Rejected Mercenaries

An idea I'm developing...a short video featuring four classes that tried out for the mercenary team but were ultimately rejected. I like the idea that the merc team we see aren't the only people in the world, that there are people with highly specialized skills that could have been on the team but aren't simply because the gameplay would be godawful or they couldn't fit into the culture of mental illness propagated by the team. Specifically, the idea is that RED and BLU actually hired a GI-Joesque universe of mercs with highly specialized skills, and this video would be a small sampling of who they are and why they're not in Team Fortress 2.

The Diver

A frogman-style diver in a skintight body suit, flippers, and monoglass scuba goggles, he speaks in a voice like Sean Connery pretending to be English.

Weapons: Speargun /Limpet Launcher /Diving Knife
Abilities: Can breathe underwater / Improved Swimming speed
Scene Baselines:
Runs out of spawn into Badwater's desert environment.
Ambushes a spy, but is subjected to a karate chop, larate kick, and eyeful of powerful chest hair
Eventually settles blithely in a knee deep puddle, sighs dejectedly

The Pilot 

A long-faced but smiling chap in aerial ace gear, like the fur-trimmed bomber's jacket, aviator's goggles, and mic. He speaks in a methodical, almost lyrical slow tones, like a commercial airline pilot or Bing Crosby. On his back is his main loadout, a rocket backpack. Different loadouts carry different packs, including a balloon, helicopter rotor, and jump jet.

Weapons
Shotgun
Airborne PDA
--Letter Bomb (creates area where enemies temporarily take minicrits)
-- Air Drop (drops a fast-deploying air sentry or weapons crate for allies)
--Paralanding (teleporter)
Microphone
Abilities: Hold jump to fly
Domination lines:
"You are now free to move about the coffin."
"And if you look out the window on the right, you will see the fiery gates of Hell."
Jokes for video:
takeoff through roof
Runs out of fuel, landing amongst an enemy camp

The Boxer

Weapons: None, obviously
Abilities: None of these, either.
Hand to hand fight with scout, as he's winning, scout pulls out his scattergun

The Bureaucrat

Weapons: n/a
Abilities:  n/a
Spends the entire video sitting quietly at a desk, scribbling. Various explosions rock his desk, disturb his papers, and tip over something onto his desk.

Turtle Bay

Turtle Bay is variation on a TF2 map I've wanted to develop for quite some time. Basically, it's a map that's a little more dynamic and exciting in the way new paths open up and such. For now, I think Special Delivery or CTF would be the best game modes to express it.

Thematically, it's meant to be the factory where the Engineer manufactures his weapons. Now obviously, he designs all the buildings, and he builds them in the field. Video games tend to use visual shorthand to convey actions: the engineer hitting his sentry with a wrench isn't really him fixing it by dumbly bludgeoning it, it's meant to subtly convey the act of repairing a building. In the same vein, you might expect that the automated build process stands in for a complicated deployment stage where a team of engineers painstakingly assemble a sentry like an IKEA bookshelf, but I prefer to interpret the automated deployment literally.

If that's the case, then the Engineer must have a facility that exists to supply him with those toolboxes, where he keeps the workshop seen in The Engineer Teaser and tests out elaborate weapons. I also thought it could double as an experimental weapons laboratory for a Mann Co competitor.

The Map's Gameplay Aesthetic

First of all, the Intel points in Turtle Bay are different than other maps (where they are the same). The intel is located near a pick-up truck with its bed full of suitcases. The potential problem, obviously, is that a bed full of intel briefcases might confuse players entering the intel room, so a spotlight would shine on the truck while the intel is there, and go off while the "active" intel is gone. If this proves to be too confusing the intel pickup could be altered to a single briefcase, with the truck moved out-of-bounds.

There are then three drop-off zones, themed around different rewards for intel and showcasing a large engineer weapon that supplies the reward. Get three caps in any zone to win--or mix and match! The first Zone might be the Critical Hits zone, where a generator-sized object that looks like an engineer building crossed with the kritzkrieg and a fire hydrant lives. Supply it with Australium to get crits for ten seconds. Although each dropoff zone is different, ideally one would be my long-lost Intel Repository, with its huge stack of briefcases. Awesome, right?

