Hey good job, there, hardhat

December 10, 2008 - Robin Walker

We've been pretty quiet lately, but thankfully, that's about to end. In the next few days we'll have an update out that has a couple of new features for the Engineer and Spy, and a variety of other smaller fixes.

• Teleporters will be upgradeable to level 3. As the teleporter is upgraded, the cooldown will decrease.
• Dispensers will be upgradeable to level 3. They will heal faster and generate metal faster as they are upgraded.
• Spies will be able to recharge their cloaking ability by picking up ammo off of the ground.
• We've made a bunch of minor changes by adding particle systems and upgrading the HUD to show things like deaths by critical hits, players that are overhealed, and giving more information to medics when people are calling for them.

These are just to work on some class balance and depth issues that we've seen in the wild with these two classes, but aren't meant to replace their entire class packs. They will be getting more attention further down the road.



While that's in testing, we're off working on several things that folks have been emailing us about, so we thought it'd be good to provide some detail:

• The next class pack will be the Scout. One of the main goals we're focusing on for him has been to provide tools that make him useful in maps like Dustbowl & Goldrush. If you have any ideas for what you think would work well, post them over on the Team Fortress 2 Forum and we'll take a look.
• We are actively working on a massive XBox 360 update, which will include pretty much everything we've shipped on the PC in the last year. We'll provide you with a rough date when we have one.
• We're also working on bringing over a variety of engine improvements from Left 4 Dead into the TF2 engine, but it won't be a wholesale replacement of the engine. This means we'll get some of L4D's performance improvements, like the better multicore support, but not all of them. For example, we can't bring over some improvements without dropping support for DX8, which we're not prepared to do.

Finding the Time to Bleed

October 16, 2008 - Valve Writing Staff

Since the release of Meet the Sandvich in August, several people have asked us how something we'd boasted would be "our magnum opus," "over four hours long" and "make Citizen Kane look like something dumb a complete idiot would make," ended up being one un-dramatic minute spent inside a refrigerator.

Now that more than a month has passed and the wounds have healed on Meet the Sandvich, we can finally give you an honest account of this aborted 240-minute epic, and by that we mean point fingers: It was all the bean counters' fault.

The suits took issue with every brave, authority-questioning page of our Meet the Sandvich script-specifically that there were supposed "similarities" between it and the 1987 action film Predator, and more specifically that it was word for word the 1987 action film Predator.

"Could you explain to us how your script is in any way different from Predator?" asked one of the suits.

"Predator takes place in Guatemala," Erik Wolpaw explained, using his I'm-explaining-something-idiotic-to-a-child voice. "Meet the Sandvich takes place inside a refrigerator in Guatemala."

"Where you can hear Predator happening outside of the refrigerator," clarified Jay Pinkerton.

"Also, Predator is two hours long," Erik continued. "Ours is four hours long."

"Right," said a suit, "but only because the script includes the first half of Predator..."

We nodded.

"... then all of Road House, and then the rest of Predator."



More nods. For a bean counter, this guy had really done his homework. Much like Dutch, when Dillon explains to Dutch how the Predator uses the jungle to its advantage, these suits really "got" it. We let our defenses down.

"Our script is pretty much exactly like Predator," Jay agreed.

"We took the script for Predator and put our names on it," Erik added, in case this hadn't been clear.

"Also, we had to paste the script for Road House there in the middle," Jay said when it suddenly occurred to him that business types who don't understand the creative art of writing might think merely writing your name on the Predator script isn't a full time job for two people. With everyone apparently now on the same page, Jay began working the room and shaking hands.

As it turns out, we'd been led, like the Predator by Dutch, into a trap. Instead of sharpened bamboo and weighted jungle pulleys, though, this was a trap of words, and instead of the Predator, it was us.



