ReNo

Oh sorry, I wasn't referring to the sounds, I just meant that what I WAS referring to (the very "mini" feeling sniper recoil, if that makes sense) might not seem like a big deal but is a nice touch and that it's attention to detail like that sets games apart. That said, the sounds are mostly pretty effective sounding. I feel the need to draw attention in particular to the train on the 2nd level - the "choo choo!" sound and kind of model railway sounding engine are, again, such a perfect match for the theme. Lovely

That is seriously awesome work right there! The visuals and polish are incredible for a student project. I think my favourite bit is near the start when it demonstrates sniping - the ultra-speedy recoil is just perfectly judged and makes it *feel* all shrunken and cartoony I know that sounds like such a minor thing but its touches like that that can set it apart. Amazing job.

I won't go into detail like in the specific categories here, but I'll just say that my vote for overall best went to skysilcox and "VCTF-Glitch". It was a tough one between it, Lunaran's "Ludonarrative Dissonance", and WhiteDevil's "ctf_20cubes" in the end. Although I didn't vote for Whitedevil's entry in any of the other 3 categories I think it did a really solid job in all 3 of them, which made it a really strong entry overall. Ultimately I went for Glitch because it was the one that stood out as the most memorable and the one that most impressed me with its use of brushes, which - being the main theme of the contest - I felt was the most important consideration for deciding overall favourite.

