TF Team

For general feedback about the game.

Steam Support

Visit the support site for any issues you may be having with the game or Steam.

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 seen a lot of lately - making life a nightmare inferno for both the Spy and Medic.

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.



Recently, we've received a ton of email asking us if we had accidentally leaked the details of the Spy's unlockables, after Kaanin created this fake web page detailing his version of what the release should contain. His mocked-up image was convincing enough that even some of us at Valve were momentarily fooled. Well played, Kaanin.

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:

• Does it affect the main weaknesses of the class? What could opponents do against an entire team of this class armed with your idea? Class balance is more a function of the weaknesses of each class than their strengths. Weaknesses provide population control, where the value of a counter class rises as a class's population rises. i.e. Snipers become more valuable the more Heavies there are on the enemy team. As a result, we're very wary of reducing a class's weaknesses.
• How does it affect the core interactions between this class and other classes? To help here, it's useful to coarsely determine the standard interaction for this class and each other class at short, medium, long ranges, and varying terrain layouts, assuming roughly equal skill on each player's part. Then think about how your idea affects each of those interactions.
• Does it also solve other goals we have for the class? We usually have several goals we're trying to achieve with a class, and ideas which solve multiples are more valuable.

The last one raises another question: What other goals should we have for the Heavy update? Half the battle of good design is choosing the right goals and the right constraints. In A Heavy Problem, we specified a goal for you, and the constraints that had to be kept in mind. Try taking a shot at defining the overall set of goals that the Heavy unlockables should be trying to achieve. Watch out for the common circular logic trap of finding an idea you like and then trying to extract goals from it. We find it's best to not think about ideas at all at this point, and to focus entirely on more abstract goals. What are the biggest problems in the Heavy class? In what situations is it the least fun? Like idea evaluation, goal generation is a big topic in itself, and one we'll go into in a later post.