Quote:
Originally Posted by JackBauer
Hope you are being serious pal. This ain't nothing to fuck with.  |
For sure.
If you want details I can share some.
Back in like 1998, some friends and I started making a Half-Life mod called Trepidation. We were on some shared HL site, but eventually got trepid.net and some old hosting plan. We never finished Trepidation, as it was like 4 games in one and none of us high school kids actually knew how to legitimately make and ship games, but we were close and had a big dev team as well as a pretty strong, growing community. When we got legit scared of being expelled from high school (because the singleplayer was basically like Die Hard set in a high school), we changed the game to only be one of the modes, the multiplayer werewolf hunt. Most of the team and community left, but we weren't expelled so WOOOHOOO right. Hah.
Fast forward to 2004, Trepidation still not out but Jesse and I kept Trepid going through mapping and reviews and articles and interviews, and on the old TF catacombs forums there were whispers leading up to real conversations and plans of sorta remaking TFC/QWTF, basically use the upcoming Half-Life 2 engine to make a Team Fortress game ourselves. Nobody had heard anything about TF2 in years, last we saw was some realistic warfare type game that we were excited for but weren't sure it was what we wanted (blah blah you all get why you're even here).
Jesse and I started making TFC:S, but not many people joined us. Instead, most people joined this over here, Fortress Forever, because it was organized well with a proper website of its own and it just had all the momentum and a lot of real talent on the dev team. Jesse and I joined the FF team in January 2005 as mappers. We fooled them with an eloquent email, they had no idea the chaos us trepids would bring haha.
Meanwhile, I had always been pursuing a gamedev career. Went to Full Sail, got a degree in gamemaking ooooohhhh aahhhhh, then got a job at Gearbox working on Brothers in Arms. Contract ended, but who cares I was on the FF team. And the retail Garry's Mod team briefly, but Jesse and I couldn't devote proper time there and decided to quit, focus on FF. Jesse focused on playing BF2 and enjoying college life instead, but I always stuck with FF as much as I could.
I started working on Stuntman Ignition at Paradigm Entertainment in 2006. FF released in September 2007.
All this time, I had never had an actual job programming even though I was a programmer with experience (thanks to FF and other modmaking) but just not a classically trained computer science guy. To this day I despise anyone who hates on me for not being a classic computer science guy, it's been a rough hurdle to overcome career-wise.
In November 2008, Paradigm shutdown because they had no idea how to utilize the talent at their disposal to do business properly, but what do I know I was just an hourly temp contract level designer for 2 years, programming a first person shooter by the end. By that point with FF, I had been programming instead of just mapping and had taken the reins to lead this FF beast into the great beyond, or whatever hah. Basically, almost the entire dev team was gone, because FF shipped and did ok whatever, but TF2 had most the TF players and blah blah blah, if FF didn't get a resurgence in development and beta testing it was dead for good. Much like now, except we've made it possible to slow build and never truly die just flop around getting CPR every now and then.
As lead, I proceeded to recruit heavily from the passionate community and attempted to be as active as possible, more than I had ever been. I knew I couldn't lead it on my own because time is relative, so squeek came on and basically took over, especially when I started working at a new startup game company in Dallas called Controlled Chaos. I pretty much ran out of free time, and I've never been as active with FF dev as I was pre-2009. I've always been around, and I'll help where I can and how I can, but it's been the squeek & co. show for a long time now as most of you know.
Fortress Forever, as far as I'm concerned and it seems mimicked with the other devs and the community as a whole, is just a passion project and will only officially die if we let it die.
AfterShock pretty much made the pyro update happen, for example. He's done a lot for FF for a really long time including leading before me, but this is an example of how the project we have here and what it's evolved into allows for continuous decentralized development with waves of resurgence whenever and however we want. We can do anything, we just need time and resources. We can scale from almost no dev to a ton of dev. It's pretty cool and I've never experienced anything like this in "real" game dev, the only thing that comes close is the stuff I own like Trepid. Most game companies have no idea, and that's fine with me if now it means a business advantage.
So back to finally becoming indie gamemaker...
I started a game publishing company in 2011 called Rich Pine, really it's anything apps and tech related. In 2013, four friends and I founded what we hoped would be the dream game company, pure gamedevs and mostly royalty-based revenue sharing so there's incentive to work on games forever, and we called that company Hatchlight. It is a DBA of Trepid, which has another DBA called Trepid Studios that is more of a general production company for games, film, music, any media, etc and able to act as production support for Rich Pine and Hatchlight, whatever whoever.
So here I am now after 18 years of the grind since high school finally able to run wild with these companies owned and operated by me and my friends. I got paid the other day to work on an unannounced project, but me getting paid means it's started. And since we launched Rescue Love Revenge in Steam Early Access last month, now we just gotta sell that game and the revenue from that will support anything else we want to do, which can include FF.
As far as I'm concerned, Trepid Studios will always work on FF because I'm not going anywhere and plenty of people involved in these indie companies are already involved in FF.
As long as we keep FF pure and free and not interfering with Valve by remaining Steam/Source friendly, we should be good to keep working as long as we want.
Most importantly, I personally have a passion to make some FF stuff that I never got around to. I believe in the core concept of TF and what we've created here with FF is just the beginning now that we have the power of Steam and a future so open to anything.