I think everyone deserves some feedback for their effort so I'm gonna try and go through all of the levels and share my thoughts for each voting category. I think it'd be great to get more discussion going on about the entries, so share your thoughts people! Siteless265 by callguinness I was a bit disappointed here, as I thought it looked like it'd play pretty well from the screenshots and I liked the look of it to boot. In the end I felt the optical illusion of the black faces against the black skybox confused and annoyed me more than adding to the fun, but that's always the risk with adding novelties like that. I also felt that it was a bit too cramped for UDKs movement based combat. Maybe it'd be better with human opponents though, as I found with the bots that almost all the action took place around the shock rifle which just became a spot to rack up splash damage kills. I easily snagged a monster kill in a 4 player DM just camping overlooking the shock rifle and repeatedly firing, which I don't imagine would happen against human players. 20b_Barragan by CampaignJunkie Well you clearly didn't set out with gameplay in mind here, so I don't have too many qualms about dissing it There's at least the central wall to provide a bit of cover, but otherwise this is essentially an empty room with some spawn points and weapons, so I don't see it getting much rotation time on servers (do those still exist for HL2DM anyway?). Unnamed by Dmx6 The layout is a bit too simple and lacking in ambition for my liking. Could have used more variation; once you are in one of the 4 "compartments" that the walls slice the map into your only option is to head for the ramps to get out. Which ramp you take is of little consequence, as they ultimately lead up to the same place. Lack of choice for players leads to pretty boring gameplay, so always try to give them non-trivial decisions when it comes to route planning. Maybe one set of corners could have been left as is, but the other 2 could have lead to a higher walkway that bridged over the top of the current one? Then, as a player, deciding whether to pick the left ramp or right ramp would be given more meaning and consequence, which ultimately makes the game more fun. Just stuff to keep in mind for the future I did like the overhangs on the cross walkway that you could hide below to elude your opponents temporarily though - they made it more interesting than if the whole walkway had just extended straight down at the edges to the floor. Shard by JamesKing3D The huge scale probably works against the gameplay in this level. With so few brushes to use but such large distances involved, there's a whole lot of time spent travelling in a straight line with no cover. This is particularly true if you go to the rear pathway, which is just completely featureless and exposed. It looked like there was a doorway cut through the crystal leading out from the hollow to the middle of the rear path, but in-game it is blocked from the hollow side with a solid missing texture for me, so I can't tell if it is meant to be open or not? Assuming so I guess it would have played a bit better, but as it was for me it didn't work too well. VR20 by killertomato I think choosing to make this for CSS was a good plan, as it's about the closest in gameplay style to MGS as any FPS. Being entirely restricted to a flat plane is never gonna make for the most rivetting gameplay so I don't picture this being great in this category, but in CSS it could be quite fun to quietly stalk your foe and lay in wait in some of the little alcoves, so I think it probably holds up as well as plenty of AIM maps do. Don't Mess With Hexas by KungFuSquirrel Like most hex based maps I think this one looks to ask a lot of the jump key I do like the arrangement you've gone for though, and I think having the 3 distinct islands (well, kinda 4) is much more interesting than bunching them all into one. I wish I had Q3 installed to play it as it's tough to really get a feel for the scale and flow from the pics alone, and maybe there are more freeform routes around than I'm giving it credit for, but it looks like players are quite restricted to the jump pad paths you've set, and that in turn would lead to player movements being too predictable for interesting gameplay. Could be wrong though. DM_20B by Leon Kilean What a strange level this is I imagine it would be fun to play on by virtue of that strangeness alone. In the end I think it is a bit too gimmick driven for any sort of serious gameplay though, and the moving parts - of which there are more than I'd expected, and more major in terms of size - I feel could get pretty annoying in the end, particularly the ones that can crush and kill you. I also didn't really get the thinking behind the weapon placement, particularly the lack of anything at all on the somewhat difficult to get to rooftop. Ludonarrative Dissonance by Lunaran MY VOTE I felt a bit uncomfortable doing so without having actually seen it in-game, however I voted for this map as strongest gameplay. It just looks like it'd be a load of fun to have a 1v1 battle around. Even though it is essentially a single pathway spiraling its way around, it creates lots of little ledges and nooks and crannies to leap around on and explore. It's nice and tightly packed so you never have long to travel before your next route choice or opportunity to switch tactics, which I feel quite a few of the other competitors suffer from. It's also a floater that doesn't look horribly treacherous for accidental suicides, as despite the holes there are lots of surfaces to hit upon if you do tumble of many of the edges. It just looks very polished and very well thought out. It doesn't try to do more than 20 brushes is capable of like some of the more ambitious entries, but because of that it isn't stretched thin. Very nice, and earns my vote. Satmush by quazilin1 Didn't play this as I don't have Q2 installed. From the look of it I reckon it seems a bit exposed on the upper platforms though. Having some of the platforms overlaying others was a good call and should help provide some cover down below but I wonder if extending some of those columns up through the platforms to create some sort of obstacle on top of them might have made it more fun. dm_reflex_contest3 by ReFlex I don't know why the low gravity surprised me, as I was baffled at how gameplay was gonna work when just looking at screenshots and it totally makes sense once in-game. As an open space low-grav arena I imagine this is quite fun, but ultimately I think any level needs a bit more cover and opportunity to elude then ambush their foes, and here you're pretty much always in view of your opponent and thus denied that opportunity. InCubed by sarge mat I played with bots and had some fun on it. It's a bit open and featureless around the outer edges, but the central "building" breaks up line of sight nicely, and the little corridors give a bit of breathing room to take a little break from the carnage. Weird glitch (or even weirder design choice!) though; one brush that makes up the central building doesn't have collision, meaning you just fall through the floor and can run through the walls. Weapon placement seemed pretty good, I was definitely making use of all the ones on offer, and the bots performed well. Miniature Sun Observatory by sentura Could be more fun than I'd given credit for by looking at screenshots. The alternating gradient paths just feel "nice" to hop or drop between. I imagine quite a lot of suicides though by virtue of how narrow all the surfaces area. Trying to run around while focusing on combat is bound to result in a lot of blind drops off the edge. VCTF-Glitch by skysilcox I had a 4v4 game on this, which it handled pretty well, and could possibly even handle more. That is pretty impressive for a level made of 20 brushes! I can't say it was the most exciting CTF map around but it was certainly playable. Part of the problem is UDKs measly weapon set of course, but I did think that having just the single jump pad route between the bases made it a bit of a brute-force effort to fight through the bottle-neck rather than encouraging any tactics. After I'd captured their flag I had no choice but to just leg it along the mostly exposed, fairly straight and option free path home. I reckon a second route joining the bases would have made the level more interesting to play, but it is certainly playable as it stands, so good job. Oh, but that teleporter confused me - sent me through 3 times before I realised why I was appearing somewhere totally different! Looks kinda obvious once you know what it does, but before I did I was baffled! Also, once you've taken the teleporter there is an invisible wall blocking bullets you fire toward the enemy base, which caused me to suicide with a rocket. Oh and trying to jump onto a clearly accessible tower bit from there back toward my base saw me hit an invisible wall and fall to my doom. So a bit rough around the edges there. Dolphin by SNDXR I find this one hard to judge because I haven't been able to play it and I'm not experienced with L4D2 survivor mode. It looks to me like it's a bit linear though. The gameplay seems to be mostly limited to a single floor, which might be ramping upwards on a gradient, but it's still the same surface. The chunky ramp type thing near the rear looks to break that a bit, but I feel you coulda done a lot more like that. For example, making that white, windowed section near the front wider and putting another floor of it on top with a walkway around it. That'd be 1 extra brush but it would have added a pretty significant section to the layout. Unnamed by Term!nator525 Sadly this one looks a bit too simple in floorplan to be much fun to play. No real choice in route at any point, so there's no real tactical decision making other than "shoot them if you can see them". I think if you'd had a few more brushes to play with it coulda gone a long way to improving the playability, but it definitely appears more of a screenshot map than a gameplay map, so don't take that too harshly DM-Crystal by Vilham I really wanted to check this one out in game but I don't have UT3 installed. It looks to me like a lot of fun! Perhaps a bit too much reliance on jump pads for movement but I can appreciate why they're needed, as there was no real alternative if you wanted to use this layout (which I've already acknowledged looks fun!). ctf_20cubes by WhiteDevil Creating a fun CTF map in 20 brushes is never gonna be an easy task, but it looks to me like you've done an admirable job of it. 2 distinct main routes, and some obstacles and connectors that provide rough variations on those routes, should mean there is room for a bit of tactics rather than a simple bottlenecked collision of armies. I did get a bit annoyed at getting snagged on the curves at the bottom of the ramps but it's understandable as clip brushes weren't free in the rules. Outline by Zyndrome Holy shit, that wasn't what I was expecting at all I figured the hexagons were fairly sizeable, and when you said moving I'd expected them to mostly stay still but occasionally shift around kinda slowly. Nope and nope! Absolutely tiny, this is like a bouncy castle of a level, and you feel pretty much entirely out of control as you surf across the top of this constant wave of movement. I actually think this makes it way more interesting! I wouldn't want to play it for any huge amount of time, but I think it'd be great fun for a short free for all melee battle. Seeing this in-game was the biggest surprise of the contest for me, so high five for that!

