Remember last month when developer Fntastic said it wouldn’t use volunteer labor to build its upcoming prop hunting rehash game Items? The studio is instead going to be leveraging its community’s creativity with a map-making contest instead, which is totally not the same thing. Honesty! Transparency!
Players are being encouraged to design a map for the game in any style they wish, whether it’s a 2-D drawing, a 3-D render, or “any other style” entrants choose. Submissions must also provide images or artwork for the map, a description, the map’s general theme, and “balance considerations.”
Once entries close on November 28th, Discord fans will vote and the winner will see their map fully added to the game as well as a name credit and a free copy of Items for Steam. There will be no monetary reward, which was confirmed by a studio spokesperson to TheGamer.
Adding another layer of cringe to this whole affair, three of the currently six entries to the contest have admitted to using AI art generators in order to “create” their entries, while members of the game’s own Discord community are decrying the contest’s masquerade as a free labor workaround. So yeah, things are totally going fine with Fntastic 2.0.
