up made me laugh. I honestly couldn't believe it--I was playing World of Warcraft, their seventeen year old son, and my dad says, "Why the hell are you playing a female character?" Anyone comfortable with mmorpgs might know this is fairly common place--unless of course, I'm just crazy. We all know that 90% of female characters are guys (gay guys at that, right?), but why? For me, it just became the norm. I had seen it so often before, I already had a male level 60, and I was going to make a priest, yes a priest. For some reason when I think of priests, especially on WoW, I just can't see one as a male (waltzing around in a white robe). My argument? I simply like females--yes, they are attractive, and yes, it did interest me. No, I'm completely strait, and no, it doesn't make anyone uncomfortable whom I play with. It didn't seem that big of a deal. My parents thought otherwise. Tonight we had a discussion as soon as I got home from work. Nothing is better than finally coming home and then your dad telling you "We need to talk. We think you are having sexual identity issues." Really, it tops my day to find out that my parents suspect I'm gay and that I'm cross dressing when they aren't looking. "We tend to put suppressed feelings into our fantasies." This is all regardless of the fact that I've roleplayed guys in the past. What was even more painful was having to explain the game to my parents: "No...the gender I could care less about. Male priests look gay, I'm sorry. I'm just trying to play a freaking game, there isn't even roleplaying involved. No, I won't start a new character because I don't want to put in another 120 hours into a new one, and because this is completely trivial. Obviously it doesn't mean a thing to me." I guess I'll avoid playing assassins, sorceresses, and amazons on Diablo II now.