I think everyone deserves some feedback for their effort so I'm gonna try and go through all of the levels and share my thoughts for each voting category. I think it'd be great to get more discussion going on about the entries, so share your thoughts people! Siteless265 by callguinness I love the screenshots of this one, but I think that the charm it has from a distance doesn't hold up as well in-game. The optical illusion from the black-faced brushes certainly works as intended, which can occasionally give a nice surprise, but from most angles while playing it just means you can't see the form or structure of the level and instead see...well, black It DOES look great from far out angles though, and it's certainly bold up close, so on the whole it's a good entry visually. 20b_Barragan by CampaignJunkie MY VOTE I love how this looks. I just *want* to be there, which is always a lovely feeling to have about a level. The ambience is right on the money; it feels warm, inviting, intoxicatingly colourful. The textures look gorgeous, the alpha'd tree brings in probably the only truly soft edged visual in the entire contest, the lighting works beautifully... Suffice to say, this got my vote for visuals, despite some tough competition! Unnamed by Dmx6 Needed a bit more subtlety I'd say. Some odd texture combinations (e.g. the corner blocks are badly worn concrete on top, metal grating on the ramp edge, and intricate panelling on the sides, which just looks incoherent and implausible), and the lighting (specifically the red spots at the corners) was a bit too garish. Oddly, a touch that I think looked really nice was one that most people would never see - the underside! When viewed from underneath with the starry space sky in the background, the sharp form of the level, the dark texture used, the white stripe outlining the silhouette, the little highlight near the "peak"...all of that makes it look a really bold and imposing sight. Shard by JamesKing3D I think there was something wrong with version uploaded (or it clashes with the January build of UDK?), as I was getting a "lighting needs to be rebuilt" error, had missing textures, and in places had faces that just didn't seem to be getting rendered at all. On that rear path behind the main structure itself I could just run along a totally invisible brush, for example. So it's hard to judge based on what was in-game alone, but between it and the screenshots I liked it a lot. Everything about it feels "sharp". The textures with the streaks through them are definitely not pleasant to look at, being so noisy and flickering reflections at you as you move around, but it *shouldn't be* pleasant; it's harsh and unwelcoming and that fits the design of the level. It's eye-catching, bold, and different. I like it. VR20 by killertomato I don't have CSS installed at the moment so couldn't check it out in-game, but I did take a look at the VMTs and was pleased to see you'd given a scrolling material proxy to the "sky" for authenticity It looks pretty faithful to the MGS VR missions, though it does lack the inner glow around the edges of walkable areas, which is understandable given the contest restrictions but would have been nice to see (particularly if it pulsed using material proxies) and probably could have been done using a single brush as a func_illusionary covering the entire floorplan with a bespoke texture stretched across it. Don't Mess With Hexas by KungFuSquirrel Well it's very simplistic, but it's still nice to look at. Good lighting that suits the well-chosen sky. Nice textures that look believable as the material in which some sort of monolith structure like this could be sculpted. The hex's are well place to give a nice, full screenshot. So...yeah, simple, but nice. DM_20B by Leon Kilean There's some really cool stuff going on here that the screenshots really can't do justice to. At first when I saw the latest screens I thought the weird smiley graphic and things had spoiled it, but the animation on it and on the fish tank panels indoors are really awesome. The colour changing glows add a lot of interest too, and even the music - which again, I was sceptical about - adds to its charm. I was less keen on the movement of some of the brushes, which I thought was going to be more limited than it turned out to be and ultimately seemed a bit OTT for my liking. Sometimes the movement seemed to occur at odd or clashing times (particularly involving the sliding ramp) which looked unnatural and messy. On the whole though a very unique level, good work! Ludonarrative Dissonance by Lunaran I wish I could see it in-game, as from the screenshot you can see little hints of how cool the hand drawn textures are but I feel you could appreciate them so much more in engine. It genuinely does look like papercraft though, which gives it a neat and distinctive theme. The forms of the brushes look good, lending it an almost terrain-esque look as if it were carved into a cliff face or something. In short - it looks really nice. Low-impact and subtle rather than "whoa", but definitely nice. Satmush by quazilin1 It looks pretty cool for the tech; solid texture choices that look good together, and overall it has a nice sense of place against that space background. I don't much like the 90 degree corners on the ramps - it looks at odds with the rest of the level and having them just hovering unsupported like that looks a bit awkward. Otherwise no real grips though. dm_reflex_contest3 by ReFlex Simple, but quite nice looking. I like the texture use - they all sit well together and look good in your lighting setup, though I feel it might have looked a bit more varied if you'd used a different texture on the "side" walls to the corner columns. I also think it might have been nice if the side walls were shorter than the full height of the corner columns, and once those superceded the height of the walls they were shown as full octagons rising higher. Maybe have the side walls curve or lean outward after a certain height... Anyway, I'm just thinking out loud the direction I'd probably have gone with it I like what's there, but I feel you could have pushed it a bit further. InCubed by sarge mat I wasn't keen on the visuals of this one. It's too blocky, which I suppose most 20 brush maps are to some extent or another, but here the brushes are mostly simple boxes which doesn't lead to a visually impressive end product. The texture set wasn't particularly to my liking either, and the mostly flat lighting didn't bring out the best atmosphere from them. For some reason it's the ceiling that particularly turned me off visually. The brown texture tiling a dozen times off into the distance without anything breaking it up didn't look great, and because it so often makes up a big portion of the screen in a map like this, I feel you'd have been better opening up the top of the level to the skybox instead. Miniature Sun Observatory by sentura First of all I should point out that on running this one in-game it was missing the skybox and "mini sun" materials, so that kinda limits what I can make of the overall visual appeal. Despite that, I think that seeing it in-game made me like it more than in the screenshots. The texture choices looked pretty good and felt right for the theme, and the way some of the ramps and platforms were angled gave it a bit more visual interest than I had anticipated. VCTF-Glitch by skysilcox I was sure this was gonna be my favourite visually when it was in the WIP thread, but in the end it was *just* nudged out by Barragan. It is lovely though. I love the limited yet potent use of colour. The little dots on the white flooring I hadn't really noticed in screenshots, but in-game they look great and are a nice way of indicating the base you're in without taking away from that fresh white scheme you've got going on. The towering columns going into the sky are so simple yet so effective, and though the arch things that the flags are on are a bit confusingly glitchy looking and hard to really get your head around, the way it segments the colour and introduces that little splash of green really looks great. All round good job with very little to criticise visually. Dolphin by SNDXR It's a nice idea this one, but doesn't really feel like it's finished yet. I know you were prohibited from using a 3D skybox, for instance, but a good way to improve the scene would have been to use a cylindrical skybox extending much further out than this one, and then using a fog controller to fade the edges of the water into the skybox. That alone would have made a big difference to the appearance. Secondly, the boat itself looks awkwardly shaped, with too much mass in the rear compared to the front. The white section with windows also feels underused. If that section had been much taller and more developed it probably would have made it feel a lot more believable as a ship. Finally, I'm not sure what the texture is on that vertical brush right at the back of the boat - kinda looks like a starry sky or something? Hard to interpret what that is from the screenshots alone. Unnamed by Term!nator525 Unfortunately I couldn't get this to run - it kept crashed HL2DM to desktop when I tried to run it. I have the texture pack you mentioned but maybe not in exactly the same folder structure? You should probably include any custom textures used in your zip (or embedded in the BSP) to ensure people don't have issues. Not that I'm 100% sure that is what is causing the problem. Aaaanyway, judging from the screenshots alone this one looks like a really neat idea that is really pushing it to be done justice in just 20 brushes. It's hugely ambitious, so you deserve credit, but from the screenshots it appears a bit messy, curiously textured, and lit with the bare minimum effort. Still makes for an impressive first impression on glimpsing the screenshots though, and even without any brushwork changes, a bit more care on the texturing and lighting could really perk this up. DM-Crystal by Vilham I really like the look of this. The simple texture works really nicely with your varied lighting, and it looks very otherworldly yet somehow pleasant at the same time. ctf_20cubes by WhiteDevil Everything looks really nice, and the huge boxes jutting in at unorthodox angles works a treat. Nitpicking: I'd say the red and blue giant box textures are perhaps a bit too saturated and dark, to the point they look like a totally different and inconsistent marble type texture until you really get up close and realise it's just a colour variant of the normal one. Oh and I think the bloom is too high, as everything was a bit overly glowy. But as I said; nitpicking On the whole it looks lovely! Outline by Zyndrome Not too much to say when a map is made out of 2 colours and a single shape, but it achieves what it sets out to

