The Day the Heavy Ran Out of Ammo

Pan slowly through scene 1. Shell casings litter the ground, dead pyro barely visible in frame. Distant Heavy laughter can be heard. Fade to black.

Fade in on scene 2, pan slowly through. More shell casings. A dead soldier should appear visible in the frame, and a scout's hand is visible, too, dead at the foot of a fridge.  A half-eaten buffalo steak sandvich is on the ground. Fade to black.

Fade in on scene 3, pan slowly through. Faint battle sounds. Pan through the scene, to freshly falling shell casings and a Heavy firing maniacally into a diverse crowd of BLUs, a Medic healing him. Boom-headshot, the Medic goes down. The Heavy looks over his shoulder, angry but not about to stop shooting.

Click-click-click--- the Heavy stops, perplexed, and lifts the minigun to shake it gently. It rattles hollowly. Experimentally, he pulls the trigger again. Clicking.. He feels the pouches on his waist.

Heavy POV, close up on his palm--there are three bullets, which roll out and clatter to the ground.

Low shot of Heavy watching them roll away. After their last clink, he sags, slightly. Then, sounds of a building deploying and a wrench whacking a building. An Engineer is building a dispenser! He hustles over to it carrying his Minigun, and watches as the Engie whacks it.

Unlike in the game, if possible, the Dispenser-deploy animation should be syncopated with the wrench swings, i.e. wrench hit, followed by 20% of the animation, wrench hit, next 20%, to imply that the Dispenser requires an Engineer's touch. This should stretch the tension nicely.

Finally, the little bottom hatch opens, to reveal an ammo belt. As the Heavy reaches for it, a BLU sticky bomb lands next to his palm.

Reaction shot of the Heavy. He defends himself from the explosion with his hand.
Heavy POV on Dispenser--it's gone, but visible through the smoke is the Demoman, grenade launcher in hand. Shift shots through the smoke to establish that he's there, backed up by a Scout, Pyro and a Soldier. They all look smug.

Shot of the Heavy, glaring at them, holding his gun, thinking.

Close shot of the Demoman raising his sticky launcher to fire another shot--slow motion--as a minigun flies into the shot and bowls him flat on his back. The scout looks on in surprise at the Demoman (whose foot is sticking up from the bottom of the shot), when the Heavy barrels across the ground punches the Scout.

Now we see the Heavy, he's holding the Scout's scattergun between two fingers. He pokes the trigger mechanism with his finger. Close up on the gun--it's too small to accommodate his finger. He looks around, and grabs the scout in a headlock, stuffs the gun in his hand, and fires it at the Pyro three times. There's an explosion of gunfire--the Soldier is holding a now-smoking shotgun.

The Heavy throws the Scout at him.

TF2 FANFARE, ROLL CREDITS

Brute Medic

Working on a concept idea for a kind of hulking Brute Medic unlock, wherein the Ubercharge turns the Medic into a temporary melee-class killing machine reminiscent of L4D's Tank or Bioshock 2's Brute Splicer.

Currently, I'm considering the following buffs for the Brute Medic:
AoE healing--the brute medic is still healing allies as long as his charge is in place
Barehands Melee Attack (+50% Damage)--the brute medic's method of attack replaces the Secondary Slot while the charge is active. Switching away from it allows you to interrupt the charge
Megajump--to allow the Brute Medic to get in and out of combat quickly and chase foes
Knockback Resistance--allows the Medic to tear up in combat mode, much like the Demoknight
Damage Resistance--also devoted to giving the medic some staying power in close combat

Obviously, this idea is left-field crazy, but it has its basis in a couple weapons/classes/characters in a few games. The Big Daddy suit for Bioshock 2's multiplayer, for example, and the Tank in L4D share qualities of fortitude and power in a limited sort of capacity. If you have some ideas for ways the Hulk could change, let me know on SPUF forums or here, on the blog!

SPUF Runner-up: Kayohgee

Bio
Quite literally a "Baby man", the mercenary known as the Heavy in TF2niverse-159354 is the result of an experiment in which a prototype Mark IV "Manndroid" Exo-suit was given a single infant pilot (as the capsule was originally built for chimpanzees and was therefore unsuitable for an adult human).

The pilot's name, gender or (brief) personal history are a mystery, as are its motivations. While it clearly enjoys its work, whether the infant believes it is "playing" with the other mercenaries or is truly psychopathic at an impossibly young age is unknown. What is known, to allies and enemies alike, is that he or she has proven to be one of the most efficient killing machines in the Mann Co. army, and is indisputably the second deadliest baby on Earth. With a suit constructed out of solid Adamanntium and an arsenal of weapons at its disposal, the Heavy's only true weakness is its mobility. While the Mark IV is capable of travelling at speeds exceeding those of an ordinary human, its infant pilot consistently scores well below the accepted minimum on the "Ability to walk" portion of his or her yearly physical and tends to precariously stumble around the battleground, a featherweight away from toppling over.

