What would get your ass out of retirement?

[JackBauer]

Just for one single game? Just for a few weeks?

Is there anything that would make you play ff again?

like taking part in a ff world cup (like TFCWC)? one last salute in a clan war just to get the feel of competitiveness one last time again? reuniting with your old clan and pals just to play your nemesis one more time?

or if there was a bigger active scene and an active clan scene in general?

or are you done with FF for good?

[Iggy]

I'm not "retired"...... but if AE got back together, I'd love it!

[rdrt]

MAKE FF GREAT AGAIN

[KubeDawg]

A new FF.

[caesium]

fortress, forever.

[oaties]

Pickups. Old friends coming back to pickups.

[tatuajesde]

a new FF

[vatterin]

The gap of experience and skill is just too great for new people to join and old people to return. I've tried coming back to play only to get wrecked and not enjoy the game. I have more fun playing games that aren't the same 4 vs 4 against stacked teams fests.

[gparrel]

Originally Posted by tatuajesde

a new FF

haha this.

[trepid_jon]

Originally Posted by gparrel

haha this.

It's happening. We're at the very beginning, but it's happening.

I finally managed to become a full time indie gamemaker and whatnot. No more job to job, contract to contract mess for me. So now I'm free to do whatever I want to do. And one thing I want to do is make FF. Annnnd I didn't do it alone.

Will be in the full swing of things by the new year, technically by next week but hey whatever hah. Time to ramp up, plan stuff, get started.

And the best part is, everyone's invited!

[JackBauer]

Originally Posted by trepid_jon

It's happening. We're at the very beginning, but it's happening.

I finally managed to become a full time indie gamemaker and whatnot. No more job to job, contract to contract mess for me. So now I'm free to do whatever I want to do. And one thing I want to do is make FF. Annnnd I didn't do it alone.

Will be in the full swing of things by the new year, technically by next week but hey whatever hah. Time to ramp up, plan stuff, get started.

And the best part is, everyone's invited!

Hope you are being serious pal. This ain't nothing to fuck with.

[trepid_jon]

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.

[cobol]

Originally Posted by JackBauer

Just for one single game? Just for a few weeks?

Is there anything that would make you play ff again?

like taking part in a ff world cup (like TFCWC)? one last salute in a clan war just to get the feel of competitiveness one last time again? reuniting with your old clan and pals just to play your nemesis one more time?

or if there was a bigger active scene and an active clan scene in general?

or are you done with FF for good?

Bring on part 2

[trepid_jon]

Maybe some Vive support in the new FF?

https://www.instagram.com/p/BN7ZWsQD...n-by=trepidjon

Watch my instagram for more as time goes on, right now it's early just design stuff...

[homie in reboks']

Originally Posted by trepid_jon

Maybe some Vive support in the new FF?

https://www.instagram.com/p/BN7ZWsQD...n-by=trepidjon

Watch my instagram for more as time goes on, right now it's early just design stuff...

What the fuck?

[trepid_jon]

Originally Posted by homie in reboks'

What the fuck?

Step 1: load FF with the Vive / in VR https://www.instagram.com/p/BOeMVbjjghM/

Step 2: ????

Lots to figure out.

Keep in mind, VR is just one more way to play, the focus will always be PC mouse and keyboard, especially while all this new stuff is so fresh.

So much potential for a game like FF with all this new tech, like programmable GPU stuff aka nvidia gameworks, or like cloud computing aka improbable spatial, or like photogrammetry aka insert yourself as a character.

VR is just one of many new things to think about compared to when we started in 2004. I mean, even the mobile market is nuts, imagine if you could use your tablet to assist you in FF matches or maybe at least spectating in-game (that'd be cheaper bandwidth-wise than full audio and video streaming).

But don't mind me, I'm just rambling before sleep haha

[homie in reboks']

This does not make VR look appealing to me.

GoPro footage of you wandering around a parking lot doesn't make me think, "Wow! This looks super cool!" I'd prefer to see some insight on the integration of the controls; specifically how the in-game movement correlates to your physical movement.

If you're trying to advertise VR as the next cool thing this didn't work for me. Maybe it'll work for someone, though.

Not trying to rain on your parade, but I'd really prefer a much more grounded approach to creating a new Fortress style game. One based in the reality of the current situation.

I personally don't think it's fair to everyone that actually plays and develops the game when you come in here and layout all these grandiose plans of the mythical mystical magical FF2. And then disappear for a year only to come back after you release your own game. Honestly, to me, it feels like some smoke and mirrors just to drum up support for your Noodle Western game Love Lick Lactate or whatever.

You've found a cool new thing, Virtual Reality, that's great. And it's absolutely fantastic that you're willing to invest your free time and effort into this game/genre. Squeek and Aftershok both already do that, and they're the sole reason why the game still lives and breathes. But give us something tangible. Give us a general timeline of development. Give us your ideas for controller integration (which you have in another thread). Give us more ideas of how to appeal to the mainstream and approach the niche Fortress player-base. Give us more than silhouettes and logos. Give us more than 4 second videos and the exclamations of VR as 'the next big thing'.

And honestly thanks. It's always nice to see people willing to support this game and its future iterations. Also, good luck.