Map

A map (also referred to as a level) is the customized playing field that players can play in on former versions of the Flash-based and current HTML5-based Bonk.io sites. Aside from the sports modes within Bonk.io, all maps after a few months into Bonk.io's initial launch, were created through that editor's version.

The History of Maps

The Beginning

The first maps within Bonk.io were created shortly after its release, in April 2016. They were added by Chaz in the then experimental "Gish mode", which was later renamed to "Bonk mode" a few months later, then to "Classic mode" within the current HTML5-based Bonk.io.

In total, there were 7 maps that were created in this time period by their removal, laying the foundation for the user map interface now seen today. Rather than the Level Select to find the maps, the host of the Custom Game can use commands "/map 1 to /map 7" to load them. Of these maps, the map known as Classic by Chaz was /map 1 within the listing. For more information about these maps, refer to the Gish Command Maps page.

This is an image of a player falling off of a rotating square within /map 3 when the former Gish Command Maps were still present. The current version of this map is under "Four Squares" by Official.

The Level Editor

The addition of the Level Editor on May 24, 2016 finally allowed for users to create maps. However, they were not saved into the database, since players were unable to create Accounts at that time, and map voting was not a feature. The Gish Command Maps also lost accessibility around this time as well. However, the majority of these maps were saved onto the account Official, which is thought to have been owned by Chaz.

On June 3rd, 2016, levels started getting added into the database, players were allowed to make Accounts to create maps and vote on them to, leading to the certain rise of the first maps that were voted on within Bonk.io. The map now known as Classic by Chaz was taken from the Gish Command Maps and was brought into the game as the default map when a Custom Game room was created around this time. When it was the pre-loaded map in a room, it showed as owned by Chaz. When found within the Level Select, it was seen to be owned by Official. This was later changed in early September 2016 when within the Level Select the map was moved from Official's account over to Chaz.

An image of the old version of the map tallpendulum as shown within the Flash-based Bonk.io, when Bonk mode was called Gish mode.

Rise of the First Maps

The first map within the Flash-based Bonk.io that was available without commands, which was labeled with an ID of 1, was "Three" by Chaz, however this map never garnered many upvotes. Other maps that were published afterwards, such as Classic and Overhead by Chaz/Official; tallpendulum, and later duck and cover by JonesReal; Meridian and Climb by Fantao were all maps that were towards the top of the listing at the time. All of these maps had only a few hundred upvotes at the time, where Classic by Chaz was the most upvoted of these maps, at around 500 upvotes by Mid-August 2016.

The map Classic by Chaz as seen today with spawn locations.

The map tallpendulum by JonesReal as seen today without spawns.

Chaz's Picks & Rise of Duck and Cover

On August 24th 2016, Chaz added Chaz's Picks, a listing of maps which concluded at 37 maps that he had chosen to showcase the recent Bonk.io community's maps for their unique gameplay. Maps by JonesReal / jones and others ended up soaring in popularity as a result, especially when Bonk.io reached its peak popularity in mid-late 2017 to early 2018, with over ten thousand players being online at peak hours.

This is an image of the top of Chaz's Picks days after it was first added in August 2016.

This is an image of the top maps within Chaz's Picks less than a year later, in March 2017. Note that Classic by Chaz is not present within this image since it was taken off Chaz's Picks in late September 2016, however, it was at about 100-115k upvotes at the time.

Resulting from the listing being present, the map duck and cover by JonesReal grew to highest ranked Bonk.io map, and with Meridian by Fantao close behind in September 2016 as a result of being featured within Chaz's Picks, both surpassing Classic by Chaz in the weeks after Chaz's Picks was added. Other maps, including DEATH by emil900 and Pyramid by /\/ / /\/_/ /\ ended up surpassing Meridian in the months after, but never ended up surpassing duck and cover at the time.

The full list of maps within Chaz's Picks.

The map duck and cover by JonesReal, as seen today without spawns.

Rise of Copied Maps

During 2017, plagiarisms of maps and copy trends started to grow in popularity. Most notably, the copy trend of Slingshot maps mostly popularized by Trollbeeb2's copies of apstp's map: 'Human Slingshot!.' The most popular of these copies, was the map 'WWE Red VS Blue Slingshot', which is currently the 10th highest rated map within Bonk.io. Other trends also grew, some of which targeted other creators as well, and are still common to find within Bonk.io.

