For MM2CRA, Entrant 1 Duora Super Gyro with an average score of 77.33!

For MM2FLA, Entrant 8 Duora Super Gyro with an average score of 85.00!

For MM6WIN, Entrant 3 Russel with an average score of 92.33!

For MMWTMWS, Entrant 2 FTX6004 with an average score of 86.33!

Entrant 2, Derek!

Entrant 6, Thunderono!

Entrant 4, Korby!

Entrant 5, Duora Super Gyro!

- Incorporation of the maps 2CRAB02, 2FLAB06, 6WINB04, and WTMWSB05 into MM8BDM v6c (with judge feedback considered)
- Architect Medals for the following users: Derek, Thunderono, Korby, Duora Super Gyro
- Architect (Runner-Up) Medals for the following users: Duora Super Gyro (x2), Russel, FTX6004

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1m4p2EYF07SN9vhLx50gJK0Tl1nRYYNqY9w-6rA4-oLA/htmlview[url]

To start off, I think it's important to re-establish my mentality when it comes to old, flawed maps like this. I went over this back on the old forums when I made the newest version of MM2QUI, but it bears repeating here: I strongly value nostalgia as it relates to this game. I think a lot of older maps have lots of memories attached to them both by active players and folks who dropped the game for one reason or another.

These maps, while often flawed or outright bad, have distinct identities that I feel are worth trying to preserve. This is a mentality I've approached many projects with, but I think Flash 6 being as well-received as it has been is the ultimate proof for this little theory of mine-- after all, if you can save MM2FLA of all maps, what else can you save? Is it possible that most iconic maps, even if they're broadly disliked, can be made popular without sacrificing what makes them noteworthy to the folks who've spent years playing on them? It's very important to me, and it was front and center when developing this map.

So that's the pitch: make a good map using current MM2FLA as the core. However, another thought was in my mind: just making this map fun won't be enough to warrant consideration, it needs to impress. It needs something new to call its own beyond just being a working layout. My thought immediately went to the end of the stage where you can use the upper path to avoid all the enemies; layering the map would let me make the pit a more sensible setpiece, let me connect to the otherwise useless upper portions of the map, and as Llama put it, recontextualize the other parts of the map to focus on a "king of the hill" style of gameplay.

On top of that, common MM2FLA pain points needed to be addressed; there's too much ice, it's too cramped, the pit can feel like a total deathtrap, and search snake is king around the edges of the map. To go over each of these:

• Too much ice is an easy fix, but I left ice in longer straightaways to allow the speedy selling point of ice to actually shine. There's a jump to and from Pharaoh Shot that the ice makes a lot easier, and I like that.
  
  
• The map being too cramped is an easy fix on paper, but scaling the map only gets you so far. I opted for a hybrid approach here; scaling up common pain points like the entrance to the eastern hall and the hallways themselves, while also adding new areas appropriate for combat to supplement the halls. This keeps the overall footprint of the map mostly intact while making more places than just the middle of the map viable as battlegrounds, making the map feel bigger without actually making it that much bigger.
  
  
• There are plenty of reasons core MM2FLA's pit feels like a deathtrap, but I think the main two are 1) too much focus on the pit and 2) lack of viable routes out of the pit. Number 1 is naturally solved by the new direction of the map; the bridge intentionally sticks out far enough to not be able to see most of the pit, and since the bridge is the main focus of the map now, this leaves the pit and back room as the best place to stay safe from players up there. This combos well with the solution to the second problem, that being the expansion of the back room and the new dropdown teleporter. I'll go into more detail about the dropdown later, but the intent of these changes was to turn the pit into more of a route than a setpiece and I think it played out roughly how I wanted. I do agree with the judges that changing the triple stairs into something else would be good for the map, though.
  
  
• Search snake eats up the southern section of the map. This is a pretty common thing for mappers to have to watch out for these days, and I jumped in front of it with this map by having the eastern hallway hook southward to create a null wall that blocks floor crawlers. Simple fix, but it makes the southern section of the map a lot safer.

So with that and my "hill" in place, I've got one more consideration: how do I stop the bridge from totally dominating the map? The pit and back room are actually key here; the bridge almost can't see them at all, but the addition of the dropdown also adds a powerful new way to siege the bridge itself. In practice, I had a lot of fun playing around this dropdown; I remember I had a duel with Korby where both of us kept dropping off the bridge, and then the mindgames for if we'd take the dropdown and reattack would begin. It felt so validating. As pointed out by the judges, this also calls back to how actual Flash Man has a pretty long vertical section.

The teleporters seem to be a little more contentious; Llama's judge feedback cuts the closest to my intent with the new positions, but the idea was to strengthen the back room by adding a way to cross the map without the bridge ever being able to see you. Taking the teleporter to the back room positions you to either go to the dropdown or the eastern room without being spotted (allowing for mixup potential if the bridge hears you take it), and taking it to the southern room affords you an escape to the windows for a more direct fight. This is the element that I think had the weakest landing in the map, but I'm not fully convinced they deserve to be removed outright; I suppose I'll wait and see on that front.

Finally, aesthetics. Eagle-eyed (read: eyed) players will notice this map has no new textures; this was a challenge I made to myself to see if I could make the map look good using only what's in vanilla, something made more feasible by my introducing the Crazy Cannons. Somehow I managed to pull off solid setpiece distinction with this extremely limited set; west is characterized by the enemies, east the bricks, and south the bars. The back room and bridge can be characterized by virtue of their own location and geometry, so I didn't need to worry about them as much. These days I pay a lot of attention to setpiece distinction, as neglecting it can lead to situations seen in some of Freems's feedback for other maps where they couldn't commit them to memory-- the reason, as I see it, is that there isn't enough unique stuff to look at and remember.

There were a lot of other, smaller decisions, but the basics are here: turn the map into a duel/2v2 "king of the hill" style map, rebalance to account for that, and make the outskirts of the map more fun to play around. I'm very happy with how I managed to accomplish these, and I'm super glad folks responded to it in the ways I wanted. I don't have much I want to do to the layout before it goes into v6c, but I do want to adjust for some of the judge comments I got; namely, smoothing jumping out of the pit, a reduction to the ice in the southeast, and introducing a handful of new textures as appropriate. The texture challenge was cool, but the map isn't better off for it.

Thanks for reading my absolute eruption of words! Above all else, the main reason I'm happy about winning is that I get to keep MM2FLA's core essence in the game, which makes my above mentality happy. Hopefully somebody gets something out of this big dumb wall of text, be that insights into mapping or just a little bit of entertainment.