Banner art by 14Bit and background/typography by Freyja. Based on promotional artwork for Pick It Up! Ska In The 90s.
One of the major complaints about our previous contest was that it was not long enough. To address this, we're taking inspiration from the frantic energy and raw punk spirit of Ska music, and making this contest even shorter.
You have just one month to make a map (gameplay only!) - specifically, you must abide by the first Commandment of Ska and "Pick It Up!" by including pickups of some kind - flags, cores, Passtime jacks, whatever. Stock gamemodes and custom ones are both welcome.
Rules
- You must make a 'standard' map that runs without any server modifications or plugins.
- Detailing is not required or advised.
- Your map must be able to accommodate for a standard amount of players. This means a minimum of 16 spawn points per team for standard maps.
- Your map must be fully functional; meaning it includes objectives, spawn points, is fully lit and both teams can reasonably win.
- MvM entries will not be judged.
- Your map must contain pickups in some capacity.
- Pickups should be important to the gamemode. Anticipate low scores if your gamemode tries to skirt around this requirement.
- If you aren't sure what constitutes a pickup or not, ask!
- No, health and ammo pickups don't count. (Unless you can make a convincing case.)
- Maps may be no older than four days before the date and time of this post.
- We didn't do a very good job of announcing the contest in advance, so we've added a bit of leniency.
- Judges, contest organizers, and those otherwise involved directly in judging cannot win any prizes or place in the top 3.
- Limit one entry per person.
- This only applies to people who work on the map in Hammer. If you are only an asset contributor, you may be a contributor on as many maps as you like.
We do not expect these rules to come into play due to the nature of this contest. However, here they are just in case:
- Each map can have a team of four collaborators. A collaborator is someone who has contributed to the map either via work in Hammer, or through the contribution of custom assets.
- Only two members of a team are allowed to work on the map in Hammer. All other collaborators must be asset contributors.
- People are only considered asset contributors if their custom content has not been released to the public within two weeks of the contest start.
- The deadline used to be the contest start, but gamemode prefabs are particularly useful for this contest.
- The contest begins as of this post.
- The contest ends May 18th, 2020, 11:59 PM (23:59) GMT.
- That's about one month from now.
- That's not very long!
- The deadline used to be May 11th but has been pushed back due to technical issues with our servers that made map development more difficult.
- An upload thread will be created about a week before the deadline. You must post your map in this thread to submit your map.
- You may do whatever you want with your map before then. It is highly encouraged to upload your map and have players test it before the deadline so you can get feedback and improve your map.
- You will be given 48 hours after the deadline to fix any bugs that crop up. After that, no more updates.
- If you discover a bug with your final submitted version, you have the option of reverting to an older version of the map, provided that it is already uploaded to TF2Maps.net and/or our game servers.
Maps will be scored on the basis of how much fun they are to play, and on their relevancy to the theme (pickups). Detailing is not a required component of this contest. However, aesthetics still do play a role in how well a map plays. Lighting cues can tell players what routes they should use, and a cleaner or more professional looking alpha will always feel better to play than a sloppily constructed one. Keep these things in mind when designing your maps!
Voting will be one big public round with no official judges. Scoring will be a hybrid between numerical scores and ranked voting. Everyone will provide numerical scores, which will then be turned into ranked lists and then fed into a Single Transferable Vote system to determine the winner. This should provide the fairness of ranked voting while also providing us with the juicy statistics of numerical voting.
This also means that you may not score two maps the same. You must pick your favorites! In the interest of making this easier, scores will be 0-100. Anyone who scores two maps the same will have their votes thrown out. Everyone must also vote for at least 75% of the maps to have their vote counted.
Prizes
1st place will get a Mapper's Medallion. The top three will get a pick from our prize pool of game keys.
Links
Gamemode prefabs:
CTF Door Systems
Invade CTF (symmetrical, one neutral flag)
PD Prefab
CTF Arena
SD Arena
Attack / Defend Passtime
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