Essay Proposal

My essay proposal is to critically analyse the production design of the computer game Team Fortress 2.

The main reasoning behind why I propose to analyse the production design of this particular game is due to many reasons:

• The game's influence is derived from conventional early 20th century commercial illustration, in addition to 1960's industrial design elements. This compliments the work on my blog that relates to the Time Machine. (Basically, I'm still in the same time period)
• The art style is, to put it boldly, a unique choice compared to other conventional games/films. It utilises specific rendering techniques in order to reflect the illustrations it's inspired from. Adequately named "Illustrative Rendering"
• Although the core elements of the game are complete, the development of the game is, in a certain way, still ongoing. The game today still produces many major updates to reflect with real-time events, most recently a Scream-Fortress update, that added elements to the game to reflect the event of Halloween.
• Although I haven't yet found a physical published source, the game has a large number of online sources that discuss the production of the game, from videos to presentations to articles, interviews and online publications. In particular, the official blog of Team Fortress 2 is a goldmine of information relating to design choices and production of the game, it will be an excellent source of information to write an essay about.

Initial sources of information:

http://www.valvesoftware.com/games/tf2.html
http://www.teamfortress.com
http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications.html
http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2007/NPAR07_IllustrativeRenderingInTeamFortress2.pdf
http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=4338
http://halcyonrealms.com/animation/the-art-of-team-fortress-2/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._C._Leyendecker - one of the influences on TF2's design