Robin Walker
The Former TF Newswire's First Interview.
— The PF Staff
Hello everyone, thanks for stopping in. This section of the Newswire will be like no other you will find in the TF world. I wanted to do
something that hadn't been done in the TF community before. Initially I was going to have my own separate page for interviews. I
found out that Spif only lived a few miles from me and it took off from there. I will not boast of being the Geraldo of the TF
community, I am not a journalist. What I hope you will find is some interesting information about some of the people who make up
our "not so little" anymore community. For my first interview I wanted to get right to the heart of Team Fortress, so I headed down
under, and Robin Walker from Team Fortress Software was gracious enough to be our first interview.
HURT:
First off, Id like to thank you for taking time to do this interview.
Let's start off by telling me a little about yourself. Age?, family,
schooling.
ROBIN:
I'm 21. I grew up in a forest in the middle of nowhere, without
a TV and with a computer.
I've got an elder brother who's working as a programmer
in singapore, and runs a mud called Archon in his spare time,
and I've got a younger sister who's halfway through her tertiary
education.
I completed 1/2 of my 3 year computer science course before
deferring. I worked for a year programming for NEC. Halfway
through that, John and I began work on TF in our spare time.
By the end of that year, interest in TF, both from the players
and from gaming companies, was good enough that we thought
we could actually make a living of it.
HURT:
With Team fortress having little income coming in from donations,
how does the TFS team make it day to day?
ROBIN:
Money lent to the company by people who believe in us enough
to risk their money, basically :)
HURT:
Can you give us an idea of how the Team Fortress idea was born?
what was your inspiration to start this project (or something like that)
ROBIN:
I can't think of any one inspirational thing... by the time the qc
compiler was released, we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted.
Hexen definitely influenced the class structure... we played a lot of
co-op Hexen, and loved the way the differences in the classes made
the teamplay aspects more important.
The team vs team orientation, and the name, of TF was pretty much
based upon an old Doom map called "fortress". We got it off a friend
of a friend, etc, so I'm not sure who made it... basically it was just
two fortresses, each with 3 rooms. Only the first room in each base
was open at the start. The goal was to press all four buttons in
room 1, which opened room 2, then press four more buttons in
room 2, which opened room 3, and then press the end level button
in room 3. And at the same time, prevent the enemy "team" (2
players per team of course :) from doing the same thing to you.
It was a great way to play Doom... and it certainly influenced TF.
HURT:
Even though you are the most visible member of TFS, please tell us who
all the members of the team are and what area of the project
do they work on.
ROBIN:
John : Original Designer and Programmer.
John also did several well known TF maps, such as 2fort4.
He's working on the AI and Map Code design for our future
projects, which will be seen in TFII. He'll be sharing the TFII
coding with Robin.
Robin: Original Designer and Programmer.
He's working on TFII design. He'll be sharing the TFII coding
with John. He'll also be working on some TF II maps.
Ian : Original Designer. Biz Guy. In TF 1, he basically filled every
hole we had... did textures/models/sounds for us. He also did
the TF Demo Competition map.
Futurewise, he's working on map design, and is the closest thing
we've got to a Manager.
Antony: Programmer. He wrote rvis and has worked on some other internal
programs. He'll be working on any internal apps we need,
and working to earn us some money thru outside programming
contracts.
Damian: Visual Designer and Media Director. He scripted and storyboarded
the TF Promo for TF 2.5. He's working on visual design for
TFII, and the script for our other product.
Jamie: Map Designer. Modeller. He's worked on some maps for our
other product. He's returning to Canada to do his modelling
course, and the end of which he plans to return and work
full time as a modeller.
HURT:
As we are at the 1st anniversary of TF, is this where you expected
to be 1 year ago?
ROBIN:
Not at all :)
TF was written because it was the patch we wanted to play... it
never occurred to us that it would become popular, let alone as
popular as it has.
And the idea that we'd be able to turn it it a career was even
less on our minds. We've been hacking games as a hobby for
long time now, but it's always been just that... a hobby.
HURT:
Give us what a typical day consists of at TFS.
ROBIN:
I don't think we actually have any typical days at TFS...
we work our own hours, and rely on each other's honesty
to work as much as we think is necessary. Since we're all
working on something we enjoy, it's not too much of
a problem.
HURT:
On the Team Fortress page, you mention that TFS is working
currently on TF for quake 2.
You go on to say that you are also working on a "commercial" project.
Could you tell us a little bit about that one.
ROBIN:
Priorities have shifted recently... we're now working more on TFII
than we are on Wrong/Kanon (the two inhouse names we have for
the commercial product).
