My god, it’s been a while since I posted on my blog. The planets must have aligned or something.
I’ve always been a fan of Valve’s games and the Portal series is no exception. When Portal 2 first came out I found myself among many people playing with a makeshift version of the Source SDK specifically for Portal 2 (basically just the Alien Swarm SDK with a custom FGD). Things started getting lively over at the Thinking With Portals website (the biggest Portal mapping site on the net), where I am a staff member.
After the official Portal 2 Authoring Tools beta was released, Valve contacted Thinking With Portals asking if we would be interested in running a mapping competition if they provided some prizes. We jumped on the opportunity.
Even though we were only given two weeks to accept submissions, the response we got from the community was astounding. Our initial projections estimated a total of between seventy and one hundred maps.
When submissions closed, the grand total was two hundred and thirty-seven maps (one hundred and ninety-five singleplayer and forty-two cooperative).
Wow.
We’re now executing the surprisingly arduous task of sorting through those maps and judging them. Given that each map takes about 10-20 minutes to play, it’s going to be a while until we’re done.
