Alpine Art Style

August 19, 2008 - Dhabih Eng

We decided to create a new TF environment after sensing some desert-fatigue, both internally and externally. The new theme had to be a departure from the current look without being so different that the characters felt out of place in it. We also wanted to leverage some content from our existing environments, since crafting every asset from scratch would mean we'd be moving the release beyond Valve time and into the realm of geologic time. Given these goals and constraints, we settled on the Alpine theme for two reasons: Its green foliage and blue-gray rocks let us introduce a new, cooler color palette to the game, and the lumber mill / mining camp buildings fit our existing set of structures. For Arena Lumberyard, the goal was to establish a clear difference between the two sides of the map. One side climbs up toward a large mountain peak, and the other dips down into a vast valley. We're excited to have a new visual theme to play with, and we'll definitely be using it in future maps.

 

Incoming Heavy!

August 11, 2008 - Robin Walker

We've been a little quiet for the last week as we've put the finishing touches on the Heavy update. We thought the Pyro pack was the biggest we'd be doing for a while, due to the large changes to the Pyro, but the Heavy update has turned out to be even bigger. In addition to the three unlockable weapons and thirty-five achievements for the Heavy, we've got a new game mode with five new arenas for it, a new Payload map focusing on more open spaces than Goldrush, and another popular community-made map. Throughout the rest of the week we'll be giving you the details on all this, and if all goes well, you'll have your hands on it shortly afterwards.

The community-made map included in the Heavy update is cp_steel, by Jamie 'Fishbus' Manson. After the Pyro update we received a lot of email telling us how wrong we were in our choices, and cp_steel was an easy next choice due to the way it dominated the suggestions. If you're firing up your email right now to tell us that we never get anything right, please include suggestions of what map(s) we should be looking at next.

We'll be updating A Heavy Update site with more info daily. Stay tuned!

TF2 Environments

August 1, 2008 - Jakob Jungels

One of the things we're looking at for the next update is the creation of a new type of environment for our levels to be built in. We're pretty happy with the way our environments have turned out so far, but as we create more and more maps with these achievement packs, we want our level designers to have more to work with in terms of giving their settings a unique look.

The challenging part of this type of design process is in finding types of terrain and structures that provide an understandable, interesting set of visuals and at the same time staying within the constraints of what we want to do with gameplay. In addition to this, we want to be able to stay within the strengths of the engine that TF is built around.

 

In coming up with these ideas, we have a set of questions we ask about each one, for example:

• What are the costs in building this compared to the value it creates for the end user?
• What are the obvious types of new gameplay that we can create with this theme?
• Is this environment flexible enough that we can leverage it for our other gameplay types?
• Is this environment flexible enough to be usable for ideas we may come up with in future updates?
• Is this type of thing recognizable to a larger set of people?
• Has it been used successfully anywhere else? Has it been used too often?
• Does it create a unique experience that people will be drawn to?
• Can we leverage existing art assets to help build the new environment?

Having come up with a set of criteria, the next stage of the process is to brainstorm as many possibilities as we can, building a list that we can chip away at over time. In doing so, we come up with a smaller set of possibilities, some which we may build right away and some which we reserve for a later time.

We find that creating a set of questions like the above actually makes the design process quicker and easier for us - immediately highlighting which ideas simply will not work with the goals we have in mind. Hopefully these examples will help you in taking a look at your own ideas for what types of environments you'd like to see TF take place in.

TF2 Trading Cards - Part 3

July 24, 2008 - Jakob Jungels

For this week's update, we've got another set of trading card images to take a look at. The focus of our most recent achievement update, the Pyro is a character that players may have seeing a lot of lately - making life a nightmare inferno for both the Spy and Medic.
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Neat Community Creations

July 16, 2008 - Eric Smith

One of the things we hope to do on this blog is to point out the creative things that members of the TF2 community are up to. The Steampowered TF2 forum members have been collecting links ever since TF2 was released, and you can take a look at the list (and its accompanying 46-pages-so-far (!) forum thread)here.
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So much blood!

July 9, 2008 - Robin Walker

Well, we were expecting some response to A Heavy Problem, but we severely underestimated just how much interest everyone had in contributing. If you're one of the many folks who emailed us proposals and haven't received a response, please accept our apologies, because there's just too many for us to reply to all of them. From the large amount of feedback and forum activity, it's clear that many of you found this interesting, so we'll definitely be posting more design goals. For those of you still thinking about it, here are some more tools to use in evaluating ideas:
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TF2 Trading Cards - Part 2

July 3, 2008 - Jakob Jungels

To continue from the previous week, today we have some additional finished trading card images for you to take a look at - the Heavy and the Medic.
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A Heavy Problem

July 1, 2008 - Robin Walker

As Gabe mentioned in his lengthy response to an email recently, the next class pack will focus on the Heavy. For the Medic and Pyro packs we kept our goals for the pack pretty close to our chest, but for the Heavy we've decided to open up the process a little.
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TF2 Trading Cards - Part 1

June 27, 2008 - Jakob Jungels

During the development process with most of our games, we end up creating content that, for a variety of reasons, may never see the light of day. Sometimes we may not have the time to bring the content to finish, sometimes we use them as a company-only experiment, and sometimes the content just isn't in line with what we're doing at the time. Needless to say, there's a fair bit of cool stuff that we've never been able to share with our fans. We're happy to say that this blog has now given us a unique format in which to share some of the unused artwork with you.
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The Medigun Healing Ramp

June 24, 2008 - Robin Walker

In any game there's often a bunch of hidden complexity behind some of the simplest looking features, and TF2 is no exception. One example is that of the Medic's medigun. From a player perspective, it appears simple enough: point it at a team mate, press the button, and it'll heal them. After playing with a bit, most players notice that they have to stay near their target and maintain line-of-sight to their target. After playing with it a lot, some players notice that there's some variability in the rate at which they heal their targets. I thought it might be interesting for Medics to explain what's going on here, and why.
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The Flare Gun

June 18, 2008 - Eric Kirchmer

When producing concept art, our artists believe in providing a variety of options for any given subject. A single concept rendering would place too strict a constraint on the resulting game design.
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Welcome to the TF2 blog

June 18, 2008 - Robin Walker

Now that we've settled into regular releases of content, we've found ourselves wanting a better way to talk directly to the TF2 community about the state of the game and some of the reasoning behind the choices we're making. Our hope is that this blog will accomplish that, and give everyone some better insight into our development process as well.
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