Well, we're done. We got entries in UDK / Source / Prey for your perusal. (Yeah, a map for Prey. Seriously. Andrew Weldon's weird like that.)See / download entries here.
Voting is open for a week too.
And if you didn't enter this time, then consider entering next time. It's good practice for starting and finishing something... Just look at these awesome people and what they accomplished in a month.
As for a post-mortem of sorts with my own entry, "Tintern":
I went gameplay first, which is weird for me. Usually I prototype a basic mechanic, then do a fairly substantial art pass, then I design some puzzles / level flow and finish another art pass. This time I went from mechanics to puzzles to an incomplete art pass.
In terms of art style, I was going for a mixture of Giorgio de Chirico's paintings with some architecture from Luis Barragan. You might recall Barragan's influence in my previous Mapcore compo entry; the colors, dude. The colors. Plus, I recently saw Chirico's "The Melancholy of Departure" at the New York Museum of Modern Art so I guess that was still fresh on my mind.
The main gimmick is from a previous project I was working on, which had you fighting a hunter that had a scanner following it around. The scanner would drop mines and generally be a nuisance, while the hunter was fast and would pressure you into running into the mines -- and the key to beating them would be to exploit their relationship.
You had to grab the scanner and basically hold it hostage or something. However, it was difficult to develop the relationship between the two when you're too busy fighting them. So why not make them allies? And following the Halo AI rule, maybe then the player can watch them do cool stuff, and they'll seem smarter?
Oh, and I kind of slipped in some Wordsworth on a lark. And if you happen to hate English Romantic poets and think the inclusion is too pretentious: it's okay, it's just the tip.