I think everyone deserves some feedback for their effort so I'm gonna try and go through all of the levels and share my thoughts for each voting category. I think it'd be great to get more discussion going on about the entries, so share your thoughts people! Siteless265 by callguinness Makes really good use of the brushes. The layout is relatively complex for just 20 brushes, with a good amount of height variation, and every face is used not just for visuals but to contribute to the layout and gameplay. Plus it's a really memorable and discernable design - the angled white-topped brushes rising up on one side and cutting down into the orange base is a nice idea and well executed. 20b_Barragan by CampaignJunkie Not much to say in terms of brush usage here, they're used pretty much how you'd use them if there wasn't a brush restriction. What does impress me though is that this scene aims for realism and hits it - it feels believable as a real place *as it is*, as if even if it had more brushes it wouldn't bother to use them. With most people taking an abstract approach to try and avoid the issue of making something realistic in just 20 brushes, I feel that deserves some recognition. Unnamed by Dmx6 By my reckoning you could make this exact same level out of 16 brushes, and I think that if you'd done so then those extra 4 brushes could have added quite a bit to the level, so I think that inefficiency drags you down in this category. Shard by JamesKing3D Wow, this has quite an epic scale to it! Definitely larger than I'd expected, and I think in terms of building something epic and imposing this is the most impressive level entered. I honestly didn't even try to count how many brushes were used, but it makes great use of subtractive geometry to get an end result that looks like significantly more than just 20 brushes. A strong entry for brushwork. VR20 by killertomato Being sculpted entirely out of blocks it is hard to get too excited about the use of brushwork here. I do like the little objective arrows you've got in there though. Don't Mess With Hexas by KungFuSquirrel Nothing much to remark on here from a brushwork point of view, but hexagons are pretty much always nice DM_20B by Leon Kilean Amibitious and inventive. As I mentioned in the gameplay thread, I didn't care too much for the moving parts in the end, but in terms of making the most of the brushes it is certainly more interesting than keeping them static. The map is very clearly landmarked, looking unique and indentifiable from any angle, and nothing felt superfluous or wasted, so all in all I'd say it makes good use of the 20 brushes. Ludonarrative Dissonance by Lunaran Unfortunately I don't have Q3 installed to play it, but it looks like a really good use of the brushes available. First off, nice dodecahedron! But really I was more impressed by the simple yet fun looking layout that also creates an interesting to look at structure. There's no filler here; every brush adds something to the scene. Equally importantly, none of the brushes are *overworked*; each brush only covers a small area instead of being expected to cover a huge expanse, which lead to many of the other entries feeling stretched thin. Plus it's beautifully asymmetrical. Satmush by quazilin1 It's a fairly simple one on the brushwork front, but then it is working with older tech so some concessions have to be made. Maybe a bit repetitive with all those identical platforms, but hey, at least there's a few other shapes in there so that puts you ahead of a few competitors for variation dm_reflex_contest3 by ReFlex I feel there was the potential to do a bit more with your idea here. By my count you use 19 brushes (are you counting the low grav trigger as a brush? Think you coulda gotten away with it for free since people use kill brushes and the like for free...), and I think even having an extra floating platform in the middle of the level (or a walkyway joining to the 2 mid-height corners?) would have made it a more interesting arena. InCubed by sarge mat I didn't think the brushwork here was particularly well done, being mostly made up of simple blocks. Some of them also seemed oddly - almost haphazardly - positioned, too. Like the 4 taller pillars around the edge of the central building - some are flush with the walls on some faces but not others, which may have been intentional but comes across as a bit sloppy. I'd also say that some of the brushes used don't add anything to either the visuals or the gameplay, which isn't good when you've only 20 of them to play with! The little square pillars at the sides of the ramp end of the level, for example. On the plus side, the arena that the brushes build offers open plan, long range combat, multiple heights to battle over, cover to take advantage of, and some close quarters sections too, so it is very playable. Miniature Sun Observatory by sentura I liked this on more in-game than in screenshots, it actually feels pretty nice just running around and leaping between the ramps. Being made up predominantly of simple ramps (though some are subtly angled, which I hadn't noticed in the screens and looks nice in-game) means it isn't very ambitious in how it uses its 20 brushes however, so I don't feel it does too well in this category. VCTF-Glitch by skysilcox MY VOTE You've made really good use of the brushes here, creating something that looks like it's built out of far more of them than it is. I can't even begin to get my head around how you made the weird glitchy part of the flag arches, but then I've never done much Unreal editing before. This took my vote for best use of brushes. Lovely. Dolphin by SNDXR Seems your download only includes the VMF and not a compiled BSP though, and I don't have Hammer setup to work with L4D2 (doesn't it just work like other source games? doesn't seem to...) so wasn't able to take a look. I like the idea behind it, and I think making it a L4D2 survival map was a good call too. That said, I feel it could use a bit more work. The shape of the ship is a bit awkward, and leads to it looking extremely back-heavy, and some of the brushes I'm not convinced add that much to the scene and so could have been more productively used. Good job on trying out such a different theme and gameplay type though! Unnamed by Term!nator525 I wasn't able to load this in-game as it kept crashing, but it appears to me like what is there *could* be built in 13 brushes, so I have to count that as a bit of a negative in this category. If it had been built in those 13 brushes then I think with a further 7 to play with you coulda improved this one quite a lot, so it's a shame. On the other hand, when I first saw the screenshots I thought "ace!". I love the idea and your ambition in trying to do it in just 20 brushes, but in the end I think those 20 brushes coulda been stretched a bit further. DM-Crystal by Vilham Octagons rather than hexagons? Going against the crowd here I really like the way you've used them. Having them protrude at odd angles and jutting through each other creates (from the beauty shot angle at least, and maybe elsewhere) a really nice view with interesting parial lines of sight. ctf_20cubes by WhiteDevil I think you made good use of the 20 brushes to create a layout both viable for gameplay and yet still interesting to look at. The only brush I questioned the use of was the 2nd huge angle cube off to the side of "high" route. I guess it provides a surface against which to hit explosives for splash damage, while if it wasn't there they would just sail off into the sky, but it felt a little off on its own and outside of the play area, and with only 1 face providing a sort of indirect benefit, I felt there was maybe room to use it elsewhere to greater effect. Overall very good job though! Outline by Zyndrome They're nice, stylised hexagonal prisms, but it's still just 20 hexagonal prisms, so it isn't particularly exciting from a brushwork perspective.

