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I just edited it from the game.

OH GOD WHAT IS THAT THING?!

Since the release of Meet the Sandvich in August, several people have asked us how something we'd boasted would be "our magnum opus," "over four hours long" and "make Citizen Kane look like something dumb a complete idiot would make," ended up being one un-dramatic minute spent inside a refrigerator.

Work on the next class pack is gearing up, a little slower than we'd like. In the meantime, I thought I'd post some answers to the common email questions we receive.

How do respawn waves work? Is my respawn time affected by my performance? Why do they exist at all?

I had trouble finding a jar to catch it in.

OMG ITS SUFJAN!!!! XDDDDDDDDDDDDDD(tiems over 9000 penises)

Well, it's been a couple of weeks since we updated the blog, and we thought it was time to let you know why we've been so quiet. The last couple of weeks we've actually been moonlighting on Left 4 Dead. While the L4D team has been focusing on finishing up the core cooperative gameplay, we've been helping them by working on their Versus mode. Versus is the recently-announced competitive mode where one team plays the Survivors and one team plays the Infected. We've learned a lot while working on TF2 in the last year, and we were able to apply some of those lessons to Versus mode. As a result, we've just finished adding critical hits, respawn waves, flawless auto-team balancing, and facestabs to L4D, while removing anything that looked remotely like a grenade. I kid, I kid.

Tipi guna keel u
Except, even when inverted, she looks mildly tame.

The path to arriving at a final design for a character is sometimes a long and winding one. This was especially the case for the Demoman and we thought it would be interesting to step through that process and shed a little light on how we arrive at our final designs. Early on in the process, soon after we decided that we were going to start a new, more stylized direction for TF2 it opened up a whole range of possibilities in terms of what that meant visually. One of the first (albeit short-lived) ideas that was being thrown around was to try to recreate a look of claymation for our game. The idea was to make the world look like a miniature set built for clay figures which animated and gibbed into chunks of clay.

.. Nearly raped me

The Black one tried to gouge my eyes out when I first encountered it, and the white one was led here by another schweet photographer, Torch Dragonbait.

Quite the specimens, aren't they? :franis:

Yah it sucks...

We decided to create a new TF environment after sensing some desert-fatigue, both internally and externally. The new theme had to be a departure from the current look without being so different that the characters felt out of place in it. We also wanted to leverage some content from our existing environments, since crafting every asset from scratch would mean we'd be moving the release beyond Valve time and into the realm of geologic time.

This butterfly scares me. And it can speak English.

Help.

I don't recommend hugging or dissecting it.

We've been a little quiet for the last week as we've put the finishing touches on the Heavy update. We thought the Pyro pack was the biggest we'd be doing for a while, due to the large changes to the Pyro, but the Heavy update has turned out to be even bigger. In addition to the three unlockable weapons and thirty-five achievements for the Heavy, we've got a new game mode with five new arenas for it, a new Payload map focusing on more open spaces than Goldrush, and another popular community-made map. Throughout the rest of the week we'll be giving you the details on all this, and if all goes well, you'll have your hands on it shortly afterwards.

The ultimate model of Tiptron is finished, and is now ready for public viewing.

GACK ACK ACK ACK!

It tried to kill me, but I caught it. 8D

Borrowing the idea from Francis's "Your Creation of the Week" contest. In an attempt to revive the digital butterfly section, and bring it back to the glory it had when the site started out, I have decided to create this thread, where the week's best butterfly is shown on the first post. Here are the rules-
1. Post your nominations in this thread.
2. The butterfly must be rare. (In other words, it must be user-created; use photoshop, paint, or whatever to make it. You can use other images to create your butterfly; for example, my "politicalflys" would count.)
3. It must be a butterfly. (Obviously. So, that means the "anything with wings rule" doesn't apply here. Sorry. The rules are still pretty loose, however, as my "politicalflys" would count. Just make sure it's a butterfly, and not something that's obviously not a butterfly (Like a dragon, for instance.))
Post your schweet pics- the nominations will constantly continue. The winning butterfly for this week will remain on the first post for a week, while nominations for the next week's butterfly are made.
The current prize is an item from my shop called the "Butterfly-Trophy." The prize will surely change in the weeks ahead. So, let's get to the nominations.
Butterfly of the Week:

Digital butterfly. OWNED.

One of the things we're looking at for the next update is the creation of a new type of environment for our levels to be built in. We're pretty happy with the way our environments have turned out so far, but as we create more and more maps with these achievement packs, we want our level designers to have more to work with in terms of giving their settings a unique look.