Looking Back, Looking Forward
Hello one, hello all!
The past two years have been crazy for Team Fortress 2, including the 64-bit update, the finale of the TF Comics, the release of the TF2 SDK, and the long-awaited official return to MVM (coming soon in Valve Time™). Over the past two years, 44 maps shipped alongside game updates, with many coming from our own community and some stemming from Offshore and Tropic Crisis.
Inside our home here at TF2Maps, we’ve also seen a lot of awesome things happen:
- Stack the Deck revisited the game-like contests of old, showing us 21 awesome submissions.
- The Dream Machine Pseudocontest shared over two dozen awesome concepts from our community.
- We’ve passed over 15 years of 72-hour events and a decade of Jams, featuring countless submissions and raising over $76,000 for various charities.
We’ve done plenty of thinking and plenty of planning. We can’t wait to share what’s next for this year and beyond.
Looking Back
The past two years in TF2Maps started off with a bang.
We launched the blog, but know it hasn't gotten all the love it deserves. Early on Stuffy360 gave us a peek behind the closed doors of Valve, which hinted at much of the past two years, including the map selection process, game maintenance, and the eventual expansion of Team Fortress tools to improve VScript and get the SDK in our hands. Check it out here!
The Stack the Deck contest yielded some of the wackiest and most fun maps from any contest we’ve run. For our 18th major contest, TF2Maps offered some crazy cards with gameplay and detailing requirements to match our community's map-making skills. For 161 days, you all scratched your heads and tried to balance some asymmetrical arenas in an effort to create the best maps possible. From bold visual themes to inventive gameplay twists, each map interpreted the contest requirements in wildly different ways, with 21 making it to the submission thread. Check out the final results here!
Map Tests, Licensing, and Guidelines — Oh My!
From our side, it may seem like things have slowed down as we know we’ve had a quieter year. We’ve done a lot of smaller things, primarily focused on improving our guidelines for hosting playtests and releasing community-driven content.
For many years, we had a pay-to-host system. Though that’s still the case for scheduled gamedays and casual gamedays, the VIPs helping keep our servers online can still run some maps when they’d like. Thank you for helping keep this community afloat!
- Now, we have more clearly-defined Hosts and are able to check in on playtest quality more frequently. Though we’re currently in the holiday drought, applications are closed for the time being as we train up the few folks we still haven’t gotten to connect with. Keep an eye on that map list as our community keeps creating and playtesting this year!
- Lastly, we’ve improved the map list page in numerous ways, giving hosts more at-a-glance information to help playtests run smoothly. We’re still looking for ways to improve the page, but make no promises for upcoming changes in the near future. If you have an idea or see something broken, give us a shout!
We’ve also released some clearer guidelines to help folks better communicate expectations and protect their work with the new licensing system that you should see on nearly every new download. Read about its release on the blog and help pages!
Similarly, we outlined some guidance on getting your friends together for a theme or asset pack. Although we love the massive collaborations from the past few years, we know keeping things organised can be difficult. Have an idea and unsure where to start? Check out the theme pack guide!
Alongside these, we reviewed many of the contests (both community and official) hosted in 2023 and 2024 in an effort to help standardize them and provide a solid foundation to start with. Though we haven’t had community members host any in 2025, we’ve heard whispers and ideas floating about. Let us know if you're interested and check out the guidelines here!
A decade of Jams!
As our last glance in the rearview mirror, we wanted to highlight the Jams. We’re proud to have a community that’s created well over 5,000 levels, assets, and pieces of art while raising over $76,000 over the past ten years. You guys are awesome!
We know that sometimes it’s hard to see the impact of fundraising, especially when it’s done online and almost entirely through word-of-mouth. However, we were able to catch up with Gamers Outreach both online and in-person at PAX West! They shared some of their new GO Karts and expressed much gratitude for all the donations from our community in 2023 and 2024.
For the 2025 Jam, we raised $11,062.97 for Doctors Without Borders!
Looking Forward
And as you folks know… we’re not quite done with all the 2025 items yet!
- Keep an eye out as the Jam season wraps up. Medals are 2-3 months away and the building of the showcase is underway. Please be patient as we continue to work through the post-Jam sorting and promotion process.
- Voting for Featured Maps will open soon! Get those ballots ready and formulate some feedback as we play through the last few maps.
What about future contests and events?
We have some large events and contests planned this year! We’re excited to announce at least one minor contest, a major contest, and a Jam. We’ve already set things in motion and hope to keep the energy high as we continue through January! There’s also some behind-the-scenes secrets, but we can’t share those quite yet.
Take our 2026 Community Survey!
As a reminder from us, TF2Maps is an old beast of a community centered around hobbyist level design for a 2007 game. As volunteers, we strive to maintain what is working and improve things over time. This naturally means that the pace of change is slow, but there can be sudden bursts of activity around game updates or community events. We’d love to hear your thoughts on recent activity in TF2Maps and how we can improve in the future ahead in this short survey.
Some Small Staff Changes
Nesman has opted to focus on the IT side of things, and we’ve previously made it more apparent who has backend access with the IT Staff role. Thank you for all the guidance and upkeep you’ve provided over the years! We hope this gives you some more breathing room. With this change, the Senior Staff position has been retired and is now merged with normal Staff. It has existed for a long time, but no longer reflects the way we operate.
Let us know what you're excited about as we keep Hammerin' away in 2026 and beyond.