Weapons
Primary: Dual Miniguns - one mounted to each arm.
Secondary: The BaBa - this consumable calms the Heavy, boosting his accuracy for a short time, but afterwards causes him to nap for six seconds.
Melee: The Rattle of Steel

Voice Lines
While the Heavy is only able to babble, his or her telltale gleeful laughter is often heard while mowing down entire waves of opponents.

Editor's Note: I preferred that this be a monkey to a baby, not just because shooting at babies seems wrong somehow but because it generates a little bit of diversity in character. I left it as a baby for the purposes of this posting. But seriously, who couldn't love the idea of a Monkeynaut Heavy?

SPUF Character Contest Runner Up: The Medic

 Dexter is in his mid-twenties. He's of unknown European heritage but he has become accustomed to the US. He is tall and fairly skinny, with blond hair and blue eyes. The attack from the RED Spy has left scars on his left arm and left cheek. His mercenary uniform comprises of a short-sleeved shirt, a grey tie and trousers with heavy military boots. He wears short, blue gloves and bands on his arms showing his mercenary class. Attached to Dexter's belt is an unusual machine, that creates a magnetic healing field. The machine is attached to his Medigun, which is worn on his back when he's not using it.

Dexter's weaponry consists of multiple scalpels that he wears on his belt, his Medigun, which is a heavily modified shotgun with two firing modes. The first mode fires a beam of healing plasma, controlled by a magnetic field. The second mode fires buckshot, which, when it hits a wall, releases a healing gas. Dexter also carries a revolver for when he needs to go on the defence.

Quotes:
When healing a team mate:
"Oh dear, silly you, getting yourself injured again..."
"If only friendships were this easy to fix..."
"You're all fixed up. Try not to do that again."

When killing an enemy:
"You'd think I'd be easy to kill, what with me only having a revolver..."

When injured:
"Might be a wise idea to pull back and heal up..."
"If only this device worked on me..."

When close to death:
"It's a good thing me and Dell invented the RESPAWN machine..."

Domination lines:
"Hah! You let yourself be killed by a doctor?"
"Pfft. You weren't even close!"
"Only one person got close to killing me, and you're not him... Okay, two people..."

Domination line against Spies:
"Seems like you've lost your touch!"
"C'mon! Last time we met, you nearly killed me!"

Domination line against Engineers:
"You traitor!"
"That will teach you to focus entirely on killing!"

Editor's Note: I liked the original nature of this character. It departs a bit from the very detached framework typical of TF2, creating a very specific character with a closely generated backstory. There's a bit of thought here, plus there's lots of voice lines, which I always like to see. Good work.  Check out The Medic's blog!

The Party Favors

Party Favors
Level Communism Fists
On Kill: Four seconds of using the primary weapon of the victimized class.
DOES NOT WORK ON PEOPLE OVER 200kg

Whenever the Heavy catches a victim in his grasp, he puts them in a headlock and squeezes. Every powerful squeeze causes their fragile bones to twist and snap, pulling the trigger on whatever weapon they happen to be holding, until finally, well, puny baby bones weren't meant to be broken that way.

I know it wouldn't work as an unlock, necessarily. It's pretty complicated and the actual benefit is badly broken... I just like the mental image of the Heavy with a Scout under his arm, forcing him to shoot people because the Scattergun's tiny trigger is too small to accommodate hands of Slavic proportions.

SPUF Character Contest 2 Winner: Stamda

The Mercenaries in TF2 are just guys. They work their jobs--blowing things up, shooting people in the head, shooting lots of people in the head, keeping people alive, shooting people in the head with rockets--but they're regular guys from a variety of backstories.

Those backstories are arbitrary, and I wanted to change them. Not because I think they're bad, but they're arbitrary and I wanted to see who else could do these jobs! So I challenged SPUF and said "Show me your moves!" Design a new version of a TF2 class, write a couple voice lines for 'em, tell me what their default melee weapons, and I promised them that I'd put them here.

Well, here's one by Stamda, who won the contest! Runners up to follow!

