![]() ![]() The problem was conceptualising artwork before the team really knew what the product was - sort of like colouring in before anyone's drawn the lines. "We always had a nagging feeling we weren't doing art direction right in all of our titles, even with Half-Life 2, where we were quite happy with the art direction," says Walker. The stylised art - TF2's most striking facet - was a direction signposted by the game itself. The dynamic changes minute to minute.Īnother lesson was letting the gameplay inform the design. Similarly, get halfway through capturing a control point before death and your partial control will gradually diminish, giving the next wave the chance to resume the attack, and forcing the defending team to keep more of an eye on it. When an enemy moves your flag, it will take 30 seconds to return to its home even if you touch it, forcing you to adjust your area of defensive focus. "We spent a lot of time in Half-Life 2 crafting the highs and lows." Now TF2 has them - instead of standing around defending the base ("a flat experience"), you're forced to deal with rapidly evolving situations, like a Medic and Heavy Weapons Guy combining to capitalise on the former's temporary burst of invulnerability. "We've always thought of pacing as a crafted thing in single-player," says Walker. One of the words we hear a lot is "pacing". It is, in designer Robin Walker's words, "the first time we've got our shit together enough to do this" (and they've had a few goes - TF2 was originally announced in 1998). In Team Fortress 2, Valve's fort-versus-fort multiplayer FPS, the devs have tried to apply the lessons they learned about iterative design to a multiplayer game. ![]()
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