Microcontest #4: Arena+

Aapelikaeki

Aapelikaeki

L3: Member
Feb 24, 2018
148
135
yes

edit: nevermind I got bored
atleast i have an idea and a theme in mind for a future arena map if I ever make one
 
Last edited:
Yrr

Yrr

An Actual Deer
aa
Sep 20, 2015
1,308
2,743
Last edited:
zythe_

zythe_

✖ ✖ ✖
aa
Feb 20, 2018
517
305
14bit

14bit

L14: Bit Member
aa
Oct 5, 2014
642
2,068
Due to an unprecedented number of entries, the fact that voting would overlap the voting of another, more major contests (Pick it Up!), and the desire to keep these as friendly low-stakes events, I have decided to pivot these events away from being competitions in the traditional sense. There will be no officially declared winner for this or any future Microcontests. Trying to judge maps based on quality and declaring winners is antithetical to the whole idea of these events, which is to explore creativity and encourage making mistakes at high speeds.

Instead, I'm going to treat these as being closer to Jams than Contests. I will be keeping the Microcontest name; these are much more demanding than a Jam, so framing them as competition against yourself and the clock rather than against others seems reasonable to me. So congrats to those who beat the clock, you won!

Because we will not be doing voting you are free to keep working on your maps whenever you like. I will still be writing feedback for all of them, based on the versions we played during the testing.

The Microcontest Megathread has been updated with this information as well.

TL,DR:
Everyone wins if they finished, these are now competitions against yourself and the clock, and I will still be taking time to write up feedback for every map within the week.
 
14bit

14bit

L14: Bit Member
aa
Oct 5, 2014
642
2,068
Feedback time! All maps are listed in the order they were played, with the ones played multiple times for fixes at the end. These maps may have been updated since, but I'm only looking at the versions we played during the event.

My personal favorites were ibex, raccoons, 8bitfenix, and halfcircle.

This is a very, very fast map. It's such a viable strategy to blitz for the enemy flag that not much happens. It seems that the moment a flag is grabbed, the round is pretty much over since there won't be enough people left to chase the carrier. In my opinion it needs to be harder to get the flags for a win, harder to get the flags back to your side, or have multiple caps to win. The route underneath thorough the center is just too fast once most players are dead.

Seems like most of the feedback for this one was covered during the test by others, but I'll repeat it again. It's slow to rotate between the points, making camping the more viable strategy than trying to cap the enemy point. It's a beautiful map, it just needs the points to be closer somehow.

Not a fan of this one, every match plays out the same. There's only one point where you can cross to the enemy side (being the point itself), so you never get interesting flanks or different plays. You just rush the point and set up a hold. Interesting idea with the sniper decks, but I don't see any reason to get up there where you can be shot when you can just stay safe on the ground and head for the point.

Just goofy enough to work! I like the combination of pits with the medieval mode, it lets you get away with larger spaces while not making it all feel empty. Maybe slightly more cover to reduce the effectiveness of medic snipers? I like the one way dropdowns too, makes it a bit more interesting.

I love the height variation here, but a lot of the hallways and rooms are just too cramped. The left building with all the ramps and doors down into the side flanks off mid is painfully small. That whole area just isn't fun to fight in, which is a shame since once you get past that building the rest of it is so well done. This was one of my favorites!

This one is mine! Other than the massive sightline and the broken doors that I overlooked, I think this went well. It's a bit small, but the flow between the points and the main fighting areas work well. I think I did a decent job with the theme in such a short time as well. I'm planning on expanding the spawn buildings, extending the stream with more play space, and giving an exit directly into the stream from the spawn building. This should push back the spawns and make the map feel bigger without messing with the main combat space since I think it worked at the current scale.

I'm surprised we didn't get more asymmetric arena! I really like this one, one of my favorites. It looks good, plays well, and seemed pretty balanced to me. There's a few places where you can get trapped (like under the giant log) and there's a bit of strangeness going on with the stair props around the map, but that's easy stuff to fix. My biggest issue is the wonky clipping around the train. You can walk on some of it, but other sections are clipped off with no visual indication. I don't know how you'd fix it, but it really bugged me to be able to stand on the train outside, but not be able to walk through the fully open doorway that has no visual indication that it's clipped.