The Sniper
Bio: Stay off her lawn! A curmudgeonly old hag from Fort Gratiot Township, Michigan, this geriatric banshee of a woman can thread bullets through skulls as easily as she can string into sweaters! If you don't get a head full of lead, you'll sure as hell get an earful of berating from this living insult generator! She's mighty good at cribbage and checkers, too.
Appearance: Wrinkled, sunken face, gummed mouth, bifocals, an orange wig, a nightgown and slippers. Stands with a hunch, runs with a hobble and swings melee weapons meagerly.
Weapon changes:  -Rifle is an ironsights rifle with a crack in the stock and a piece of fake hair stuck in the ejection port. -SMG is dual Scorpion variants that are heavily beaten, with a tally mark (totalling 7) labeled "Husbands" on the right gun. -Melee is a rolling pin with flour and blood on it.  Voice: Raspy, wheezy, and intended to annoy.
Voiceline examples:  Kill streak: "Do they kill boys at birth now or what?" Headshot: "Here, let me help your miserable wife out!" Melee dare: "Don't run, you'll just die tired and an embarrassment!" Dominating a Scout: "Nyeeheehee, my dentures are squrrielier than you, schoolgirl!"

Team Fortress Throughout the Ages

So I recently discovered the Wayback Machine, an Internet archive service. It is excellent because they've been taking snapshots of websites periodically for at least the last fifteen years, and boy, amongst the sites they've saved? Teamfortress.com

Check out the first Snapshot: 1/6/1997. Look at that web design! Fiery jpeg text, pure black background... It's great. I cannot snicker about this because I'm not in the business of throwing stones, at least until the lease is up on this glass house I live in, but it's pretty cool to see how far the web has come--how far this site has come--in a decade and a half.

This is probably the greatest gem from that site.  It's Robin Walker's company bio, a little over ten years before the launch of TF2. That's pretty cool.

Robin Walker
Position: Director, Lead Designer
Title: Director of Nonchalance
Future: I'd like to keep coding freeware game add-ons.
Present: I'm handling the game design for our TC, and maintenance of TF.
Past: Two years at uni officially doing computer science (I'm not going back to finish my degree, I swear!)

 The site breaks around 2001 and comes back online, owned by Valve apparently, in 2004, advertising Halflife 2. Interesting to nobody except me, probably, is what Team Fortress 2 looked like when I was a junior in college, when I was just an innocent lad who didn't like FPS games and had only the vaguest idea of what TF2 was all about. Meet the Heavy would change my life and cost me literally hundreds of precious hours of sweet existence.

SPUF-Authored Voicelines

I ran a bit of a contest on SPUF, where I challenged the community there to write voicelines for their favorite set. It got a few replies with a variety of good voicelines, although far more references to Doctor Who than I had anticipated. Such is life, I suppose. Anyway, here are voicelines that I felt really captured the spirit of the contest, or made me laugh.

Astronaut--
Court Marshaled, Maggot!
To the firing line!
Back in line, maggot!

Stamda--
Where's my money?
Hey you, with the shoes and the shirt!

 Von Raptor
On Kill assist: "where would I be without my Patient?"
Spy Kill: (Angrily) "It seems my team can fight, but cannot observe..."
: "There is nothing more obvious then a "Deceptive" Spy"
: "and so ends the curious incident of the engie in the night time"
: "Bad spies are common, Good ones are rare, therefore it is in the former that you fall!"
:"no ghost need apply"

After a large number of kills/assists on a short time: "When you have eliminated the enemy, what ever remains must be a failure! Haha!"
"I am the Medic, it is my business to stop your business"

Winner!

Vivhero--
When Dominating
Scout: "Dominated! Can't run now can ya ya poser?"
Soldier: "Keep lobbing rockets brotha, I can eat them up!"
Pyro: "Oh man! Your like a big walkin' Healthpack!"
Heavy: "Ya wanna eat fatty? Hope ya like fish, I got seconds when ya come back!"
Engineer: "Drink it up cowboy!"
Demoman: "Aim always beats spam!"
Spy: "COme on ya spook, disappear! Try it!"
Medic: "Ya won't be needed here doc!"
Sniper: "No matter how high the tower is, ya still get beat by a fish like a moron!"

Toying with Sets: Taunts and Voicelines

TF2 is full of item sets, and some item sets, when you wear them, affect the Merc's behavior. Whether this translates to silly voicelines (Heavy is prettiest princess!) or silly behavior (Thriller Dancing) or just something else changes depending on sets, but generally it introduces some new ways for the Mercs to make us laugh.

So I had this idea: what if any given class had been released with a particular set as their default outfit and weapons? Obviously, this would affect the way the players thought about the characters and change the way the characters were written. What if the Sniper was British Expat in Saudi Arabia instead of an Australian? What if the Scout was a bankrobber?  How would it affect their domination lines? How would it affect all of their lines?

