On June 17, Virtual Reload and Wired Minds hosted the first ever Mondrian Custom Tournament. The goal was simple: run a week-long Summer Camp based around Mondrian – Plastic Reality, where campers would create their own levels. The week would culminate in a Time Attack tournament where only their levels were played. The results were amazing. Nine campers learned Mondrian Maker and Studio in just a few days, and brought their A-Game to the tournament, streamed on Twitch at the end of the week.

You can watch the full stream of the tournament below. Keep in mind it’s three hours long! So grab a cup of coffee and get ready to see some top level play from some of the most creative young minds in our community.

Latest Patch Notes

Plenty of feedback came in from the camp, which has led to some important game updates and optimizations. Here are the 1.0.11f8 patch notes:

Changes

  • Game: Made a minor change to Bomb Chain behavior. Now instead of the chain going off all at once, blocks will pop in sequence based on their distance to the center of the explosion. This has both optimization and gameplay benefits. With less happening at once, Bomb Chains are less likely to slow down the game. With Gems now also coming out in sequence rather than all at once, this makes grabbing the rewards from Bomb Chains much easier!
  • Game: Added a limiter to block pops, which prevents too many particles from spawning at once.
  • Game: Reduced antialiasing quality on Gems when more than 20 are visible on screen.
  • Game: Adjusted animation speeds on Block Pops.
  • Game: Darkened the limiter in Time Attack mode.
  • Studio: You can now use the suffix “Gray” or “Grey” in the Grayscale version of your backgrounds.

Hosting Your Own Tournament

If you’re interested in hosting a tournament, we’ve created a convenient Google Form you can fill out with your contact info and your vision of how you’d like your tournament to go. “Artist Collective Licenses” for Mondrian – Plastic Reality are also now available. You can use these to buy multiple copies of the game for your cafe, classroom, or camp (make sure to register with the Steam PC Cafe program). We will be happy to provide direct training (usually remote, in some cases on-site) in the game’s toolsets to your tournament participants.

The core of the Mondrian Custom Tournament format is the allowance of letting you run it however you want. Single Elimination, Double Elimination, Round Robin, number of contestants, host, ads, streaming platform, merch, prizes, it’s all up to you! We learned a lot from the first tournament, and still want you to have control over the content and delivery of your event, so we can only make some recommendations:

  • 2-3 levels per participant, generally 12 levels minimum works best
  • Make sure all levels are downloaded prior to the beginning of the event, only the levels you want to play are in the active Levels folder, and no content subscriptions are active on Steam Workshop (in other words, unsubscribe from everything before opening the game or it will download again)
  • Custom Background Images can add even more branding or give participants more ways to share their creative skills with your audience.

Fill out the form above if you think a Mondrian Custom Tournament would be right up your alley, and we’ll be happy to work alongside you to build it, offer training, and make it as good as can be!

As always, thank you for playing! Hope to see you at the next tournament.

– Danny