The map WWE Red VS Blue Slingshot, the highest rated copy map within Bonk.io.

The Hacking of Classic by Chaz

On March 30th, 2018 the map Classic by Chaz was altered by YLKO, who got into this account somehow, making the map near-unplayable in terms of game-play when selected from the Level Select. As a result, the growth of the map was partially stunted as a result, making it unplayable within the Level Select for the rest of the Flash-based Bonk.io's existence. However, Chaz restored the map in February 2021 shortly after the move over to the HTML5-based Bonk.io.

This is an image of the map Classic by Chaz after it was first altered by YLKO. It was changed again in 2019, causing for it to be fully blank, aside from a single spawn in the middle of the map. The map has since been restored.

The Overtaking of Duck and Cover

During early to mid-2018, the map 'duck and cover' was surpassed by battle for the swing as the highest rated map within Bonk.io, another map by JonesReal. The map 'battle for the swing' was also featured within Chaz's Picks. The map ended up as the most upvoted map ever published in the Flash-based Bonk.io.

In total, battle for the swing ended up with a total of +783k / -119k in votes, gathered over the majority of the existence of the former Flash-based Bonk.io.

The map battle for the swing by JonesReal without spawns.

Community Picks

On May 29, 2019, a total of 99 unique maps were selected through voting by the BCD to be within the Community Picks, replacing Chaz's Picks. A large portion of maps within Chaz's Picks made its way over to the Community Picks, along with more recent maps. Maps such as Fallen Bridge, which was only at 500 upvotes at the time, grew as a rapidly as a result, ending up with over 40k upvotes after about 18 months of being within the list in the former Flash-based Bonk.io.

An image of a portion of the Community Picks within the former Flash-based Bonk.io.

The map Fallen Bridge by GayfishDeluxe as seen in-game, being the first map within the Community Picks.

Bonk 2 Alpha

On July 17th, 2020, Bonk 2 Alpha was released, along with its own editor for players to create maps on. Due to the limited time while the Alpha version was up, along with the limited player counts on that version at the time, no maps gained substantial popularity before their erasure from being accessible. However, the most well-known map at the time is assumed to be the map called "Demo Map" which was created by Chaz, and was the default map that loaded when a custom game was created.

This is an image of a player (in blue) playing the map Demo Map, created by Chaz within Bonk 2 Alpha.

Bonk 2 Beta

After months of work being done to create and refine the Editor, on April 25th, 2020, Bonk 2 Beta's Editor was released, soon after, several maps started to rise to the top in popularity among the others. Most notably, NexusP1's maps PvP 3Teams - BLACK Nexus, Queimada, and Football 1 by Nexus P1, which initially covered the Top Rated listing.

Other creators, such as kklkkj, GudStrat, and others have also made multiple well performing maps early on within Bonk 2 Beta. At the all of these maps had in the high hundreds to low thousands in terms of upvotes.

The map Pvp 3Teams - BLACK Nexus by Nexus P1 with spawns.

The map Parkour Floors 2 by kklkkj with spawns.

The map Queimada by Nexus P1 with spawns.

By October 2020, the map PvP 3Teams - BLACK Nexus by Nexus P1 was nearing 10k upvotes when it began stalling due to the rise of Sniper Shot by not pro, which was based off it. A similar case occurred with NexusP1's Football1 map which Botnick based the map Deathball from. By the beginning of November 2020, Botnick's Deathball surpassed PvP 3Teams - BLACK Nexus, along with Sniper's Spot surpassing it by the end of the year.

Closure of Adobe Flash

Adobe Flash eventually met its end on January 12th 2021. Chaz moved Bonk 2 Beta over to the domain of the Flash-based Bonk.io, replacing it with the new version. As a result, the new Bonk.io grew in active player count by about 250% as a result of players who once played the former Flash-based Bonk.io, having moved over to the current HTML5-based Bonk.io.

With this, maps from the former Flash-based Bonk.io remained playable within the new HTML5-based Bonk.io but were no longer able to be voted on. However, players were able to vote on maps published within the current version. Due to the increase in player count, many maps started growing faster as a result. For instance, the map Sniper's Spot went from under 20k upvotes at the beginning of January 2021 to about 60k at the beginning of May 2021. With this, multiple maps are expected to surpass 100k upvotes by the end of 2021.