I'd love to see more contests. Can't guarantee always entering but keeping them intentionally small scale and not focused on putting out loads of custom content makes them extremely tempting prospects! To add another idea to the pot, how about something riffing on the Halo forge style of level editor? Provide some standard terrain and let people build on top of it but not actually edit it. Similar in ways to the art pass idea, but instead of having the focus on the art, it's more on how you integrate your own layout and brushwork with the restrictions of the existing terrain. Sadly that would probably mean restricting entries to a single engine though, which I think these days in a community like ours could be a bad idea. As for the voting method, I'd put my weight behind allowing more than one vote, as I think it spreads out the voting more. Having just one vote each can lead to the strongest entries hogging all the votes while others sit with none, which is a shame as sometimes they have plenty of merit and charm of their own, just not enough to win around somebody's sole vote. If voters could pick a 1st, 2nd and 3rd choice - with more "points" going to the entry based on that ranking - I think it would lead to more interesting polls with more of the entries competitive. Not sure its possible within these forums technically though. The multiple categories question...I actually quite like splitting it up as it has been this time around. The current difference in leaders in each category attests to it's value in my opinion. It lets maps be celebrated for what they do well, regardless of failings in other areas. CJ's barragan map for instance has horrible gameplay (no offence, but you said so yourself!), but it has a really nice atmosphere and is the map that most makes you think "I'd love to be there", for which it is rightly winning votes in the visuals category. I'm not sure we then need an "overall" category though - maybe just adding the totals of all other categories would be sufficient.

