There's been a lot going on in the Foundry recently. With the holidays fast disappearing, your Foundry staff are beginning to feel the after-effects of too much banana-flavoured rum behind the closed doors of the Foundry... so without further ado, it's time to get the doors open and let the Foundry reopen!
- Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer...
The eagle-eyed amongst you will already have spotted that the reopening of the foundry doors coincides with an addition to the Foundry Team: It gives me great honour to announce that Evil DIMwit will be joining the ranks of the boys in blue!
Evil DIMwit will bring a valued extra pair of eyes to the development of maps, working alongside iancanton in the Gameplay Workshop. RedBaron0 and thenobodies80 will be keeping an eye on the newly created Graphics Workshop: These two new Foundry Workshops replace the old Main Foundry forum. MrBenn will continue to watch over the Final Forge, as well his old stomping ground of the beginning stages of map development, which has been rebranded as Melting Pot: Map Ideas.
In an attempt to keep the development of maps moving in the workshops and forge, mapmakers will be limited to developing up to two maps at any one time - the idea of this is to encourage cross-fertilisation. In order to try and keep things moving along, the Foundry Moderators have decided to introduce "review periods", and will endeavour to sweep through their principle area on an approximate fortnightly basis (we all have real lives to get on with too!). These changes should help to give some impetus to map development by giving realistic deadlines to produce updates by, and will hopefully eliminate some of the uncertainty and feelings of "hanging around". If two fortnights pass without any updates or meaningful engagement from the mapmaker(s), then map threads will be put out for recycling.
To help provide clear guidance to map development, new Foundry Guides (covering Map Ideas, Gameplay, Graphics and the Final Forge) have been developed - some of these may change over time as the foundry process continues to evolve.
Finally, while the Germany Revamp Competition enters the final stage (there will shortly be a run-off vote between the two clear favourites), keep your eyes peeled for more foundry competitions! We're planning a variety of contests that will include avatar/signature competitions, tutorials, gameplay designing as well as map revamps - we'll be making the Competitions forum live up to its "War of Art" description!
All that remains is for me to raise a banana, and wish everybody a very Mappy New Year!