The polls are closed and the results of MapCore’s 20 Brush Challenge are in! I hoped for a better fate for “Don’t Mess With Hexas,” if only in the gameplay category, but it was a difficult field and I just didn’t get the votes against some really great competition.

Most of my votes went to the often-mentioned-here Matt Breit and his entry, “Ludonarrative Dissonance.” It’s a gorgeous level in screenshot form, but you really have to see it in motion – his teleporter, jump pad, and dodecahedron face textures are animated from unique pencil-drawn frames, creating a look not unlike that of the classic video for Take On Me. Matt has talked about wanting to do a full map in this animated pencil sketch style and you should encourage him to do so. It’s awesome.

Duncan “ReNo” Blair’s “Monotone Heights” pretty much destroyed everyone else in the community voting across all categories, which is what tends to happen in contests he’s entered over the years (I was, however, fortunate enough to once fend him off in a single category of an old Snark Pit competition with my HLDM level “Odin’s Guard“). We may have to ban him from future challenges if he keeps this up.

It’s been a while since we did a challenge like this at MapCore, but it may not be long before we roll out another one. We’re discussing some possible options for the next challenge now, and will probably start gearing up for another one in 2-4 weeks. Join us!