Monotone Heights 28 brushes (20 world, 6 skybox, 1 trigger_hurt for killing falling players, 1 trigger_multiple for death fade) I was aiming for a rooftop battle at the summit of a skyscraper, but I didn't get around to doing any custom textures and in the end what gave the best look was a uniform, minimal concrete look. I suppose it is similar to some of the monolithic style Halo maps. Actually really pleased with how varied and playable a level I managed to get out of the 20 brushes. I spent quite a lot of time tweaking almost every vertex to make as much use out of each face as possible. I really wanted to keep movement smooth and freeform rather than being too confined to pre-defined jump pad routes or constant hopping and dropping, so there's lots of angled flooring to try and keep things nicely connected. The result is a fairly large space to play around in without being too exposed or "killboxey", and I imagine it could be playable - and enjoyable - for anything up to 4 players. The VMF is included for anyone interested. Credit goes to Hipshot for the lovely skybox! Beauty Shot Layout Shot (kinda hard to show since it's on a few floors, so here's a reverse angle to give you the idea) Editor Shot DOWNLOAD

Were you trying to use HL2DM? I had problems setting it up too, had to follow the steps in this guide to get it running correctly... http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/s ... ?t=1457047

I'm now part of a 3 man indie team so have to do a bit of pretty much anything and everything from programming to art, but previously I worked for Outerlight as a designer so that is perhaps more relevant. As a general designer I had lots of all round design responsibilities, but a big part of it was level design, so I'll describe how it worked there. It was only a team of about 18 developers though, so might not be too indicative of larger companies. Typically we worked on a level as a 2 person team - 1 designer, 1 env. artist. We'd get together to brainstorm ideas (along with the other designers and env. artists initially), and once we'd settled on a theme the designer would start drawing out layout ideas and the env. artist would start gathering references for art style and assets. Once a rough layout was approved the designer would start boxing it out while the env. artist would start building general use assets for the level that weren't too rigidly linked to the base brushwork or layout (general use textures, themed crates and barrels, etc...). After testing the boxed out layout the designer would make adjustments for better gameplay, while making use of the general use assets the env. artist had produced. Once a fairly finalised layout had been reached the made-to-fit assets would be the env. artists new focus. The designer would be dropping these in while working on the technical side of our game's levels (room locators, interactive object triggers, item pickups, spawn points, drawing up non-artified floorplans for use on the in-game map, AI waypoints, etc...). Lighting was also part of the designer's role, though often the env artist would give their opinion on how it ought to look. As for sound, we had an external audio producer who would run through our levels and create soundscape files for each area. The designer would then be responsible for implementing these and liasing with the audio producer to discuss their balance and any issues. As seir said, the larger the company the more focused and small your role will become. That's why I like small companies

skysilcox: That looks sweet, reminds me a lot of the Mirror's Edge pure time trial maps, which is a very good thing in my book! Looks very exposed from a gameplay POV though. I suppose if you want a CTF level of any significant length in just 20 brushes it's hard to prevent that however! Whitedevil: Layout seems much more interesting now, looking nice!

Orpheus! Didn't expect to see you here! Have at it man, this little contest is the perfect one to get you back on the wagon

Mine is source, just in HL2DM just now (all I've got installed at the moment!) but I might convert it to TF2 instead - tempted to make it some sort of game mode beyond deathmatch. I had another play with it last night and reworked the layout a touch, but it looks similar enough from a distance shot that there's little point in posting another just now! As for making the tower seamless, I'm planning on doing a custom skybox with probably a flat colour lower half that I can just use fog to merge the tower into. Not sure how well it'll work, but it should be good enough. Nice idea using transparent textures though, interesting alternative. Leon: I'm loving the atmosphere in your level, and definitely looking forward to seeing it in game with the moving elements and pulsing light - sounds like it'll be killer! WhiteDevil: That's neat, I always like the idea of building levels out of primitive repeated blocks like that. I once tried to build a level solely out of flatshaded hexagonal prisms, and it was pretty fun! Could be tough when you've only 20 brushes, but it's impressive that it's already looking cool and you've got another 8 to spare (plus 2 more by reclaiming those floating details if you absolutely need em).

Here's my initial tinkerings of a skyscraper roof arena. Not sure if it'll stay this way though, tempted to break the symmetry, and it definitely needs work on the texturing and lighting.