Pretty standard 2CP arena, seems to work decently. It's weirdly difficult to get to the points, requiring a perfect crouch jump from a corner or to walk all the way around the building for non-jumping classes. The buildings with the trains also don't flow well; the natural route they push you towards is crossing the bridge, which is not what most people want to do. The real route that people want requires a 180 degree turn, and I remember some people not even knowing that existed until the second time we played the map. The dead end with the health also just doesn't feel great. I'd completely redo those buildings entirely.

Small, but not in a interesting way. There's not enough going on here to provide an interesting experience to me. It's a box with spawns in two of the corners, points in the other two, and a building in the center. Yes, there's more than that, but that's what it boils down to and plays like. There's little advantage to trying to take the center building, and both points aren't interesting to attack. It's a perfectly playable map, just not an interesting one.

It's a circle with two points. There's nothing I can really say here. Good joke I guess, if that's what you are going for? If not, good luck.

Feels a lot like a less interesting Lumberyard to me. Feels overscaled, there's some ridiculously long combat spaces here that aren't fun to play around. The cap zone isn't well marked on the floor from what I remember, and the use of shutters adds unnecessary risk to entering the point area while doing very little for providing actual cover from what I remember. Either fill the spaces to make it more interesting or try to shrink the spaces down. I'd work to emphasize the upper area by adding more routes to reach it; that whole area just didn't see a lot of use.

Very big! Too large! There's some interesting ideas going on with the chickenwire, hills, and elevated platforms with cover on one side, but the map was so big I really couldn't tell what was and wasn't working for me. Sorry I can't be more helpful here.

One of my favorites, very impressive for only 90 minutes of work. there's enough complexity going on to make fights dynamic and interesting, but not too much as to overwhelm players. The area behind the points themselves is a bit cramped with that rock near them; I'd expand out the wall a bit just to give some more breathing room around the point for defenders. Maybe also jazz up the spawn area, pushes though that space once the round is going are a bit dull since it's just a big empty corridor at that point.

The mad panic of the drop is pretty fun, if a bit buggy. Expanding the map a bit more and giving each time a slightly more defined side would also help; I played medic for most of the map and regularly instantly died from landing so far from teammates due to circumstances outside of my control. Some scattering is good, but at times it felt entirely too random for my tastes.

Another of my favorites, entirely because of the radio tower point. I'm a sucker for the "highground over point" setup (see pd_waterlog for details), and it works quite well here. There's some night height variation and different routes to the point going on, which makes the fights dynamic and fun. Unfortunately I'm not a fan of the other point. The transition between the points in the center isn't a terribly interesting space, and the point itself doesn't have any real interesting features. The cap zone also isn't marked on the ground, and is very small. Expanding it out to take up the whole floor between the computers would work wonders for the fights around the point, allowing players to spread out a bit and fight more effectively while both capping and contesting.

Pretty small, too much health, not a lot going on. I'm not a fan of the more linear tug-of-war style arena maps where you just have to overwhelm the enemy because there's no real flanks. There's no real opportunities for positional strategy if you can't flank, which is what I personally enjoy about arena. As it stands it just a wooden room with a fight at the point and there's not much else I can say.

Interesting layout. Seems to make good use of the powerup's jump height, with plenty of locations accessible with the jump. I don't really have much else to say since I'm not a fan of medieval mode in general, since it removes a lot of what I like about TF2. It seems to work alright for what it is, so I'll just leave it at that.

Very compact with some weird angles to fight around. Pushing up to the top point feels very strange with the angles and ramps, and it's even weirder to fight someone coming up to the point if you are already there. The lack of ammo really hurts the map; I ran out several times and couldn't effectively fight for the rest of the round. The lower point is very simple, and I rarely participated in fights there since the upper one is clearly a better position to hold from. Maybe pull spawns back and redesign the entrances to both points to make the fights more interesting? Maybe allow flanking somewhere? Not sure how you'd do that with the hole in the center though.

It took me two whole playtests to get to grips with the layout, and only because the second one was almost empty so I had time to explore. It's really neat visually, but all the areas look the same and are poorly lit. There's some nasty sightlines and it's overall just weird. Kind of fun though? I can't tell if that's because of the setting or the actual layout though.

