Podcast – Work In Progress

If it’s true that fortunes favors the brave, Eric Ruth must be a lion. As an indy developer he’s authored a large number of demakes (a pixelated game that borrows core style or gameplay elements from another game). Most noteworthy are Team Fortress Arcade and Pixel Force: Left 4 Dead.

It has been a few years since I last spoke to Eric and in that time he’s been busy. A project that had Valve interested in his work (though it ultimately fell through) and a stint at Riot Games (home of League of Legends) had him traveling across the county.  Now he’s settled down, with some new friends, to make his own original game.

This is the first in a series where we talk to the creators and hosts of shows featured on thePodKast.com, the gaming podcast network.

Adam “Torkz” from ReachCast, Dustin “Dust Storm” from Podtacular, Jon Shute from How to Murder Time and John “Agro” from KritzKast take a look at what made the first pick up the microphones and what it is that drives them to come back week after week for the entertainment of others.

See part two of this series on Podtacular.

For Australians there’s really only one TF2 community and that’s ozfortress. If you’re part of ozfortress  there’s a chance you already know the name Tim Bagheri but if you don’t then I’m sure you’ll know him by his nick, wm or WarMaster. He certainly lives up to that nickname. With his assistance ozfortress runs cluster of active leagues, cups and charity events. For most people this would take up enough of their time. For Tim it’s just the start. He is also involved with Gamers United and TF2Mixup Match.

GU has a presence right across the world. Their servers and services extend from Australasia to Europe, South Africa and North America. KritzKast servers are provided by GU so I have a vested interest in their success too. It may just be that GamersUnited is the big brother who went out into the world and came back laden with stories and wisdom. In many ways that describes Tim too. They have recently taken on a new skin, a new look for old gaming hands.

In this first interview we talk to wm about all the works he’s been involved with and what we can expect from him later this year.

We finally put PubComp to bed in this episode of WiP. The ambitious attempt to create a web and server system that would allow dramatic customization of competitive play on the fly is a pipe dream many of us have shared. It was not to be. This conversation with the lead SourceMod coder, Vincenator, stands as a warning against placing too much control of a project in one man’s hands. With proprietary solutions shared between Parable and EOReality the project came within days of completion before it failed to finish.

Vincenator stays upbeat. The hard work has been done and his code is now in the hands of the public. It remains to be seen if anyone else will pick it up. For his part he is embarking on a career in coding. I hope he stays in the gaming space and comes back with a new project for us to follow.

When you create a solution for TF2 players to come together and scrim you’d better not assume the project is ever done. No matter how good your solution is the players who use it day in and day out will find faults. If you let those faults fester they’ll grate on the players and eventually someone will step forward with a solution of their own. Marty thinks he’s that guy. Together with a coder their small team has been working in the shadows to bring TF2center.com to life. It is their hope that they can gather the comments and wishes of the TF2 community to provide an alternative to the unloved TF2lobby.

In this first interview I talk to Marty about the ideas they have for TF2center, how they hope to bring about change in just a few short months and what ground work they’ve laid down so far. He talks about the desire for player ranking and the need for a web designer with user interface skills. If you’d like to get involved with this project Marty can be contacted on his gmail, or you can drop a him a message in reddit.

Intro/outro created for WIP by Cryogenetic.

When I first started chatting to Chris Shetter he was trailing off his career in eSports casting. For years he’d struggled to see the results from all his efforts in shoutcasting and was looking for ‘another way’ to make it fun again. Before this most recent chat we’d seen him pretty much give it all up. He’d moved with his wife to Seattle so even the “dc” moniker no longer held true.

Talking to him now it is as if he’d never left the scene though in reality he hadn’t. Choosing to blog sporadically about events in eSports that he found to be particularly irksome he’d kept a hand in. Now he’s drawing some old friends back together and exercising coding muscles to bring about a completely new eSports web service mm1.fm. Sticking to an audio only output he’s creating a web service that’ll run 24/7 gaming audio using a collection of current shows. Interrupting every so often with news updates from all aspects of gaming. The concept he likens to sports radio and is a far departure from the visual feasts of his tgbf.tv days.

Intro/outro created for WIP by Cryogenetic.

i46 was a pretty big deal for everyone who either attended or watched the streams from the UK’s largest LAN party, hosted by Multiplay in Telford. That statement is true for a great many people (500+ listed Team Fortress 2 players under one roof including two visiting teams from NA) but especially so for Comedian and his merry band of shoutcasters representing VanillaTV. We take this chance to recap some of the things that went absolutely according to plan,  including the 1milliion viewers on their twitch.tv live stream, as well as the things that didn’t like the day1 audio issues.

i46 may have contributed to the requirement for a slipstreamed method of editing, encoding and uploading video on demands (VODs) for VanillaTV. Comedian takes us through the current solution they have in place. It appears that Skyride has invested a great deal of time creating software to do the task of many men hours. Not to let his new found skills go to waste he’s now turning his attentions to Open Broadcast Software (OBS). This open source solution for live streaming stands as a new, cleaner and faster streaming solution with a small footprint allowing the casts play at a much higher quality level. Needless to say VanillaTV are looking to it rather than the paid-for alternative, XSplit, as the future of eSports casting. Skyride himself is working on plug-ins and has produced a rather nifty how-to for other casters.

