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.