Other zone ideas:
New spawn areas

New Paths
-- moving a train to complete a hallway
--blowing up a wall
--rising elevator platform
--drain/flood section of map

Map-hazard special sentry guns
--fire
--ceiling mounted
--aerial bombardment
--electricity pylons

Grants access to "bonus zones"
--vending machine with candy bar healthkit
--access to additional ammo or health

Deactivates enemy map bonuses?

Engineer Buildings Contest

So I think the Engineer could build stuff. Lots and lots of stuff. So over at SPUF, I threw together a sort of contest for people to describe and design buildings for the Engineer to design. See, the thing is that a lot of people have ideas about what the engineer would design but no idea what it would really look like. One of the most prolific designers of Engineer weapons, Pyanodon, is a fantastic and creative modeler but I thin that everything he designs is more suited to Doctor Robotnik than the Engineer.

So I want people to design things that the engineer would build. Even if they're ultimately unusable for the game, it'd be fun to see what people come up with.

So to start it off, I created the Uber Generator, a machine that builds uber. This isn't the finalized design, as it's too boring and the silhouette looks too much like the Dispenser (which is intentional, since it was meant to be a retrofitted dispenser originally).

Levels of Production

Team Fortress 2 allows you to create and submit your own items for a chance to get them in-game. Why am I telling you this? If you've managed to stumble across this blog odds are pretty good you already own a dozen virtual hats or you're my friend on Facebook. Hi, Mom. Anyway, it made me think about the various ways items might be constructed in order to reach the battlefields of Teufort, because I am a lunatic and these are the sort of things I think about in my spare time.

Least Generic

Level 1: Cartoonish Improvised
Cartoonishly improvised devices were constructed from garbage for a homeless man's Halloween costume. Or by a cosplayer whose student loans have finally come due. They're usually made of soup cans, soda bottles, funnels... everything retains it's original shape and labelling; they don't look like they should work but it's a video game so they do, anyway. They're usually terribly impractical looking and the aesthetics are designed to really sell just how improvised they are, and usually they look like they'd be most at home in the labs of cartoon inventors like Gadget from Rescue Rangers or Edd from Ed, Edd, and Eddie. The Bum's Bazooka and the Soda-Popper are ideal examples.

Level 2: Homemade
These are weapons that were created by someone with a modicum of know-how. They're still made up of pieces that are recognizably taken from somewhere else, but they're harder to identify. Rather than being whatever random garbage would fit into the required silhouette, these pieces look practical, like they might actually serve the purposes they've been co-opted into. In a home-made weapon, some parts are obviously custom tooled, made by someone who knows what they're doing but maybe doesn't have much of a budget. The Flamethrower and Razorback are perfect examples of homemade weapons.

Level 3: Custom-Made
These weapons were obviously crafted by professionals who knew what the heck they were doing. These weapons are manufacture-grade quality but obviously made to particular specifications. It is clear that nearly every piece of this weapon was crafted specifically to be a part of this weapon. Many custom-made weapons may have high-quality artistic flair on them, decorations that serve no purpose but to look fancy. When designing a custom weapon, I think it's best to try and keep elaborate decoration to a minimum.

Many engineer weapons could qualify as custom-made, especially his buildings. Medic weapons, too.

I think the assumption should be that the Engineer has access to a machine shop, tools, and scrap, not to mention the skills necessary to craft high-end machinery and keep it in good working order.

