Thieves Highway

by czyys
created Jan 13, 2017
Leaderboards
600 views | 3544 downloads

Rating
/ 27 votes

Difficulty
/ 15 votes


map notes
Collab map between Meark and me.

Thematically and visually inspired by Thief games.
Gameplay-wise influenced by levels like Development or Caverns, mixed with some fresh ideas. So it's very much about routing and finding faster strats.

Big thanks to our testers: Mrfirestorm, indapop and especially ahllyks, he tested this map with us for more than a week straight and came up with many great tweaks.

Final thing: there may just be a special prize from tashizuna for a person with the best SS time a week from now ;)

Edit: And here's the prize for the winner: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/83037671227658240/310956846611562498/final_comp_names01b.jpg
Congrats indapop and thank you tashi!
edited May 22, 2017

27 comments

C
said Jan 13, 2017
The details and atmosphere are amazing, I enjoyed just exploring it.
czyys
said Jan 13, 2017
Great to hear that, atmosphere is key element of thief games. We actually wanted to make some additional, optional areas, but the map would be real laggy if we ended up doing it.
Leap
said Jan 13, 2017
wow! http://imgur.com/a/9WQMa

Sadly it's a bit laggy :(
czyys
said Jan 13, 2017
Spoilers! : D

Huh, we were sure we got rid of lag when we optimised the map deleting all that's unnecessary. It's still full of everything though, so you can probably experience some lags on weaker computers.
Morelia
said Jan 13, 2017
I see what you've been up to the past four months.
czyys
said Jan 13, 2017
Hah, thankfully not quite. We started working on it at the end of October, and we just took our time with it.
Linley
said Jan 13, 2017
Its fun and looks good
invert
said Jan 14, 2017
lighting could use some work, the blocks in the house and all the stuff at the end is difficult to see

aside from that and lag, still generally good overall
invert
said Jan 14, 2017
i kinda hate to be the only person giving criticism, but that's kinda what i do... and i feel like the lighting is a major/prominent issue

my computer definitely doesn't classify as lower-end, so idk what's up with the lag on my end

i really don't wanna discredit all the effort and stuff that went into the map. overall aesthetic is good and the design is creative.
czyys
said Jan 14, 2017
Last thing we did was actually making sure every dust,enemy is visible enough. We didn't get reports about any problems in the rich house or cathedral from testers, so I'm not sure. Maybe it has something to do with settings of your monitor. But thanks for playing the map and for your feedback, will make use of it in the future.
fishmcmuffins
said Jan 14, 2017
while i didnt have lag issues, lag is often caused by the transparent props that there were TONS of in this map.  a lot of them were on layers that can be disabled in ingame menus which is good, just something to keep in mind for the future i guess.

while the map looks really nice it's pretty busy i feel.  the bright yellows on the blue-ish grey background pop out really nicely in some sections but when you add brown to the mix and the character also being a really faded color things get really muddy sometimes.  this section in particular fucked me up a lot; https://i.gyazo.com/ab02c332e5f2a1e999275ea4f8ab70bb.png what's solid and what isn't is very hard to differentiate, the trash is hard to see (mansion dust is far easier to see, which you switched between a few times in this level anyway) and your character really gets blurred in while falling after this section due to the trash particles and scrolling background.  a lot of the issues i had could easily be fixed if layer 18 was a lot less drab imo.

honestly though i definitely enjoyed routing and playing the map, and it has some damn good art, but after a few plays i found myself disabling every layer i could and maxing the brightness on my monitor.  colors of important things (mostly layer 18 and 19 in this case) definitely need some more contrast here from the background
edited Jan 14, 2017
czyys
said Jan 14, 2017
Oh well, I guess even more testing next time is the lesson. Thanks for the feedback.
Also, wth fish, not even close to 50s, you can do better than that. Like the only strats close to optimal you do are the two super strats.
edited Jan 14, 2017
fishmcmuffins
said Jan 14, 2017
i realized like 1.5 seconds of timesaves from me doing stupid strats and my run is pretty garbage.  probably go for faster when i have an actual desk to play on when im back in college sunday :|
czyys
said Jan 14, 2017
Nice. There are some more cool strats you do actually, like for that pack of 3 turkeys. If you don't get competition from other folks, then I'll try to provide it after the contest is over, if you care about that.
Linley
said Jan 14, 2017
You guys will never catch me back here at 1:16
invert
said Jan 14, 2017
could have to do with my color calibration (what feels most natural) but even turning up the brightness to the normal max i use for better visibility in games i still get trouble in the areas i mentioned

if no one else is complaining though, it's probably just that
invert
said Jan 14, 2017
(at least fish agrees tho)
czyys
said Jan 14, 2017
Yeah, I acknowledge it's a problem. The amount of testers we had was apparently not enough, something to keep in mind for the future.
Giamma
said Jan 14, 2017
Stunning! Beautiful art and It really plays like a stock map, nice job

I read that people disable layers...it's a bad practice :I
czyys
said Jan 14, 2017
Thanks Giamma! It's easy to tell Meark was the main force behind the visuals ;d
Well gameplay's first, so if that helps people to play the map proper, then this only means mapmaker should've done better job.
Also, nice strat for the first super ;)
Mrfirestorm
said Jan 14, 2017
Great to see the map finished, it's just as pretty and my god the finisher is just amazing. great job with it :D
czyys
said Jan 14, 2017
Glad you like it, it would never look nearly as good if not for Meark. And thanks again for testing! I hope you prefer the new gargoyles placement over the old one ;)
dustman77
said Jan 14, 2017
The background is difficult to tell from the foreground. The section towards the end with the tiny blocks feels very awkward and not intuitive.
czyys
said Jan 14, 2017
Yeah, like I said earlier those are issues that didn't turn up during testing, so probably more people should have tested the map. But even then, we were going for specific visual style so there's not much room for changes. And the map is designed in a way so that player will have to do few runs before he gets accustomed to the routing.
Meark
said Jan 16, 2017
Sorry I haven't been home all weekend to see this, but great job man! It was fun doing a collab map with you. Sorry to everyone who had problems seeing. I tried to make a clear contrast between layers, but I guess it got muddled in the middle. But I'm glad people enjoyed it for the most part. :D
czyys
said Jan 16, 2017
Likewise, I've learned a lot during this time about dustforce mapmaking. I hope we can do another one sometime in the future maybe ;d
lgb
said Sep 7, 2019
BEST MAP EVER!!!!

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