I don't think I entirely agree CJ - there's definitely a lot of brush saving you can take advantage of through subtractive brushes. Lets say you want a ring shaped platform. In purely additive engines you're looking at 1 brush per section of the ring, so the more curved it is the more cost there is in terms of brushes. Essentially this shape becomes impossibly expensive as you're gonna be spending almost half your budget on it for even a blocky one. Switch to an engine that allows subtractive geometry and you can have as smooth a ring platform as you like in just 2 brushes - add 1 cylinder, then subtract a smaller cylinder from the middle of it. That said, as long as people take that sort of difference into account when judging, I don't really mind. I think it's kind of a shame that there's only 1 entry allowed per person though, given the quick nature of building these maps. But hey, I've not finished my first one yet, so maybe it's a little early to be moaning

Grrr, Hammer seems as buggy as ever. First HL2DM will only load in the 2006 version of the SDK tools, which just renders empty blackness in the viewports on my ATI card. Then after setting it up manually to use the 2009 version of the tools, it appears to be working fine but will only show 1 of the 4 viewports at a time, even if I tell it to reset the 4 viewport windows. Some of the keyboard shortcuts (cut/paste for example, and tool hotkeys) are either not working at all or working with a weird delay, while others work perfectly fine! Think I might build an entry in UDK instead...

This sounds right up my alley! Haven't cracked open an FPS editor in almost a whole year, so this provides the perfect excuse to give it a shot again. 20 brushes sure sounds limiting, but in a really cool way, and as said it really lowers the time investment required which will hopefully bring in a fair crowd. I don't think unlimited faces is a problem - surely we're assuming a brush has to be a single, convex primitive right? I don't think adding one with hundreds of faces really gives you much more flexibility than one with, say, 10 faces, if that is the case.

Not at all! I agree, spy party does look very interesting. From what I've read it is a strictly 2 player offering (I'm sure the principle ideas could extend to more players though) but focuses entirely on "blending in" gameplay, similar but more elaborate than that The Ship used. BGT doesn't put as much emphasis on that, so if that was what drew you to The Ship it might leave you a little cold. I'm definitely interested to see Spy Party's take on things. My understanding is that it is quite rigid in how it plays out - 1 spy inside the building, 1 sniper outside, and no option for the sniper to do anything but watch and take 1 shot. It's extremely focused gameplay, which isn't a bad thing, but isn't quite what we wanted to go for with TS2 which was more open. I hope it does well when I comes out though, I love games that tread a different path to the norm

Here's a rather long, random bunch that spring to mind. I tend to find world cinema more interesting than UK/US, so it's rather weighted, though in truth I enjoy English movies just as much. They just tend to be less memorable for me, and so less likely to come to mind when thinking of movies I really love. The Fall Pan's Labyrinth Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon The Warrior (Musa: The Warrior in some places) Sunshine Brick Tekkonkinkreet LOTR Trilogy Infernal Affairs Heat Gattaca Tale of Two Sisters The City of Lost Children Fast and Furious movies (yeah, absolute guilty pleasure!) Battle Royale Sinbad movies (another guilty pleasure) Ping Pong Versus The Usual Suspects Goemon Oldboy Dark City Taxi (French series, not the US remake) Brotherhood of the Wolf

Oooh, also, just noticed that we got a Eurogamer review today... http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010- ... iew?page=3 We got a 6/10, which is lower than we'd hoped, but at least they are mostly positive aside from the legit criticisms levelled at the aiming/shooting. There is a lock-on if you click the right-stick in when aiming at somebody, but we didn't do a great job of making that obvious, and hitting people with some of the weapons WITHOUT using that can be quite a nightmare on the Xbox controller. It's not an issue on the PC, but that's not really an excuse, it just says we shoulda done a better job of making the aiming work well on Xbox!

Yeah I agree with an awful lot of your comments Thrik. It was an interesting u-turn in design intention through the life of BGT. Right after The Ship we started working on a few different prototypes for other game ideas, but The Ship 2 was one of the bigger ideas we shopped around to publishers. Our ideas for The Ship 2 took pretty much everything from the original game and - while simplifying a lot of the needless complexity as BGT has - also added lots more depth. Some of it was really really cool and I'm convinced would be a lot of fun. I don't wanna go into detail, as who knows, maybe one day Chris will get Outerlight back off the ground and The Ship 2 could happen, and I'd hate to let the cat outta the bag prematurely Suffice to say, while BGT made changes such as removing the "passenger" NPCs (technically they still exist as "extras" but the tweaked gameplay makes them less influential) and made identifying player names automatic (mostly in an effort to speed up the gameplay), The Ship 2 would have gone in the absolutely opposite direction. The intention was to make the process of stalking and killing your target (and most importantly, getting away with it!) an even more elaborate process than it was in the original game. Think of how it was in The Ship, but bringing in more elements of "Guess Who?" and "Cluedo" Oh man, thinking back on it now, I can't help but get quite excited about it again Easy to see why Ubi wanted us to go more in the direction of BGT though, even if our ideas for TS2 seemed to build a more interesting game for the "hardcore" TS players. The Ship has earned a somewhat cult status with PC gamers and has a good reputation with almost all who remember it, but the sales weren't fantastic. It was just too slow and complex for what people expected in an FPS, which lead to many people trying to play it as a deathmatch game and ruining it for not just themselves but everyone else on the server too. Speeding it up and simplifying it to try and appeal to a wider audience was a no brainer, and it's hard to fault Ubi for taking us in that direction. Ultimately, even as a simplified version of The Ship, if you play BGT with a group of like-minded players you'll still find a game that rewards those who play it in a very different way to your average FPS. It's definitely no simple deathmatch game, regardless of how the trailers (that Outerlight had no hand in making) make it appear - and that's a claim that even has merit when you look at the deathmatch game mode!

