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Apple Games has published a new feature article on Team Fortress 2, the team based first person shooter from Valve Software. Apple's article combines an overview of the game's features with commentary from co-creator and project lead, Robin Walker. The feature also offers information about the game's classes, back story, and strategies for success in each of the six available modes.

To develop the game’s art style, Walker’s team turned to another icon who might seem out of place in an article about a first-person shooter: Norman Rockwell, who, along with such predecessors as Dean Cornwell and J.C. Leyendecker, established a specific tone for early-to-mid 20th century art. “Good art direction doesn’t just look good, it should also solve functional problems for your players,” Walker notes.

He cites an example of that: “A player meeting another player in the game needs to be able to rapidly extract a set of information from the in-game representation of that other player, such as ‘What team is the player on?’ ‘What class is the player?’ ‘What weapon is the player using right now?’ One of the things we’d identified in our testing was the importance of silhouettes for identification purposes: they’re color agnostic and work at extreme ranges, under widely varying lighting conditions. And it helped if the silhouettes were very clean.”

Apple Games: Team Fortress 2

Valve Software

Team Fortress 2

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