I'm not going to say much, mainly because I dislike self-promotion,
and because I hate to say something and then not deliver it... and
Wrong is most definitely still in design.
Basically, TFII will be aimed at providing a great multiplayer team
based game... with John's AI design it should provide fun single
and co-op play. Wrong is aimed squarely at the single player
and co-op (with a small number of ppl). It's emphasis will be
on a strong plot with squad-based combat. Damian's a film grad...
story and cinematics are what he does, and with the 2.5 promo,
I think you can agree he does it well. The combat and the game
will be designed by the same designers as TF... we'll be trying to
keep the same emphasis on interesting goals and obstacles that
TF has.
HURT:
How do you get your information about Quake 2 so that you have an
idea what you can and can't do?
ROBIN:
We guess, and we rely on info garnered from conversations with
id employees. Design-wise, we don't worry too much about
implementation at the moment... we just assume we can do
everything the way we want, and keep in mind a few alternatives
if we find we can't do things exactly the way we hoped.
We got some experience with this in TF 1, when porting things
from LAN to Net to QW.
HURT:
With the advances in Q2, what new exciting things does that mean
for TF as far as maps, goals.
ROBIN:
Ok, the map code is still in design, so I don't want to say too much
about it for fear of not delivering. TF2 map code should be easier
to use than TF1 map code, because it's actual code... it's not something
forced into the map entities, which really was a horrible way of doing
things... unavoidable in quake1 tho.
For the more programming inclined, TF2 map code should be far more
powerful than TF1 map code, and in some ways, even more powerful
than quakec was in quake1.
HURT:
I know that the TF2 project is still very young, but can you tell
us about any ideas that are being looked into as far as Team Fortress 2.
ROBIN:
Again, like the map code, TF2 is still in design, so anything I say
may not make it into the release. TF2 will be aimed at providing
much better communication in teams, and allowing larger battles
to work. It should also be playable in single player, or co-op
vs computer.
It won't be a simple port of TF1 to quake2. Classes will be different,
although there'll certainly be similarities in them... anyone who's
tried to design modern-warfare classes without making them seem
too much like TF's will tell you how hard it is to do :)
Apart from the standard TF2 multiplayer maps, TF2 will have
"TF Campaigns", which are a few maps tied together by a
specific plot. The map code design supports the ability for maps
to be able to read/write to a campaign cfg file, enabling maps to
store the finishing state of previous maps, and use them to
alter maps later on in the campaign.
So, a losing team in the first skirmish of a campaign might
find they've lost some of their base in a later battle... etc.
And finally, I'll put in my one and only plug for donations...
we will be regularly mailing info on the status of TF 2, among
other things, to all those who donate(d).
HURT:
With the initial slow reaction to the donation idea, can we
expect a different way for you to re-coup some of your time and expense on
TF 2? Like a subscription type thing, or maybe registering.
ROBIN:
I'm not the Biz Guy... that's Ian's job.
Currently, the plan is to package TFII and sell it in stores.
This will enable you to play single/multiplayer games, and
will provide you with 3 or 4 TF "Campaigns".
You'll also be able to download everything you need to
play TF2 on the net from the TF www page... but this
won't enable you to be able to play Campaigns.
All this could change though.
HURT:
What is your favorite and least favorite things about Team
Fortress?
ROBIN:
Favourite: The spy... he's such an interesting class, completely unlike
any other class/character in any patch.
Least Favourite: Players who still think frags are in any way important
in a TF game.
HURT:
What was the last straw that caused TFS to pull the items out of 2.6?
ROBIN:
The 2.6 decision was misinterpreted a bit. The email _volume_ was the
final straw... but it didn't have much to do with the decision really.
After 2.5 we knew we had to slow down a bit so we could work on TFII
and Wrong. Unfortunately, TF was still getting more popular... if
anything it jumped a lot after the 2.5 release, which made dropping it a
lot harder to do that we thought. The patch is big now, and any change to
it has repercussions, which take time to work out... and that's the main
reason 2.6's additions were removed.
It'd take at least a month of testing before the 2.6 additions were
stable enough to be happy with them, and during that time, we'd find a few
more things which we'd want to add... basically, we had to draw a line
somewhere and stick by it. It was a sudden decision when it came, but not
one we regret... I think TFII and Wrong will be all the better for it.
HURT:
Any closing comments?
ROBIN:
I'd like to thank many ppl, but I don't want to name them because
I'll definitely leave out ppl who deserve to be named. So, I'd just
like to thank everyone in general, especially the www ppl who've
supported TF for the last year, the TF clans and players who've
played it, and most especially the map makers who've contributed
so much of their time and energy to it.
Hope to see you on a TF II server!
Robin.
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