The VG Resource

Hi everyone! Dazz advised me to make a post here regarding a little project of mine: The 8-bit badge for Team Fortress 2!

About TF2

For anyone not familiar with Valve's "Team Fortress 2": It's the world's leading hat simulator, with an extensive hat-based economy mostly fueled by the creative minds of the community. Also it has some FPS elements, but nobody cares about those.

Creative players can submit their own item ideas to the TF2 Steam Workshop. Depending on the community feedback and depending on if Valve likes it, it has a chance of being included into the game in future updates. The creators get a split from the revenue created from Valve selling that item in their in-game store.

My Idea

My idea is fairly simple but I need a capable spriter in order to make it a reality: Create 8-bit sprites of all nine classes performing one of their taunts, create 3d models for the sprites and attach them to the class. Here is an example:



What I Need

- nine 8-bit sprites: One for each class performing a taunt, standing still with their signature weapon or performing another action
- dimensions: 16x16 or 32x32 pixels
- sprites use only three 8-bit colors (not counting background color), just like regular NES sprites (use NES color palette)
- one of the three colors needs to be the team color (RED and BLU)

I'll send screenshots of the taunts I find to be the most fitting for this purpose, but you're free to make suggestions of course.

I know the limitations may make it too hard to make compelling 8-bit versions of the expressive classes but try to work with it anyway. There's a limitation for the complexity of the model after all and the above prototype (which is a 16x16 pixel sprite) already fills up about 500 triangles of the max 1400 triangles. So choose wisely if you want to make 16x16 or 32x32 sprites. You'd save me a lot of headaches if you can work with just 16x16 pixels though.

Yes, you will only need to create the 8-bit sprites, I will make the models based on your sprites.

Monetary Compensation

This is an awkward question to answer, for one reason: I won't pay you directly, immediatly or at all. Before you call me a cheap ****, let me tell you that I instead offer you a 50/50 split of the revenue this item would create if it was accepted by Valve. This would mean that you could secure yourself a steady stream of big or small payments in the future by Valve if they include our item, but it also means that you could receive nothing at all for your hard work if the item simply doesn't get accepted. We will also not know if our item got accepted until after it got implemented into the game, which may take a while. Valve adds community items in large chunks, if our item gets accepted, it will most likely be added in the autumn update.

Because of the way the revenue can be split up, I would also need you to have a Steam account so I can allocate your part of the revenue to you. Ideally you should be a longtime member and have already spent some money on Steam, since I hear there are a lot of limitations with new and free users, like not being able to upload workshop entries, which may complicate things in the future.

Other Info

I plan to tackle this project in about six weeks since I have other obligations to take care of and a three-week vacation coming up soon, where I probably won't have a fast and steady internet connection most of the time.



Feel free to write to me if you have any questions or suggestions for this project.

P.S.: You'll get bonus points if you can manage to make the sprite for the spy look like the crab enemies from the Mario Bros. arcade.

I tried to do the scout. Do you like it?
I know it's not a taunt but I figured he jumps a lot, so I made him jump.

Looks pretty good! Only thing that bothers me a little bit is the right leg, looks kinda weird (I don't know what it is), but other than that, I really like it! Good job!

Maybe it doesn't have to be taunts necessarily, having the classes in mid action like that would be even better maybe, like the soldier rocket jumping, heavy firing his minigun or engy repairing his sentry.

If you still want to try out the taunts though, I attached a zip file with screenshots of the taunts I considered (since I'm dumb and I didn't see the attachment function the first time posting...). But like I said, I think those mid action sprites are probably a better idea than the taunt sprites.

granted i am several days late but i saw this just now

not a taunt (since i learned it's really hard to fit that type of detail into a small sprite with the NES color limits) but i attempted something for the soldier



it'd be pretty hard to get all of the detail of a taunt (or even a regular pose) in a small space like 16x16 and even in 32x32 it is pretty difficult, so i attempted to make it a regular pose; i exaggerated the size of the head a bit (as NES games tend to do) to actually provide any detail around there

here's 16x16 sprites of each class. I made alternates for the Demo (to make his skin its own color) and the Heavy (for sandvich instead of the minigun).


1x

EDIT:
I used TF2's palette to recolor the sprites so they fit. I also recolored the sprites to be in each color of paint. some look better than others, obviously.

The submissions look great so far!

I'll work on bringing all those to TF2, to see how they all look and to see if I can fit them all under the max triangle count of 1400 tris. It will take a while, since I won't have a good internet connection (or any at all...) in the next five days. After that I will decide, which sprites I will take.

Thank you all for the submissions!

Edit
Forgot to mention: If anyone else wants to submit their own sprites, you can still do it! Nothing is decided yet and additional submissions are still welcome.

Alright, I'm finally back.

It took me a while and it was not easy to make a choice, but I think I will ultimately go with Mit's submission. I like all submissions, but I like his in particular because of the detail he managed to squeeze into such small sprites.

I still created models for all submissions like I said I would; if you want, I could create reskins for TF2 using those models.

Good news everyone! The badge is finally released and it has received very positive ratings so far. You can find it here:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/fi...=300253411

If you like it, please upvote it and add it to your favourites! You would help get tf2 some much needed 8-bit-love.