Level 4: Customized / Repaired / Modified
Think of these weapons like a car that you have owned for a long time. While there are many cars like yours, few have suffered the same way yours has; every nick in the windshield and bumper sticker identifies this car as yours, instead of someone else's. On a battlefield like TF2's, even made-to-order equipment will be damaged, and repairs need to be made. Similarly, as you own something, sometimes the urge to customize it takes hold. Some people might write slogans on their weapons, or paint it to their liking. Sometimes a weapon might need to be slightly altered to fit the job it needs to do. When designing a customized or repaired weapon, perhaps it would be best to imagine what the gun was like new, and then apply years of service to it. How did that scratch happen? Would that piece come loose, prompting the owner to fix it with a clamp and wing-nut? If that the stock of that shotgun broke, how would the Soldier repair it? How would the Engineer repair it?

Level 5: Industrial Manufacture
These are weapons that are mass produced and generic. TF2's unique art style holds that even generic weapons look somewhat customized in order to fit into each man's massive paws, but ultimately there is a storehouse somewhere containing hundreds of boxes of weapons just like this one. These are weapons that are ordered from catalogs, or issued directly to new mercenaries. Of course, TF2 doesn't take place in the real world, so hypothetically many weapons could be ordered from catalogs, but mostly these apply to realistic-looking stock weapons. The shotgun, scatter gun, pistol, SMG--these all fit that description.

Level Green: Schroedinger's Weapons
These are things that aren't technically weapons until they're used to collapse an unsuspecting skull. All of the stock melee weapons (except the Knife) fall under this category. I like to imagine that these are items that sort of floated around in the periphery of that class's life until desperate circumstances caused them to swing, just once. Soldiers carry entrenching tools to dig trenches, but low on ammo and beset by a savage foe, it's feasible that he might have swung just once, to save his life... and it became his tool of choice. I like generic melee weapons because of that split-second imagery. Plus, it's hard to imagine someone who carries two different guns on their person at all times investing a lot of effort into resorting to making a melee weapon, especially one out of tape.

The French Tickler

The French Tickler

Not to scale

Level 25 Appliance
Attack chains between victims
+Alt Fire: Short Circuit Blast
-50% Afterburn damage
-75% Spread

The French Tickler fires a highly concentrated stream of particles which chain between opponents. Basically, when an opponent is struck with the beam, he takes X amount of damage, and the beam attaches to the next nearest opponent (within ~100HU), dealing X/n damage, and the next nearest opponent (ditto), dealing X/(n/2) damage. The weapon also ignites the principle target, but not any chained targets. Medics, cloaked spies, and disguised spies are protected from the chaining effect.

The alt-fire short circuit blast is just one idea, but I feel as though there should be more going on there. Possible projectiles destroyed by the SCB fill a bar that causes minicrits on chain attacks? Or on flaming targets? Something interesting without being too complicated, but also useful without hinging entirely on luck.

The French Tickler also appears differently in Pyrovision: rather than a hand-crafted stun rod, it looks like a long feather duster.

Triple CP Gamemode

Gravelpit is an excellent CP map. I'd argue that it's one of the best, in fact, and certainly it's one of my favorite. I mean, CP in general is kind of boring aesthetically, and Gravelpit is pretty generic except for the awesome towers over the main control points, but Gravel Pit is probably the most longlived map I've seen in TF2. I think it's the only launch map that I still enjoy playing on.


I like having two objectives. Trying to anticipate where the enemy will be, or anticipating where they anticipate I'll be, and anticipating their anticipation of my anticipation and being where I was start out with, Ah-HA! So what if we had a Gravelpit style map where he who controls two of three points can make a push for the enemy's Master CP?

Hmm. This could use refining. So in TF2 people seeeem to like maps that are either really, really fast (KOTH, Arena) or really, really long (24/7 2fort). So here's the idea: you have a "master control point" guarded by a large door with three locks. There are three central control points (activation locks for the door code). They're all open, and there's several passageways. Unlock CP A, and you activate lock A and open corridor A. You unlock CP B, you activate lock B and open garage door B. Now, if you lose A, however, corridor A closes, while lock A stays open. That way,  the losing team isn't stuck either recapping CP 4 or waiting to lose: they can get out a side door and challenge any one of three CPs, but at the same time the winning team isn't cheated out of a run of success.

It would minimize the back-and-forth loop (maybe people like that?). I think.