Sadly it’s not all sweetness and light in the land of eSports casting. VanillaTV’s North American counterpart eXtelevision has undergone some dramatic upheavals this week. With  some of the 6v6 casters looking to move out from the shadow of the main man Jeff eXtine. Comedian explains the position he was placed in and why he’s chosen to offer VanillaTV as a new home for these leavers.  In doing so the American market opens up to him but at what cost to his friendship?

Lastly Comedian takes us through their hopes and plans for European conquest. Both Dreamhack in Sweden and Assembly in Finland are possibilities for 6v6 TF2 events though it’s impossible to ignore the problems that lay ahead in realising those dreams.

VanillaTV has many stars. The Team Fortress 2 shoutcasting site seems to collect tallent in much the same way Valve Software do. Not only has CUBE been able to find his own place but he’s rapidly reshaping their YouTube to page.

CUBE was with the original TFTV crew but initially decided not to come over to VanillaTF2 when VanillaTV was being formed. Since then he’s joined (arguably) the strongest Highlander team in Europe, SNSD. The team have won everything they’ve entered but in his opinion the competition is catching up.

Under his guidance their YouTube channel has changed from a repository of previous live shows into being a collection of brand new crafted content specifically for drawing in new subscribers; informing and teaching the public the finer points of competitive game-play.

The three new video sets are:

Insights – digging into an individual protagonist’s experience of a TF2 match

Analysis – an expert breaks down retrospectively some of the plays in a match

Frag movie review – frag movie makers critiquing the best frag movies the community has to offer

Intro/outro created for WIP by Cryogenetic.

Some projects WIP follows measure their progress on a daily basis, others weekly. Gang Garrison 2 feels rushed if they push out more than two major updates a year.

That said I know how they feel. This interview was recorded in December of 2011 and one thing or another has kept me from releasing it till now. The major 2.4 update happened for gg2 in October. The release combined a new play mode with greatly enhanced mod intergration.

Dual King of the Hill, requiring a team to hold their own point while taking the other team’s before the timer starts to go down, is an expansion on the standard KOTH mode associated with Team Fortress 2 the game’s spiritual forefather.

Possibly the most important part of this big update comes in the form of the mod update. Lead gg2 developer, Psychopath takes us through the benefits of the new open format for map makers and modders.

Intro/outro created for WIP by Cryogenetic.

In the gap between Thanksgiving and Christmas every day is crammed full of everything happening all at the same time. VanillaTV have a habit of making every day feel like that. When WIP last talked to them they were finishing up i43 so we start this show from there.

Comedian opens himself up on reddit to an AMA (ask me anything) though it seems unnecessary; he’s so open and truly excited by everything he’s doing he could easily be living an AMA everyday. In fact when South Africa’s own TF2 community interviewed him they have to pair him off with Salamancer to get any exclusive content.

That’s the thing with streaming live content, it’s addictive. As Comedian puts it, you’ve got to enjoy the spotlight at least a little. Little wonder then that VanillaTV is looking to other forms of media than the live shoutcasting, namely podcasting. With no current competition in the European market this can only be a smart move for them. Another smart move was Byte patching tings up with eSports hero,  ThePledge. Now those two are back on friendly terms vtv has an excellent new caster on their roster and everyone is happy.

One of the more interesting moves for vtv was away from their video streaming partners, TwitchTV. Comedian discusses the thoughts behind the jump to own3d.tv and the benfits it provides in combinations for an increased presence on YouTube.

I personally feel in some way responsible for Comedian meeting Ruskeydoo, the 3D artist behind so many TF2 items (including the KritzKast Lo-Fi Longwave). With that encounter a sketch on a napkin has turned into the living, breathing model of a unicorn strapped to spy’s head. On its mention Comedian almost breaks down with pleasure, I can see why. The hat is ultra dopey looking but caries the charm of random excitement of the whole VanillaTF2 team. While no promises have been made that it will make it into the game yet, it stands a reasonable chance even on its own merits.

Not content with hats, WIP has a second exclusive from this chat. VanillaTV are organizing their very own two-day TF2 cup.  Sometime in the next couple of months we’ll see two tiers of players battling it out to win mousemats designed by Torden. I’ve not seen them yet but I have a suspicion unicorns may be involved

Intro/outro sampled from Daddy_Scrabble's "Monkeys have arrived". Used under CC Licen