The suits demanded we give them the script so they could shred it. Just like in Predator, Jay doused the script pages in mud to conceal their heat signature from the suits. Unlike in Predator, this did nothing. The script was confiscated and destroyed. This created a small problem for all the Team Fortress actors we had standing around in the recording booth, watching us through the window with increasingly visible agitation.

"Hello?" barked Rick May, the voice of The Soldier. "Are we doing this or not?"

"Oh man, we are going to get fired now," Jay said. "We'll have to get jobs! We'll have to..." Jay tried to think, failed, then gave up in frustration. "What do people who aren't writers do?"

"I think they... sell things," said Erik, clutching at fuzzy images of people he'd walked past on the street on the way to nice restaurants. "Shoes and watches. From behind tables." He remembered his butler, who wasn't a writer. "Oh! Or they serve things."

"What are you two idiots talking about in there?" asked Gary Schwartz, the voice of the Heavy.

Jay grabbed the intercom mic. "Shut up, please," he observed.



"Anyone else notice this script is basically Predator?" Nathan Vetterlein, the voice of the Scout, asked. "It's not just me, right? This is word for word Predator."

"You think you can do any better?" spat Erik, a cloud of sandwich chunks hitting the sneeze guard they put between actors and writers in professional recording studios.

"You think what we do is easy?" screamed Jay, sending a further cascade of sandwich onto the sneeze guard. "Where would you have put the script for Road House into the script for Predator, smart guy? At the beginning? Because then it's just two movies," he said, not even believing how stupid someone could be to do that. He put his sandwich down to better illustrate the point with his hands, using his open palms to signify two different scripts, then bapping them together to further illustrate how stupid that would be.

Just as Jay's sandwich hit the table, a light went on in the refrigerator in Erik's head. "Sandwich... Sandwich! Say..." He punched the intercom. "Hey, guys? This is gonna sound crazy, but I have a new direction I want to try. Who's seen the movie Predator?"

"I have!" Jay exclaimed, thrusting his hand into the air.

Erik began to pace. "We open on a chopper. Inside sits Dutch, muscles bulging thr—"



"Look," Rick May interrupted, "how about we just improvise something?"

"Improvise..." Erik said, stretching the "s" out thoughtfully while staring at the ceiling.

After a minute of Erik saying "sss" followed by a gasping gulp of air followed by a few minutes of silence, Rick May tapped on the glass and asked us if we wanted him to tell us what "improvise" means.

It turns out "improvise" is another word for "the writers just watch," which sounded good to us. Better yet, the improvising was a big success, and led to the dialog you heard in Meet the Sandvich: rude, raw and spontaneous, like freestyle rap (or, as Valve writer/amateur freestyle rap impresario Marc Laidlaw refers to it, the poetry of the streets.) Here's a sampling below of some of the stuff we didn't end up using:

Heavy:

"What's that, Sandvich?"

Scout:

"Gimme back my legbone!"

"He's like a big shaved bear!"

"Pain!"

"I regret everything!"

Soldier:

"We got him by the short and friskies!"

"Don't do it!"

"You're writing checks your butt will find uncashable!"

"You only get one!"

"You call that killing me?"

"I will pay you all of my money!"

"Half the blood in your body!"

After an hour of high quality stuff like the dialog above, the writers had gained enough confidence to improvise some of our own. Here's a line we improvised ourselves from the movie Predator:

"I don't have time to bleed!"

Another improvisational gem, courtesy of Valve's award-winning writing staff, unilaterally tag-team writing alongside the powerhouse writers of Road House:

"Pain doesn't hurt!"

Here's a line we improvised that almost did make it into Meet the Sandvich, and was only removed after a non-writer dropped by our office and pointed out that we hadn't actually written it per se, and in fact had stolen it outright from The Simpsons:

"He's already dead!"

The point for all you young writers is just this: if the constraints of your current project don't specifically forbid it, your best writing will always result from writing your name on the Predator script. If, for whatever stupid reason, this isn't an option, improvise. Improvised dialog feels more real because it's lived. More importantly, it requires no actual writing.