Worst thing about it from my point of view is the marginalizing of the Xbox Indie Games marketplace. Previously once you hit game marketplace we had our own row, just like XBLA, showing the top downloads in a row. This gave a direct window into the XBLIG market and what was available (ok, not always appealing games on show, but still!) which helped pull in potential customers. Now we are the second box along in speciality shops, with a rubbish picture of some avatars as our "box art". But hey I'm not privvy to the same marketing data that Microsoft is. Maybe they're right and this is truly the best place for XBLIG to flourish. We'll need to wait and see what it does to sales. There's a lot of conspiracy theories going on that we're being pushed to the side in order to avoid cannibalizing sales/exposure from XBLA titles though, as well as Microsoft trying to turn all us XNA developers onto their "sexy new market" on Windows Phone 7. As said, just need to wait and see how it pans out. One thing I CANNOT see there being any positives to though is the removal of box art, game descriptions, screenshots, and (most importantly) the ability to RATE a game from your game library. Sure, they've made a nice new page for the games when you view them on the marketplace, but once you've downloaded it and access it from your game library you are presented with a bland, boring menu allowing you to play or delete, that's all. Who the hell is gonna rate games now you need to go in to the marketplace page in order to do it? It makes no sense whatsoever to remove this function from the place it was most likely to be used. It makes the box art of DLC titles feel much less important now too, which will discourage people from putting in as much effort. It's not ALL doom and gloom though. There's a few really nice changes too. Once you actually get in to the XBLIG marketplace they've made great improvements, particularly in the genre browsing and increasing the length of the top rated/downloaded/new releases lists from 20 to 50.

Sorry to hear you didn't like it Rick! It's definitely not a game that will appeal to everyone, and we knew it was gonna divide opinion, but more sad that you wasted your money than anything. Still, at least it's cheap right? Pogo, yeah, we all essentially got laid off. Ubisoft scaled back the budget on the game, and as a result Outerlight started having to downsize, which meant the game was taking longer to finish, which meant more people had to get laid off in order to stretch the budget, and so on The Ship still sells a bit but not enough to keep the company going. Eventually there were just a handful of us left (from 20 at peak down to 4 in the final month IIRC), and we just had to leave as there was no more cash. Sad, as at this point the game was as good as done, bar bug-fixes and TCR compliance. That was at the end of last year, and Ubisoft took the project over to an internal team in India to finish off. Afterwards, I went into business with a couple of ex-colleagues as Haiku Interactive. We ended up helping out Ubisoft on getting the game to market since we had experience on the project, but it was at that point definitely a case of plugging up the holes rather than any major work on the gameplay or content. Sad end really, none of us would have wanted it to go the way it did. Still, Outerlight is still technically trading - surviving as a one-man-show off The Ship's sales - and hopefully one day will make some money off BGT's royalties. Who knows, it might make a resurgence, but it's gonna take a LOT of sales when we're only selling at £3.50 or thereabouts! More info can be read here if you're interested in the story - my old boss Chris gave an interview on the topic recently, think it was linked earlier in this thread... http://news.bigdownload.com/2010/10/04/ ... loody-goo/

It's a bit messy really. Until Ubisoft reclaim their costs from the title, they'll be getting all the cash from sales (minus Steam/Microsoft's cuts). Once they've done that (IF they do that), then a cut will start going to Outerlight. Just now Outerlight is just my old boss Chris, who is keeping alive a "shell" of the company so that if there are any royalties to be taken, the company still exists to have 'em The hope is that it'll accrue enough cash that Chris can use it to get Outerlight back up off the ground and return to being a functioning company. The money won't be going out to previous employees though. I'll be up for a game sometime, though gonna be pretty busy tomorrow so maybe not then. Think my SteamID is reno84, though it always displays my name as just "ReNo" in the community section, so not sure what to find me as. My steam avatar is Kim Jung Il from The Ship's "World Leaders" update, if that helps you identify me

Yup, I've bought it twice now - once on XBLA and once on Steam. Not bad for under £8 Really glad it's finally come out, and totally impressed that Ubi decided to go for such a low price point. I argued all through development that we should be aiming for a bargain price point, since being a multiplayer game meant we'd live or die on the number of people playing, and with only 3 maps we are fairly content lite. Coming out so cheap is a really big help to building an audience. For anybody on the fence about the game, my (completely biased) opinion is that for under $5 the game is a steal. Although it only has 3 levels there's quite a lot to the game, with a pretty wide range of weapons that vary a lot more than in The Ship, and quite a lot of different rules and mechanics you can play around with. Pickpocketing, boasting, "murder aids" that you can use to distract or entrap your hunter or quarry, traps dotted all over the place, insta-kills on people using needs interactions, bonus rounds breaking up the action with new gameplay, security guards wandering around, etc etc etc... It's a bit rough around the edges but it's a lot different to other shooters out there (with the exception of The Ship of course) and that originality is what makes it special. Hopefully that'll earn it a bit of a cult fanbase