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As for Blind, with reference to the reviews, all the judges seemed to indicate that more could have been done with the idea (I mean, apart from the suggestions already given), and I'd agree with this. But my question is - what? =/ Any suggestions on how this idea could be integrated as a map in different ways?

I did not deduct points for "wasted potential". I said you could probably make something even better around the concept.

If you want a few suggestions then here's a few I think could potentially make the game better. Make items more readily available and allow the "seeing" player to use them as well (a shared inventory could have been nice). A randomly generated maze where the unit dies upon hitting a wall and maybe even incorporating bound elements could have been a good alternative to the game; the object could be to reach some randomly determined destination before the others. The possibilities are almost endless.

Also, I'd like to point out something I forgot to mention in my reviews. The reason I gave everyone 10 in aesthetics was because I felt that this category should not have the same ponderation as gameplay or originality. It could have been important in something like a RPG where immersion is essential but it's completely superfluous to the maps of this contest. Therefore, I decided to give everyone a default score of 10 and subtract at most 2 points if need be (8 would be the equivalent of 0). Whether the default value was 10, 5 or 2 would change absolutely nothing to the rankings.

Quote from Azrael.Wrath

This is what Gidoza meant about communicating with the mapmakers

I do see the point you're trying to make here, although I believe it is your job as a map-maker to make everything very clear and concise. The point I'm trying to make here is that the map should be self-sufficient, thus not requiring any follow up with the map maker to get things straight. This can be achieved by making things very clear as to their purpose, and leaving no room for thinking it might be a mistake.

An over-exaggerated example would be a major bug in the map. Sure, if you talked to the map-maker about the map he would tell you how to steer away from the bug, but the point of judging a map is to play it as any other person would, without a way of contacting the map maker.

Quote from Leeroy_Jenkins

I do see the point you're trying to make here, although I believe it is your job as a map-maker to make everything very clear and concise.

No. If you don't want to communicate with the mapmaker then you have to make sure you think everything through and explore absolutely every aspect. This was the whole issue with Foxwolf's map two contests back.

Adding a tutorial to absolutely everything would just have been wrong in Azrael's map where experimenting to find out what to do is an essential part of gameplay; a "puzzle" if you will.

For instance, if the map had used a vast amount of complex, never used before systems than it would have been impossible to make everything "clear and concise". If tutorials are too long and contain too much information, I tend to forget some of it. It would therefore still be my duty to experiment sufficiently with it to understand perfectly. In Azrael's case, he named the units "boiling oil"(or something like that). It would not have been too farfetched to believe that it won't disappear upon coming in contact with a partially closed gate.

There are other examples we can use. Usually, for timing, most of us use Death Counts. However, there are viable reasons for say, using a racing track to time something - like if you have a theoretically infinite amount of timers for the same thing running, and you need to deplete the timer based on when it started, even if something else comes after it. Someone looking at this might initially think it's a complete waste of space, and why not use a Death Count? But of course, that wouldn't work so well.



@Chia: Interesting thoughts, I've never made anything bound-like, but I suppose if units to dodge were like...reavers (because you know how difficult it is to dodge things even in Blind), that could be quite interesting. Randomizing places to go is easy enough (if you didn't already know - that's what the cloaked units in Blind do, they fly around randomly and have locations centering on them to randomize spawn locations and the like).

EDIT: Oh, yes, and I agree that the items are fairly limited in usefulness. I'd have to rethink them...part of the issue is that I wanted to avoid items that simply gave sight, because that'd be silly, and on the other spectrum is the issue of what items can even be useful when they're invisible. I'll put some more thought into this...