For example, I look at the Riot Demoman set and I imagined that the Demoman, rather than being a black Scottish Cyclops, was a black, drunk Scottish Cyclops policeman, and wrote a handful of lines to match.
Here's a selection:
"Die! In the name of the law!"
"I'm a police Officer! I'll leave you in pieces!"
"What's that? Po-lease brutalize me? With pleasure!"
"I'm a loose cannon with nothing left to lose!"
"You have the right to remain dead."
"If you cannot afford a coffin, one will be provided for you."
"What's all this, then?"

"I need this point for police business!"
"This is being held for evidence!"

This is something I intend to do for a handful of sets as I like, and to seek help in doing from the SPUF! Leave a comment with a handful of unique voice lines for your favorite Subclass!

Meet the Dumpster Diver/ TF2 Voice-overs

This is easily the greatest SFM video I've seen since the program started. Well written, original, wonderfully animated, choreographed, and best off all, it takes that hideous Dumpster Diver set and makes it into easily the Baddest Bad Thing ever. I won't go as murder-house crazy as one poster (who threatened to eat a stew made of his own pubes if it didn't win a Saxxy), but seriously, if this doesn't win a Saxxy it will be because the world was destroyed by horrible fun-hating creatures from beyond the stars.

Something about this video lead me to start thinking about how voice acting is used in SFM. The way he mutes Merasmus and the Soldier's conversation not only sells the idea that you're eavesdropping, but it also breaks up the audio so that the fact that it's going to be recycled lines that are pitch-for-pitch identical to the stuff in the game is not as distracting.

 The voice acting in TF2, while comedy gold, isn't really performed to be conversational, which means that even sentences that grammatically work as dialog sound off. These aren't even really meant to be dialog--they're background noise. Hilarious, well-written background noise, but mostly it's stuff to give TF2's combat a little sonic texture. When they're used in Source Filmmaker videos, there is often an uncanny valley effect: the words don't quite match up with the situation. This, of course, gets worse for TF2 fans; we've heard all this audio a billion times, so we know exactly where every line comes from and it tends to really remind me that you don't have access to the original voice actors.

Of course, it's not really that bad of a problem, and I cannot say that it genuinely detracts from a movie's overall quality. But it's something to be aware of, I guess. Listen to your audio really closely when you add it.

Ask yourself some questions:

 "What was the VO intended for--does it match the emotional relationship with my usage?"
 For example, although two lines may be written down as "Help me!" One may be frustrated, while the other is desperate. The Engineer shouting "I need some doggone help!" sounds angry, as though he's tired of being the only one on the point. The Spy shouting "I require assistance!" sounds a little more needy, but it's such a long sentence compared to "Help!" it diminishes his desperation.

"Can I edit this VO to make it fit better?"
Use editing software to change up dialog lines. Minor changes are usually better than major ones--add a tenth of a second to simulate a pause here, slightly change the pitch to alter the inflection there. Sometimes you can make Frankenlines by editing two together, but I don't know if that's going to sound great every time

"Do I need this audio?"
People tend to overuse audio because they have access to it. But watch these videos: The Mac promotional video, the Mann Vs. Machine promotional video, the Engineer Update promotional video. Three videos, and each one has one VO part in it, and none of them uses anything more than incidental audio.

The community's familiarity with the voice acting means that unless you use that audio in a really, really novel way, it's going to sound robotic to them. These are jokes they've already heard, so unless it's absolutely necessary to the scene, it's probably better to limit yourself to one, or let your acting do the talking.

"Can I get someone else to do it?"
Write some original dialog for your scene and see if you can't get someone else to perform it. Even if the actor is completely terrible, the novelty of original dialog might bring your video up! And sometimes, you might get lucky with some great material or something. Who knows?

The Necromedicon

The Necromedicon
Level Undead Medigun

On Ubercharge: Allies in an AOE reduced to zero HP become zombie mercs.

Zombie Merc:
On death, the zombie's respawn counter begins but they continue playing as a Zombie Merc. If they survive until their respawn counter reaches zero, they're respawned in their current location*.

Zombie mercs have 75 HP to start, but they begin to passively heal the longer they stand near the medic. Zombies cannot interact with objectives (they cannot block or capture points, carry intel, or push carts).

When the Charge ends, all zombies begin to degrade at a rate of 10HP per second, but they will still respawn at their location*. If the Medic dies at any point, all his zombies die. Zombies who die or degrade do not have their respawn times reset.

Zombies are limited to a vanilla Zombie Melee Weapon, which causes bleeding but otherwise shares its stats with the standard melee weapon (.6 swing speed, 64 damage).

*Live-Respawn is subject to change depending on whether or not it's possible in-engine and proves balanced.

Suggestions? Drop me a line, tell me what you think!