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PYROS SMISSMAS SWEATER 🥺 I love pyro

TOWER 57! IT! IS! DONE! 

Yeah, Tower 57 is finally out. As a backer I’ve had the pleasure of playing it a couple times by now, first its alpha (or beta?) build, and now the final release one week early. I gotta say I still cry a bit that they took out the train level the alpha opened up with, but everything else makes up for it.

If you’ve missed the first three times I’ve talked about Tower 57 on the blog (not to mention it was the first games feature in Retronator Magazine), let me just say it’s a twin stick shooter (or WASD + mouse shooter) with gorgeous art by Thomas ‘Cyangmou’ Feichtmeir. Marco ‘Benitosub’ Pappalardo did the coding part of the equation and over the last 2 years since the game was funded on Kickstarter, they’ve put together a 16-bit era masterpiece that makes Amiga and Neo Geo two very proud parents.

I’m not too deep into the game yet, but the thing is already oozing with content. The art speaks for itself, but the variety of characters, weapons, items, upgrades, and things to do in the world is just insane for a 2-person team. I even played darts in the game, for fuck’s sake it’s like GTA!!!

The trailer released a few weeks ago explains everything very well:

And if that wasn’t enough to drool over, we also got a special animated release trailer just now:

Tower 57, the game that keeps on giving. 

Female Team Fortress 2 Classes Were Almost Official

Valve artist Drew Wolf has released a new website, which contains a variety of concept artwork from Valve games such as Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2. One of these sets of concept art found on his website were numerous designs for female TF2 classes.

An internal pitch project aimed to bring female characters to the cast of Team Fortress 2.

I was responsible for story, character development and visual design. With the exception of their class function, It was important that each design presented an entirely new character. I wanted to these characters to live on their own and add dimension to the current roster of in-game characters. The goal of the project was to dive deep into possibilities and facilitate creative discussion.

For those curious, here is the video in question:

First, this is all speculation on my part. I don’t currently work for Valve, and definitely wasn’t around for the early TF2 years, so I really only have my guesses to go on. That said, think back to 2011, 4 years after TF2 launched. TF2 becomes a free to play game supported by microtransactions. Suddenly, certain elements of the game suddenly gain a lot of importance.

When you buy a game, you usually get a physical disc or a download code and have to download the entire game before playing it. The amount of time it takes to download that data isn’t very important - the publisher already has your money. However, with a F2P game that download time suddenly does matter - the longer the download goes on, the more likely person waiting for the game gives up and quits. The longer it takes to get to the fun part, the more likely the person waiting gives up and quits. Most F2P games today have broken their downloads up over time - there’s some kind of small initial download, and then some supplemental download that you get after running the first download and installing. Typically, you get a little gameplay with that first download and the rest of the data is streamed in the background while you play the tutorial.

In addition to this consideration, F2P games absolutely try to target as many players as possible. They purposely try to make sure the game can run on as broad a set of computers as possible in order to maximize their potential player and customer base. As such, this means that really high quality assets like animation and textures are downgraded by default in order to improve performance on midspec and minspec machines - because you don’t want people spending time downloading assets they mostly won’t be using. Instead, you can set aside high quality textures and such as a separate (free) download for the dedicated players who really want them and have already bought into the game. 

Clearly, some of TF2′s assets are less detailed. These were changes that was done deliberately - at some point in time, artists actually crafted new asset data for this. There’s a lot less animation data needed because there’s fewer moving parts. The specular maps on a lot of materials were turned down or simplified for higher compression. There were textures that were simplified and downgraded for more space. I suspect that it’s because of the game’s shift to F2P, both to reduce the download size and to help improve overall performance for mid and min spec players at the expense of the top end.

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