You know what I find weird? A 4-minute mp3 file of 41MB.
No way this map is getting approved with that.
I've got 15-minute songs which sound better (concerning quality) than your song, and they're only 30MB. Still pretty much, but to be almost 4 times as long as your song and better sounding, those 30MB are WORTH it.
41MB? That's a joke! It must be...
I browsed my iTunes for music that is 4:04 long and had about the same sound quality as yours. I came out at 3.9MB (In Flames - The Hive, at 128 kbps).
I always thought that 320 kbps was the maximum for the .mp3 extension, but according to Windows Media Player Classic, your bitrate was 1411.2 kbps. I don't know whether Windows Media Player Classic is just making up things because the file was too horrible to actually derive any information from it, but that's what it said.
Even Wikipedia says 320 kbps is the maximum.
Just for your information: Audacity, according to me one of the best free sound editing programs, crashed when trying to open your sound. iTunes refuses to play it. That's how horrible it is.
So yeah, long intro to say: what the fuck were you thinking when downloading/importing such music? Did you think it is 'normal' that an mp3-file that doesn't even sound that great and is pretty short is 41MB big?
Imagine this: someone turning off music and sound in-game. I like the music, you obviously like it, but not everyone does. So they turn the music (and sound) off.
My calculations showed that they just made 96.720 kB (the computer kB, so 1024 bytes) completely useless.
That is 98.73% of the freaking file size!
It's rubbish! Either remove it, or lower the quality of ALL sounds/music in your map! This is not a request, it is a demand.
About the game:
The intro for changing the color of your dude sucked big times. Don't use cinematic messages for such trivialities.
You don't even say what the "-1, 2, 3" is for, just that the player has to type it.
What if someone pressed Escape (by accident or because they wanted to play), he could never even start playing the game because the only message that you have to type "-done" is in that cinematic message (and all cinematic messages can be skipped).
Oh, also, leave out the cinematic message that says "Welcome to "The Dead"". There are much, much better ways to show that. You can use a floating text (texttag) to display that message (on a black background), or you can create an image (LOW FILE SIZE) and show it on the screen. Those actually look good.
How about a game message? A note saying you can change your color, by typing -red, -green, or -blue (or whatever the colors were). No "-done" required.
The terrain kinda sucked. Yeah, the brick walls do look nice, but all the rest? No, not at all.
Why different tilesets for all different parts of the house? That's not necessary. Besides, I don't like the... what is it? Bricks from Icecrown glacier or something? Either way, those dark blue bricks, I don't like them. They don't belong in a house.
You can create such nice houses in Warcraft (with the right models), but your house is so... not house-like. What are the boxes doing there? And the barrels? If it were a different era (where they still used barrels and boxes to hold stuff, instead of closets), then what are the television and fridge doing there?
And you can see those Icecrown bricks (I'll just call them that) going under the wall, onto the sidewalk. You don't see that in houses: the tileset in a house should stay in a house, no tilesets creeping under walls.
What's up with the message "Lou (the civilian) has fallen"? I don't know who Lou is, thus I don't care about what happens to him.
If you'd done it differently, maybe a phone call (from Lou), saying that "they're almost inside" or something, and THEN that message. Yeah, that would make sense.
But just "Lou has fallen"? That's lame.
You could also explain that mana equals hunger. There are many things you could've explained, such as why the hell is Fred just wandering around outside while they're zombies? And where do the zombies come from? And why am I just "Man" while an unknown character who dies at the start of the game gets a name? (Lou).
After I was ordered to "rest", nothing happened. I rested (to full ealth), I barricaded my house with all lumber I had (lots of barricades), ate as much as I could, and still nothing happened.
You say this is more like a teaser than a WIP, but that sounds like an excuse to me.
This map is not finished, the gameplay I get here is not teaser-like, it is like "I'm not finished and actually not really playable yet either".
Rejected for all these reasons.
Oh, 1 more thing: I do like the idea (of this being "the day you died", instead of "the day you triumphed over the zombies").
So that's good. A good idea is a solid foundation for creating a game. It's just that the game itself needs a LOT more work.
Edit: Ooohh, worst of all? I never even got to hear the 41MB-music. The only music I got to hear was the smallest one, of something a bit larger than 1MB.
Approved
.
