Well, the ThinkingWithPortals.com 2010 Mapping Contest has come and passed. I hope we all had a lot of fun, but now comes the best part. Judgement. Here is a full listing of the maps from the contest, for easy downloading:

• (No Name) by spare8ball
• Afterburn by Amran
• Dyad by Mevious
• MotanumsTest by Motanum
• Aperture Rockets by Crabby
• Aperture Facility Delta by Soga
• temprising by Jthm
• 19 by elpieo

Maps will be rated on a scale of one-to-five based on four main factors.

** - Adherence to your chosen theme.** Did you follow the guidelines for the theme you chose? Was your Reveal, well, revealing enough? Did you have your three difficulty chambers?

** - Visual and technical design.** Is your map well put together? Does your budget go crazy? Does the environment pop out and wow the player? Do brushes overlap, are faces missing, and does lighting leak?

** - Judge appeal.** An overall score of how one of our four judges rates your map.

• And lastly, Community appeal. The score on your map's Download page means something! The rating on this page will be a part of your map's final score as well. Post your map around the internet and get people to play and rate it!

As for our four judges, let's go ahead and meet them:

** - Duffers, two-time TWP Community Spotlight holder.
** - MrTwoVideoCards, long time Source mapper and member of Gear Dev.
- Relative TWP newcomer wstrika, a personal friend of mine and artist/web designer for several sites we have worked on together.
- And obviously, myself, another veteran Source mapper and Alpha and Omega here at TWP.

Questions about the judging process, or want to discuss the contest overall? Post it here!

I would also like to point out to anyone who thinks that some how tampering with their map's rating in the Download Database would be a good idea; any illicit or unsportsmanlike conduct - IE a bot/script, or posting on a forum saying "rate my map 5" - can and will be found out, and is grounds for your map to be disqualified from this rating altogether.

Play fair, it's not worth cheating!

Yay. Good to know the hard part is over.

I think I had an account on here at some point, not sure where it went.

Anyway, I'm downloading everything now, I'll start playing them in sequential order as per this page.

A brief overview about myself:

I play mostly Team Fortress 2 at the moment, but back in '07 I bought the Orange Box for Portal alone. I am a decently experienced graphic designer with about 5 years in the field, having worked on various projects from signs and letterhead to web development. With that said, I have appreciation for the elements of design and visual appeal. I'll be sure to evaluate this along with gameplay for a coherent judgment.

Best of luck everyone!

-wstrika

Good luck to everyone! And may the best map(s) win!

Waiting for results ^^ Could we get an estimate?

By post on the internet what kind of crowd are you after? Do you want large amounts of people to see it or just to keep it mainly in the TWP community?

I myself would say bring on the Titty cinnamon. But sleeper might want otherwise. Also nice to see you here mah brah Carl.

elpieo wrote:
By post on the internet what kind of crowd are you after? Do you want large amounts of people to see it or just to keep it mainly in the TWP community?

Judging by your avatar, I'd say "not 4chan". Your best bet is other mapping sites or Steampowered, so you can get some actual feedback and not a generic "good map 5 star would play again" type of responses.

I added links to the first post for easy downloading of all of the contest maps. If I some how missed your map, let me know.

Use this URL to share a link to the news post and get people to download these maps: http://bit.ly/e2iHWI

Don't worry, I wasn't planning on letting 4chan know, I'll just keep it with sites that have good communities and will actualy give good feedback.

Motanum wrote:

Waiting for results ^^ Could we get an estimate?

I did find your map very creative, and pretty challenging too. That's about all I'll say.

Being this is Portal it may or may not take a day or two for all the judges to go through all the submissions. Some are long, while some are super short, while some are easy/beyond impossible. I've managed to go through afterburn and 19, and will continue to go through the rest. I am currently not sure though how any of our other judges are doing.

I guess if life doesn't get in the way for too many of us, perhaps a decent estimate would be Friday or Saturday.

I know I am going to take a little longer, since I'm going to go through each of the map in dev mode to see if shit has been optimized well and so on. Plus I want to give a few days for everyone to get their public votes in.

Alright, seems fair!

I'll be checking every 4 hours! (Yes, I have no life and I cannot wait to know the results )

You know you can just subscribe to the thread's RSS and be notified when there is a reply, right?

Actually, no. I did not know.

I am subscribing right away!

I didn't realize people still used RSS besides me anymore. All I have is the XKCD feed and the iPhone Dev Team feed. I gave up on the WIRED Gadget Lab a long time ago.

Anyway, glad a bunch of people entered the contest. Good luck to everyone!

WinstonSmith wrote:
I didn't realize people still used RSS besides me anymore. All I have is the XKCD feed and the iPhone Dev Team feed. I gave up on the WIRED Gadget Lab a long time ago.

Anyway, glad a bunch of people entered the contest. Good luck to everyone!

Hell ya, I use it all the time. I've got a whole bunch of websites RSS'd, including but not limited to:

• my youtube subscriptions
• mspaintadventures
• myaperturelabs uploaded files
• the Cake is a Pie (although its kinda dead now)
• this one computer enhancement (err...modding) website that often has cool stuff on it

Was away for this weekend, I've evaluated four maps as of today.

How is the judging comming along?

Any news on the progress? I am dyingof uncertainty! :p