Git along there, little doggies

October 8, 2008 - Robin Walker

Work on the next class pack is gearing up, a little slower than we'd like. In the meantime, I thought I'd post some answers to the common email questions we receive.

How do respawn waves work? Is my respawn time affected by my performance? Why do they exist at all?

Respawn waves occur on regular intervals, based on the map settings. Most of our maps use a 10 second respawn wave time. That 10 seconds is then modified by the map state, generally reduced for the team that controls the most capture points. Each team's respawn wave time is then scaled down if the team has less than 8 players in it, to a minimum of 5 seconds if team has 3 or less players in it. When you die, you are assigned to the respawn wave after the next one. So if the respawn wave time is currently 10 seconds for your team, you'll respawn somewhere between 10 and 20 seconds from your death. Your individual performance doesn't affect your respawn time in any way.



We found respawn waves were a good solution to several problems.

• They provide a reward for the team that's doing well, in that if they wipe out a significant amount of the enemy team they're rewarded with a short grace period in which they can achieve objectives. Without them, we found teams felt like they'd been penalized when they cleared the enemy off the last capture point, only to have them all return immediately.
• They group respawning players together into squads, increasing the chances of strangers working together, or at the very least, moving to the frontline while maintaining some proximity to one another. Strangers aren't pushed together into groups when everyone respawns instantly, and we've seen that proximity to team mates is a fundamental requirement for impromptu teamwork.
• They provide some ebb & flow in the pacing of the battle. Without some cooldown inbetween the moments of intense combat at the frontline, many players felt fatigued much more quickly. In particular, some attack/defense maps feel almost completely static without respawn waves. That lack of progress, in either direction, was a big factor in players finding the gameplay monotonous.
• The spectator camera seen while waiting to respawn gives players some time to observe their team mates. This provides a minor help to teamwork, allowing players to see what other members of their team are up to. More importantly, we've seen that new players learn a lot of advanced techniques by spectating better players. This is one of the reasons why the spectator camera tries to find a team mate who's playing the same class as you.

Obviously, there are other solutions to these problems, but respawn waves do a good job across the board.

Also, if you haven't seen it yet, we've recently put up the Left 4 Dead blog. Erik Wolpaw is posting over there, and he's the man behind Glados in Portal. He's much funnier than those of us on TF2, so if I were you, I'd stop reading this and go bookmark that instead.

Gentlemen,

September 17, 2008 - Robin Walker

Well, it's been a couple of weeks since we updated the blog, and we thought it was time to let you know why we've been so quiet. The last couple of weeks we've actually been moonlighting on Left 4 Dead. While the L4D team has been focusing on finishing up the core cooperative gameplay, we've been helping them by working on their Versus mode. Versus is the recently-announced competitive mode where one team plays the Survivors and one team plays the Infected. We've learned a lot while working on TF2 in the last year, and we were able to apply some of those lessons to Versus mode. As a result, we've just finished adding critical hits, respawn waves, flawless auto-team balancing, and facestabs to L4D, while removing anything that looked remotely like a grenade. I kid, I kid.
Continued...

A Grim Bloody Fable

August 28, 2008 - TF2 Team

The path to arriving at a final design for a character is sometimes a long and winding one. This was especially the case for the Demoman and we thought it would be interesting to step through that process and shed a little light on how we arrive at our final designs. Early on in the process, soon after we decided that we were going to start a new, more stylized direction for TF2 it opened up a whole range of possibilities in terms of what that meant visually. One of the first (albeit short-lived) ideas that was being thrown around was to try to recreate a look of claymation for our game. The idea was to make the world look like a miniature set built for clay figures which animated and gibbed into chunks of clay.
Continued...

Alpine Art Style

August 19, 2008 - TF2 Team

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.
Continued...

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.
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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.
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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.
Continued...

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.
Continued...

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.
Continued...

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.
Continued...

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.
Continued...

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.
Continued...

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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