Halo 4: Game of the Year Edition This weeks bulletin kicks off with Halo 4: Game of the Year Edition news. It was recently announced the it will release on October 8th. You can check out the trailer HERE. Matchmaking Playlist Update Team Snipers, Team Doubles, and Team Action Sack were among the playlists that received updates in Monday's playlist update. Next update will be on October 14th Oddball will replace King of the Hill in the rotational playlist. Team Objective and Team Throwdown will receive updates, with details coming in next weeks bulletin. Forge Ricochet Contest Update The last day for submissions is October 8th. Finish up your Ricochet masterpiece and submit it. More details can be found HERE. Ricochet to Race: How to create Race from Multi-Team Ricochet Wanna know how to create a Race game type out of Multi-Team Ricochet? Spoiler 1) Label a vehicle or vehicles as rico_forgeball to turn them into 'balls'. 2) Use ForgeZones as the checkpoints for the race, and set up hill_marker objectives and label them rico_forgezone. These are set up so that they disappear and reappear in order that you hit them. Next, number the spawn sequence to set the order. You can award score for hitting each checkpoint, or only for particular ones. See the documentation for additional info. 3) Who is awarded points depends upon the team of the ball and the team of the ForgeZone. If the team of either of these is set, and so is the user data, then whenever the 'ball' enters any ForgeZone, the team of the ball will be awarded the points set on the ball, and the team of the zone will be awarded the points set on the zone. This means you have flexibility in how you set up the race. Matchmaking Playlist Calendar If you're curious about which playlist will be featured in the rotational playlist through the rest of the year, 343 have created some Calendars that reveal it all. Matchmaking Playlist Calendar Community Map Spotlight: Countdown This weeks community spotlight shines on aPK's Countdown remake. Here's a bit of Bravo's talk with aPK about how he got started in Forge, and about his Countdown remake: Spoiler Hey, aPK! Thanks for joining us today to talk about your latest project. First things first – How did you get started with Forge? aPK: Thanks for having me! I started my Forge endeavors back in Halo 3, when I discovered the MLG Halo 3 Forge Forum shortly after Foundry was released, and I started to dabble a little in Forge once the Sandbox canvas was released. It was towards the end of Halo 3's lifetime though, and I didn't get around to finishing anything, so I started to look towards Halo: Reach. I familiarized myself with map design by reading various guides by game developers and using PC programs to make designs I would later forge once Reach was released, which is really where I hit my stride. I have Solo XIII (the creator of Rail and some of the best Forge maps ever) to thank for being so helpful when I got started, and for being a great source of inspiration. ... Countdown is certainly an intricate map, with ledges, support pillars, and important sightlines. What was the hardest thing to nail when recreating the map? aPK: The lifts throughout the map were quite the challenge. I must have cycled through four different lift designs/systems before I arrived at the final one. Nailing down the lifts wouldn't have been possible without extensive testing sessions, in which I got a great deal of useful feedback from a ton of players, which helped me get them to function as close as possible to the ones in Reach. With a lot of the other details, it was just a matter of being conscious of them, which wasn't a problem for me considering I had played and loved the map so much. Read the bulletin in its entirety HERE.