In early 2012 I spent a lot of time playing tennis with friends.
In early 2012 I spent a lot of time playing tennis with friends. We weren’t that good and we weren’t that competitive and most of the time we didn’t even play for points and when we did play for points we played silly games like bluff instead.
Bluff is a modified version of tennis. It’s way more silly. You have to try to trick the person next to you that you’re gonna hit the ball when you’re not: You have to fool them and catch them out and it’s a very funny game.
While we played we often chatted and when we finished playing we carried on chatting while we got some food and the bus home. Then we played other games remotely, over the internet, like Team Fortress 2.
When we played tennis, we played games like bluff.
Bluff is a modification on the normal rules of tennis. It uses tennis as a starting point but then things change. We invented our own further modifications of bluff too. It was nice to customise the thing we played to meet our own needs or match our own curiosities.
We had the same desire for Team Fortress 2. We wanted to try out different rules in it. We had silly ideas for silly new gamemodes and features. But Unfortunately, while tennis is merely a tradition, Team Fortress 2 is a product, so you can’t modify it so easily.
Luckily… some hardworking people had already figured out how to modify Team Fortress 2 without the permission of its creator, the company Valve.
Team Fortress 2 is hostile territory. When you modify it, you’re fighting against the whims of a profit-making company. That’s not to say that Valve doesn’t want you to modify their game. By modifying Team Fortress 2, you add to the modding community surrounding it, adding value to the product. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship.
But as soon as you do something that pushes too hard against the way that Valve makes money, you risk angering them and you put the entire modding community at risk. This happened when modders started to unlock for free the cosmetic items that Valve sold for real money via their gambling scheme. In response, Valve added some countermeasures to prevent modders from adjusting any cosmetic part of an in-game character, therefore breaking countless uses of that kind of modification that didn’t step on their foot. Are you following?
I enjoyed coming up with hypothetical modifications for Team Fortress 2, and I enjoyed writing them down.
I didn’t need a modification to exist for real: It was fun [just] imagining them: You didn’t need to play it: It didn’t need to be real: You could see it in your head. It was a nice read.
I published what I wrote down as something I called the Biggest Update Ever, or the BUE for short. Other people seemed to enjoy it and it got quite a lot of attention on the internet / more attention than I was used to.
So then the cravings began: What if the BUE was more than [just] an idea: What if it became real? I fantasised about being able to play the BUE (our very own game) in the very same way as we play our version of bluff (our very own game). If only we had it! If only the game existed for real, then I’d play it non-stop and I’d never get bored and it would be good.
We then began the fun adventure of trying to turn this hypothetical update into a real one, and we somehow managed to code quite a few of its ideas into a mod.
That mod was called Tightrope because it was hard to get the game balance of all the modified features right.
My friend made some launch videos for the mod and we hosted it on a modified server for other people to play. We created a website and a forum and we made more features and more videos and I learned a lot of lessons about running an online community the hard way for the first time.
But it wasn’t a community really.
A community is when you have community members doing things. But it was just me. I didn’t let anyone else get involved because I thought we needed to be “in charge” or something for various reasons.
Therefore, the community died because I couldn’t keep up with its speed as I’m not a community: I’m a person. But if I had let the community be a community and not a fanbase then it may have been able to keep up with itself. If I had let my embarrassment or pride die, then that could have happened but I didn’t and it didn’t.
The server became more and more empty, and the forums became dominated by a small number of loud people. But we achieved our goal, right? We wanted the BUE to be real, and we did that: The BUE became real, so we succeeded, right?
So why didn’t it feel that way?
It was quite hard to make Tightrope. There was a lot to explain and you had to code it in SourcePawn, quite a low-level language compared to what you’d usually expect from a scripting language.
So what I thought I needed to do was: Make a new language that’s much higher-level that lets anyone modify Team Fortress 2 in any way they want. The cheesily-titled “Your Fortress” aimed to do that: Changing the game was as easy as configuring a settings screen.
I got really really really far on this. I thought about it all day, all night. I iterated on the language many times. It was quite similar to CSS. It was highly declarative. You said what you wanted to be true, and it would become true. You didn’t need to say how it would become true. You defined the rules you wanted and it became true.
But, yes, I worked on it in secret / in isolation and no one saw any of it and now I’ve lost it all. And at some point I gained perspective: “Wait. Why am I spending my entire life on a programming language for a silly game.” I was throwing my time down the drain. That’s how it felt / that’s what I thought, so I stopped.
At the time, I didn’t know what I wanted / I was wrong about what I wanted, but looking back now from this moment in time, I can see exactly what I wanted, and it’s only something I realised two days ago.
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