Black Mesa News

Greetings, scientists!

At long last, we are finally ready to unveil the winners of our recent “LambdaBuilds: Escape From Black Mesa” mapmaking competition! We were blown away by all the entries that we have received and, despite how hard it was to pick out 3 winners, have finally determined the top-3 for this excellent event. Below are our top-3 from third place, to the grand prize winner:

• Third Place: Taking 3rd place is Little Red Star by Midlou! Congratulations on a job well done!
  
• Second Place: In 2nd, we have The Xenian by SNW! We were impressed by your work and appreciate your submission!
  
• First Place: The grand prize winner of “LambdaBuilds: Escape From Black Mesa '' is Biotech by BeefBacon! While it was difficult to pick a winner from all our great submissions, this one was the one that captured our imagination most. Excellent work, and enjoy your hard-earned prizes!
  

[h2]Honorable Mentions [/h2]

It was really difficult picking these three maps out of all the ones that we received. Because of this, we also want to give an honorable mention to two of the maps that came oh so close to winning, but ultimately just lost out by a slim margin. These two maps are:

4th Place - Imposter, by Dolmo
5th Place - Shadows, by OnTheMatter

Both of your maps were a ton of fun to play, and we appreciate you taking the time to create them!
Full details and results can be found here.

Again, we want to thank everyone who participated in the competition, and want to offer a hearty congratulations to our winners!

[h2]Where to play the maps: [/h2]

If you’re interested in playing the maps from the competition, we have just released an official collection of them on the Steam workshop. Additionally, you can go and download the maps from the ModDB web portal if you prefer. Go and give these excellent maps a try!

• Official Steam Workshop Collection
• ModDB Portal Download
  

That’s all for now, scientists!

- The Crowbar Collective Team

Hello, fellow zombie scientists!


Head over to the workshop to check out the new and spooky community map submissions from our recent ”LamdaBuilds: Escape From Black Mesa” level design competition! Do you have the brains and the brawn to make it out alive?
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2877017092




Thank you to all the designers who submitted an entry to the competition, and a special thanks to our partners at LambdaGeneration and ModDB, for hosting the event as a part of their series of LambdaBuilds competitions! We love community events, and we are grateful to have been able to run one with these two fantastic organizations.



The turn out, and the quality of submissions, has blown us away. Winners for the competition will be announced soon, but we hope you will check out ALL the spooky submissions, and give them a play through in the meantime. Thanks to everyone that participated!


To celebrate this community event, Halloween, and the Steam Scream Fest Black Mesa will be available for 75% off until November 1 at 10:00 AM PDT.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/362890/Black_Mesa/

Have a happy Halloween! Thanks again, scientists!

Attention, Black Mesa personnel!

Yesterday marked the official end of our mapmaking competition “LambdaBuilds: Escape From Black Mesa”. Before we get on to what's next, we want to take a moment to say thank you to both LambdaGeneration and ModDB for hosting this exciting event! We believe that these kinds of community-focused competitions are a great way to celebrate our shared love of Source Engine games, and are thankful to have had the opportunity to collaborate on “Escape From Black Mesa” with them.

[h2]Next Steps:[/h2]

[h3]Announcement of the winners:[/h3]

Now that submissions are officially closed, our panel of judges are hard at work reviewing all the excellent maps that you submitted over the past few weeks. Given the volume of entries, we can’t give an exact date for when the winners will be announced, but you can expect to get an announcement regarding the winning entries no later than October 31st.

[h3]Official Map Collection Release: [/h3]

We also plan to release an official collection of “Escape From Black Mesa” maps on the workshop. While all maps are currently available for download, this collection will provide a quick and convenient way for you to see the hard work of your fellow scientists for yourself. The collection will be released by October 31st alongside the results.

[h3]Post-event live stream: [/h3]

We want to be sure that the hard work of our community gets its chance to shine in the desert sun. Therefore, there will be a LambdaBuilds live stream showcasing some of the top maps that were submitted by our community members! The live stream will be hosted by the LambdaGeneration team on their YouTube channel, with the date and time to be announced later.

[h2]Have you joined the official Black Mesa fan page?[/h2]

In case you missed it the first time, our friends at LambdaGeneration launched the official Black Mesa fan page last month. Here, you can keep up with news about the game, see awesome fan and community content, discuss and share your modding work, and more! Be sure to join your fellow scientists today on the LambdaGeneration website.

That’s everything that we have to debrief you on today. Again, we appreciate LambdaGeneration and ModDB for hosting the competition, and are extremely thankful for all our wonderful community members who participated. For now, this is where we get off.

- The Crowbar Collective Team

Hey there, scientists!

We wanted to remind all facility personnel that there is still time to submit an entry for our mapmaking collaboration “LambdaBuilds: Escape From Black Mesa”. The deadline is only a couple of weeks away, however, so be sure to grab your crowbars and get to work! Alongside this reminder, we also wanted to share a few pieces of helpful information.

[h2]Where to find help:[/h2]

If you are needing assistance with getting started on your map, need some tips or tricks, or are needing to reference the rules for the competition, the LambdaGeneration Discord channel is the place to be!

The LambdaGeneration Discord can be found here.

[h2]Uploading your submission:[/h2]

While we have your attention, scientists, we also wanted to provide you with some resources to assist you with uploading your submission to the Black Mesa workshop on Steam. The first link below will take you to a guide on uploading your submission to the workshop, while the second one will take you to a download for Crowbar, which is a Source Engine modding tool. This should help ensure that your submission to the competition will be successfully uploaded for consideration by the judges.

• Link to to the Steam Guide
• Crowbar Tool Download Link

Remember to read all the rules, and submit your entry via LambdaBuilds to be officially considered!


That’s all for now! We are very excited to see what fun and creative levels our community comes up with, and we hope that you all have a great time making them!

- The Crowbar Collective Team

Today we are announcing that the Black Mesa X Intruder mapmaking competition has finally ended after two months of awesome work from both of our communities.

While we are sad to see it go, we are also extremely impressed by all the hard work you’ve done, and are very excited to test each and every one of the maps that have been submitted to us.

With that being said, here are the next steps for this event:

[h2]Judging and Announcement of Winners[/h2]

The first order of business will be for both the Crowbar Collective and Superboss Games teams to look at and judge each of the maps that was submitted. From these, the developers will select a winner, as well as a 2nd and 3rd place submission.

Given the time required to properly test and judge each map, we can’t give an exact date that the winners will be announced. Rest assured, scientists, we will be working diligently through all the submissions, and expect to announce the winners in the near future.

Stay tuned on our Discord and social media pages for the announcement of the winning maps!

[h2]Final Developer Livestream[/h2]

Shortly after the announcement of the winners, both development teams will conclude their epic crossover event by playing with and against each other on the top 3 maps. You have all put a lot of hard work and creativity into your submissions, and we want to give our winners a chance to let their work shine!

Given that the judging process could take some time, stay tuned for the date, time, and location of this livestream event. The announcement of the livestream should be shortly after we have announced our competition winners.

That’s everything that we have for you today! We appreciate everyone in the Black Mesa and Intruder communities who participated, and hope you had as much fun making the maps as we will have playing them. In the meantime, it’s time for us to put on our HEV suit and get to work.

The Crowbar Collective team

Make sure to follow Crowbar Collective and Superboss Games!

• Black Mesa Instagram
• @BlackMesaDevs Twitter
• Black Mesa Facebook
• @SuperbossGames Twitter
• Superboss Games Facebook