Era of Voting Manipulation

With the rapid rise of maps within the new version of Bonk.io along with looser voting restrictions, a handful of players turned to employing botted accounts to manipulate the overall vote count of certain maps. This slowly gained traction in March 2021 where some users participated in a campaign to downvote copied maps in an attempt to erase them from the Level Select.

By the beginning of April, it had become widespread to where most newly published copied maps were continually downvoted after release to prevent them from garnering popularity. Additionally, several maps within the Top Rated section were hit with large amounts of botted votes, leading to some minor changes in the rankings. However, the campaign began fizzling out by the end of April 2021, resulting in it being ultimately unsuccessful. In total, about 10k-20k botted downvotes were given to copied maps while it took place.

This is an image of the Likes/Dislikes the copy map "battle for the swing" by Matt_Maty had from March 26 to April 25, 2020, showing a fairly significant drop. This map was a major target during the campaign.

An example of campaining on the site during the peak of the movement. The maps covered up much of the Hot List at the time.

After the campaign died out, the vote botting methods became accessible to more players. Some of these players had self-centred intentions, using botted votes to propel their own maps to fame.

Most notably was with the player EXTRApro68 who rapidly bot voted their released maps so that they continuously covered the Hot List. In total, 62 maps were released over the span of 2 months. This was brought to a stop when Chaz on June 25, 2021 intervened by deleting all of the upvotes from EXTRApro68's maps. Since then, significant vote manipulation has mostly ended within Bonk.io.

An image of two of EXTRApro68's maps shortly following them being bot voted.

An image of EXTRApro68's maps after Chaz removed the upvotes from them.

The Rise of Map Automation

Beginning in early 2020, more extensions began to be available to Bonk.io users as a result of the creation of Bonk 2 Beta in November 2019. The first major extension to be released was the Bonk Leagues Client (BLC) on April 8th, 2020. It allowed for users to write text on maps, generate wave functions and more within the Bonk.io editor in later editions. At the time, it was the most popular Bonk.io extension, being intended for the general Bonk.io community.

An image of the map "Wave fight" by Dmetaa from February 2021, using BLC.

An image of a preview of a map being worked on by Finbae in December 2020, using BLC.

It was also the first extension to easily for users to easily add a screen overlay on top of their map, allowing for users to manually copy images. Beforehand, users usually used other images as references, making the map-making process much more laborious. Even with the ability to use overlayed images, it still frequently took players at times several hours to successfully copy images.

The final image is merely an conceptual illustration, not an actual Bonk.io map.

Note that other extensions apart from BLC have screen overlays as well.

On July 12, 2021, Kklee, an extension created by kklkkj was first released to the public. The extension through later editions went on to improve and add upon the existing features present in the BLC. The Kklee extension allowed for shape merging, creating gradients, editing polygon vertices, and more. This allowed for further improvements in Art Maps and reduced the amount of time it takes to create them as well.

An image of "gradient blending test" by kklkkj from July 2021.

An image of "alter ego" by swiped3 from February 2022, featuring sharp and precise angles.

An image of "nhk?!" by swiped3 from February 2022, featuring complex shape generation.

Towards the end of 2021, bychtromae published the map "tree" It was the first known map automatically generated from an image, depicting a handful of trees underneath a sunny sky. Most likely, it was created with a public general-use algorithm. However, this map was either deleted or privated a few months later. A few months later, other users such as Excigma began using algorithms for his maps, including Potrace and later Voronoi to generate Bonk.io maps. Geometrize is another algorithm commonly used. As of July 2022, using algorithms to automatically generate Bonk.io maps are becoming increasingly popular within the community. By using algorithms, maps from images can be generated near-instantly and with considerable quality.

Note that the process above is a simplified generalization of the process. In actuality, it varies widely by algorithm. In addition, the final image is merely an conceptual illustration, not an actual Bonk.io map.

This is an example of an automatically generated image. The featured image was generated with Geometrize.

An archival image of "tree" by bychtromae, originally published in late 2021. It is the first known map generated from an image.

An image of "It's other profile pic" by Excigma published in February 2022, generated with Potrace. The image is from the mobile game Alto's Odyssey.

An image of "CAPYBARA v3 (Col.) by NN77296_GT in July 2022, using Geometrize.

Highest Rated Map Charts

*Note that some of the data in the charts below are based on rough estimations or assumptions. Also, some maps have also been colour adjusted to make them stand out from one another.