The Marksman's Insight - Team Fortress 2

Check out one of my latest projects over at the Steam workshop, creating items for Team Fortress 2 - Rate and favourite!

The Marksman's Insight


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Essay Update

Finished my essay a few days ago, thought I make a quick post about it. My essay explores the production design of Valve's 'Team Fortress 2', a classed based multilayer game released in 2007 as part of the Orange Box package. Since the games' release, there's been a total of 97 updates for the game, 97! That's roughly one update per week - talk about supporting your product.



As mentioned before, the visual style changed dramatically throughout development, later favouring a cartoon 50s - 60s industrial look with key design and gameplay issues in mind, such as the need to quickly identify character classes from each other. Thus, some areas I looked at was their inspiration for the art style such as rim highlighting, character design lead by silhouettes and impressionistic environments.

I'm a little up on the word count, which I hope is fine. Other than that, I quite enjoyed writing the essay learning the way in which Valve approach their games in production design.

Essay Ideas

With out written assignment exploring the creative process design behind one film/computer game, I've had a number of ideas with films such as Pixar's 'Wall-E' as well as the wide range games all with their own unique creative and design challenges. A prime example is Bioware's immense world of 'Mass Effect', where their creative process was led entirely by constructing a history, lore and narrative of an entire galaxy, explaining each and every detail of the nature of new worlds to the mechanics of every vehicle. The lengths of which they've gone to is remarkable with an entirely dedicated codex built into the game.

Ultimately, I'm settling on the idea of basing my essay on Valve's 'Team Fortress 2', a multiplayer first person shooter with a very distinct art style. Undergoing 10 years of design and production before finally releasing in October 2007, the game's visual style has changed dramatically over development.

Early Development

Final Result


The core design philosophy of Valve is very inspiring going into great depths with their design and aesthetic choices. To this day, Valve has continued to support Team Fortress 2 with substantial updates that radically change the state of play, as well as producing a number of film shorts in bringing life and character to the game.



Valve fortunately keep a blog exploring some of their creative processes that are very insightful. You can find it here at http://www.teamfortress.com/.

Any thoughts are most welcome.