TF2Maps.net 72HR Jam: Winter 2016

That's right! It's time again to start talking about what we want to do with this year's 72hr. With the last 72hr event having the largest amount of submissions to an event ever, we've decided to change things up. Introducing the TF2Maps.net 72HR Jam. No rules, no limits, no holdbacks. This is big.

I'll spare you the strawberry/raspberry jokes and move to the point - this is not a contest. The scale has grown beyond what we can reasonably run that way, which is great news, but does mean we need to change our plans a bit. So how is the 72HR Jam different to the previous 72hr contests?

• No Contest. No judging. No prizes. (Everyone is a winner!)
• No rules! You can make whatever you want - New maps, gamemodes, detail environments, particles, props, hats, weapons, plugins, sound mods. If it's TF2 related, you can make it.
• Collaborations are allowed. In fact, we want to encourage them - more on that later.

All of this is decided by the way, at least for this one. We'll consider it carefully afterward to see what works, but don't bother writing a seven-thousand-word diatribe on how we should be making it competitive, because that's not a decision up for discussion. With that in mind, what's staying the same?

• We'll give you a time, as usual, and we'll probably have a specific place for posting things you've made so everyone can see them all.
• We'll be running regular playtests, and helping people run them, as usual.
• For non maps, make sure to constantly post what you're creating, so everyone can provide feedback.
• You won't be able to update for a few days afterward, so everyone can see what was done in the time period and give feedback. You won't have to wait for a judging period though.

There are two things we specifically want to encourage, and the first is collaboration - between mappers, between communities, between skillsets. We're hoping to get other groups involved as well, such as streamers, modellers, and SFM groups. Frozen and Fubar are working on a big post about collaboration tools at the moment - that'll be up soon to help you. We also want to get loads of great feedback for everyone, so no matter what you're making, you get some use out of it. At the end of it all, we're thinking of recognising community members who're particularly helpful - one thing we're interested in is suggestions on how to do this.

So yeah. Make something awesome! Do it however you want, and lets have fun together as a community.

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With that done, what we need to decide on is the date. I'm planning to run it this time, but I have some pretty gnarly exams in mid January. As such, I'd like to run on the 23rd-24th January or later. What weekends do people want to do? What can't they do? If we want to do earlier than that, that's also okay. Don't give us any bull about Valentine's Day - your first love is hammer.

23rd-24th January. I'll edit that in to clarify.

The short version is: fairly judging so many entrants was taking far too long. We could judge them unfairly (not nice), lose some entrants (not fun), or remove the judging altogether.

Davekillerish said:

So would the results of this just be displayed in a showcase?
Also wouldnt this prompt the official release of the winter mapping pack. <-- Hint Hint

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This is nothing to do with the map pack. We can't promise much of a showcase of everyone's stuff - i'd be very happy if we had too many entries to all put in a showcase video!

Zed said:

Is there still going to be an upload thread? And will the period immediately after the jam still be dedicated to testing the maps?

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Yes- so we have the final version of everything entered all in one place- and yes, but this time so we can give them all a bit of feedback and help rather than for judging.

Cole Slaw said:

I'm going to probably do a thing!
Though i do have a question, can we use content from older maps in our Jam maps? (if we can, maybe i'll consider making coelslaw less awful, and move it into "playable," give it a name, and go somewhere with it.)
ALSO, do TF-themed lego builds count as a thing? because if they do, i might consider doing 2 submissions. (:3)

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Content from other maps is fine, but we'd like it to fundamentally be a new project for now, so it might be better to start afresh. And Lego is fine!

(Personally i'm hoping somebody writes some tf2 fanfiction)

One thing I was hoping to do is ensure we have a working MVM server for the contest, though it's very kind of you to offer and it'll be great to have two.