Hello everybody! If you’ve been paying attention to our Discord server and our social media accounts, then you’re already aware that the latest OLDC pack is out. There are some pretty good maps in it that you should definitely check out, especially since we’ve just put out a patch that fixes issues in four of the maps. This round is a little different from previous one, though — from this round forward, OLDC no longer stands for Official Level Design Contest. Instead, it stands for Official Level Design Collab!
We made this change for several important reasons. First, we felt that removing the contest element from the event would create a more positive atmosphere in the community. There aren’t any winners or losers anymore, just a bunch of cool people making maps. Second, this solves a long-standing issue we’ve been running into with submissions for the multiplayer categories. Multiplayer has simply not been as popular to make maps for as single player, so submissions for match, CTF, circuit, etc often ended up with no maps to compete against. We addressed this by holding maps back from release in OLDC packs until they had another map to compete against, but this means submitters would have to wait a minimum of 6 extra months before their map would be released, and we ended up with a few maps that waited well over a year. With the contest aspect gone, multiplayer maps will always be released in the pack they were built for. We hope this will inspire more people to submit new multiplayer maps. Third, shifting gears away from being a contest makes it easier on us to host the event. There’s a surprising amount of behind the scenes work that goes into running a contest, and we seem to have less free time to work on it every year. With a collaborative format, we can simply release the pack with no extra work required. Several minor things also contributed to this decision. We hope this change to the event will be a net positive for everyone! Also, we expect to revise the OLDC rules later on — we’ll let you know how that turns out. Please note that OLDC submissions will remain closed until the new rules are published.
With that out of the way, I’d like to briefly address the other half of this article’s headline: Sonic Team Jr. now has a Mastodon account. Mastodon is a free and open source social media platform that recently gained traction in the wake of events on a certain bird-themed website we use. This post from Fedi.Tips explains more about it. We’ll still be on our bird- and face-themed accounts, too.
That’s all we’ve got for you today, but we’re hard at work wrapping up development on the upcoming v2.2.11 patch. We plan to upload a build for our prerelease testers on our Discord server as soon as possible. Why not join and be among the first to help with testing it? Some newly-added features have introduced bugs, so we’re trying to fix them before prerelease — please be patient! Until then, keep being the awesome community you are, and thanks for playing!
