How to read this map

The clouds

Each coloured cloud is one category of change, and its name is written on it. A cloud grows when more work lands in it. The clouds never move: a category is always in the same place, so you can learn the map once. Correctness and Robustness (top left) are flaws fixed. Architecture and Performance (top right and right) are design work. Player-facing, Systems and Content (the middle and the bottom) are new capability. Craft (bottom left) is polish. A new cloud can appear during the day: when the judges find that a team's change opened a kind of work the map did not have, that category is announced in the feed and its cloud takes the emptiest part of the map. Clouds make room for each other and never overlap.

Drag the map to move it, scroll or pinch over it to zoom in on a cloud, and double-click (or press 0) to put the whole map back. The + and − keys and the buttons in the map's corner do the same.

The dots

Every dot is one thing the game can do.

• Small grey dot: something the game already did before the hackathon started, catalogued by the game's author. These do not change all day. Together they are the skeleton the teams are building on.
• Bright coloured dot with a glow: a change pushed by a team that counts for the score. The colour is the team's colour, the same as on the leaderboard and in the feed at the bottom.
• Bigger dot: a more substantial change. The judge rates every change from 0 to 3: 0 means no observable effect; 1 means one narrow behaviour; 2 means a complete, coherent behaviour; 3 means a mechanic or subsystem wired into at least two existing systems. The dot's size follows that number.
• Faded, see-through dot with no glow: a team change that does not count for the score. It is shown so you can see the work. A change counts only when the build succeeds and all tests pass, the judge finds a real change, its rating is at least 1 (a rating of 0 never counts), and it does not repeat an earlier counting change by the same team in the same category.
• Thin ring around a dot: a variation of the idea inside it, by the same team, stacked on the original. Several rings mean several variations.
• A dot far from every grey dot is something the game's author never built. A dot right next to a grey dot is something the author already had.
• A dot at the edge of its cloud, facing another cloud, belongs to both categories. The cloud it sits in is its main one.
• A dot deeper inside its cloud looks a little dimmer than one at the surface. That is only depth, not a score.

The lines

A faint line joins two dots whose descriptions mean similar things, whatever their team or category, grey dots included. The brighter the line, the closer the meaning. Lines that cross from one cloud to another are the interesting ones: the same idea arrived from two directions. When there are many lines they are all drawn fainter, but brighter still means more similar.

When something happens

A new change drops into its cloud, lands with a ring that spreads out, and the cloud lights up for a moment. The dots around it shuffle to make room, then settle.

The leaderboard

Only counting changes score. Teams are ranked by their score: 1 point per counting change, 1 per point of substantiality, 2 per category reached, 4 for opening a new category (paid to its first counting change); a change that repeats an earlier one by the same team pays less, a run of counting changes in distinct categories pays a small combo bonus, and achievements add one to three points; minus the broken-main penalty (a broken main costs nothing). Equal scores are separated by breadth, then spread, then depth minus penalty.

• breadth: how many different categories the team has reached with counting changes, out of the categories on the map.
• spread: how different from each other the team's counting changes are in meaning, from 0 (all alike) to 1 (all different). It is 0 until a team has two counting changes. Reaching many categories with one idea in each does not raise spread; genuinely different ideas do. It only breaks ties.
• depth: the substantiality ratings of the team's counting changes, added up. Beyond the points it earns, it only breaks ties.
• penalty: points deducted while the team's main branch does not build or its tests fail. The team's name is red while it is broken.

The feed

The strip at the bottom lists every event of the day, newest first, in the team's colour: a change landing with the points it earned and what it lets the game do, a combo, an achievement, a points milestone, a change of lead, a new category or a crown changing hands. Descriptions wrap in full; scroll the strip to read earlier activity, and drag its top edge to make it taller or shorter (double-click the edge for the usual height). A red line means the judges could not rate that change. The loud ones also cross the top of the map as a banner, with a sound if that cue is enabled for the event and sound is on in ⚙ settings.

On the leaderboard, the dots under a team's name are its current combo, one per category in the run, and the small letters beside them are the achievements it has earned; point at one for its name. A crown beside a cloud's name marks the team leading that category.

Point at any dot for the details: what changed, how the judge rated it, tests, files and lines, and the nearest grey dot.

Press ? to open or close this guide, or open it from ⚙ settings in the top bar. Press Escape to close it.

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