Poorly lit in sections, there's dead-ends that look like routes, and the logic is fighting itself. It seems like you've tried to spice up the CTF portion by using both 14bitCTF-style doors, and ChinCTF-style dropdown/doors, which are both trying to solve opposite problems so it just makes things worse. 14bitCTF uses the doors to make the infiltration of the intel room the focus by making the route in longer than the route out. ChinCTF uses the dropdowns/doors to make the getting in shorter and focusing on the escape. Doing both here just makes the intel room into a deathtrap where there's only really one way in and one way out, which really doesn't work well when you only have one life to try and grab the flag. This probably wasn't your intention, but this is how it reads to me. Very neat visually though!

I can't find my source for this, but I swear that somewhere Valve said they added the point to Arena mode to prevent stalemates and stop teams from hiding and waiting out the clock when they had more players. Since this map doesn't have a point and you pretty much just win by having more players alive when time is up, it's got the problem that the point in arena solves; you can camp out the enemy team if you kill even one of them. Yes, I know that's not entirely how the clock works in this map, but effectively there is no difference between this and the winner being decided by whichever team has more players alive at the end of an arbitrary timer. It just isn't terribly interesting to hide in a corner for an almost guaranteed win.

I much prefer this to the original Arena Sacrifice. The scale and general layout is well done, though I do have a few little things I'd look into changing. A and D are big empty rooms with tiny doors, and I feel that more could be done in their spaces. Overall, a lot of doorways just feel small to me, though that may be personal preference. Finding some way to make it clear what intel belongs to what area would also be nice, maybe custom intel models with the letters on them? The water at mid is completely broken, make sure that it only has water texture on the top, nodraw on the rest, and reaches all the way to the floor. I'm interested to see where this goes if you do continue!

Very large, hard to rotate to the other point. Because of how hard it is to reach the enemy's point, it's almost impossible to do a rush to try and cap it at the start of a round so everyone only goes for their own. I like the center area, but the tight hallways and prop jumps on what should be useful flanks make them awful for trying to do any kind of push in either direction. Opening up the cramped bits and connecting the center building on each side to the elevated flanks might help rotating feel more natural.

A pretty standard arena map. I feel like it might be more interesting to flip the direction that spawns direct you to to be the side of the map that isn't where the point is. It might make the fights a bit more dynamic, rather than most teams rushing to lock down the point building. It's a bit too easy to just set up around the point right from the start, so pushing people to other parts of the map or locking the point building like Lumberyard might do this map well.

I like the verticality here, it's just a shame there's been so many issues. Some of the windows on Blu's side didn't pack and are invisible, and engineers can't build in most of the center area of the map at all. The general flow of the fights is neat and unique, though the side areas near the large ammo packs seem a bit strange to play in to me. I can't put my finger on it, maybe it's the prop jump or how empty the area under the pipes is?

I'm a big fan of the Dust2 version of CrikeyStrike from years ago (and the other one I can't remember the name of), but I'm just not feeling it on this one. It's confusing to navigate since it all looks the same, and every area is just a hallway. Some more open spaces really would help the layout, as well as a lot more height variation. Yeah, there's a lot of slopes here, but there's not a single meaningful bit of height variation. Every single height change can be navigated with a single standard jump or less; there's no places where you can drop down something you can't just go right back up. The result is that the map is effectively flat, and in the end not interesting to play for me.

Dear god, the snipers. It's so very open that there's no escape. 2fort already has a sniper issue, and this map is three 2fort bridges long with no cover down the center. Significantly shrinking the map horizontally would do wonders for this; ditch the 2fort bridge prop and just make your own out of brushwork for now. I can see an interesting map idea here, with bridges up to a center point building that has a route though the bottom as a flank, but right now it's just too big and the sightlines are too long.

I don't have much to say about this to be honest. It's a nice joke done well, the only thing I'd maybe do is to have multiple different arenas for you to zoom around in.

As usual, thanks for playing everyone! If you want more info on my feedback, feel free to hit me up on the Discord. June's Microcontest date has not yet been announced, so stay tuned to the megathread for that.
 
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