Wishing you the best, cancer sucks!

Looks sick!

I hope it will get better for you soon! 🙏

Cool, thank you for playing! That was the intention.

Ha, Discover seems to work then. :) Thanks a lot for playing and your kind words.

And that's it, thanks for reading!

I walked my partner through the map to see if progression is clear. The way to the last chamber was initially more convoluted, with the player having to activate a dedicated elevator in the hub across states. She suggested to reuse the existing elevator in the west side, creating a little puzzle.

Regarding encounters the map features lots of low HP "popcorn" enemies, mixed with high attention enemies like the hammer ogre. I don't care too much about enemy theming, but "cold" encounters generally use different enemy types than "hot" encounters.

I started arting one room first (the temperature switch room). It should look similar to the old map, but I wanted to make some changes to keep it fresh.
Then I built encounters with prototype textures, keeping in mind the scale dictated by the art style.

During playtesting and due to remaining time, I eventually moved the exit room from the outdoors to the inside, cutting one room.
I also connected the two rooms on the west side of the map vertically, reusing the space for combat while still having a platforming challenge to change the pacing.

I then made the blockout in Trenchbroom, focusing on progression - after the first day it was possible to play the map already; just with empty rooms, some even just small cubes as stand-in for the final one.
The map starts off linear as well, but has many loops and ultimately opens up more.

I did the rough layout in google keep (I rarely sketch it out like this, but I wasn't at my desk at the time). It very quickly came together.
I wanted to have a central distinct hub to help with player orientation, and then rooms which require the state either in hot/cold and/or jump boots.

Usually I pick a focus for each map, to have clear goals as a designer.
I wanted the progression to feel like a mini Zelda dungeon, which is something I always wanted to do in Quake. This should include having to switch between hot/cold state multiple times which gates/opens paths.

My concept was to make a sequel to one of my existing maps, "Frozen Factory", from the Twisted Christmas Jam. The unique mechanic for that map was freezing/thawing. Progression recontextualised spaces, but was linear. I was fine with that for this one, but I wanted to change it with the sequel.

Thanks! I upped the brightness a bit in the meantime, can be quite hard to see on mobile.

Thanks! Glad you liked it.

Yep, I never did so many nor so in-depth art exploration for a map before. I quite like it having this no pressure scribble time.