Project: Team Fortress 2 Blood Splatters

 

I got this notification today from a old project I had completed over 8 years ago:

It's a texture modification for Team Fortress 2 that I submitted on GameBanana.com around 2012.
Since then, it's gathered over 32,000 downloads and 93,000 views!

Background

Team Fortress 2 (TF2) is a class-based team FPS game, with a stylized aesthetic influenced by 20th century American illustration, Spy films, and retro-futurism. I played TF2 frequently on my brother's Steam account throughout my high-school to college years, accumulating over 1000 played hours. I loved the gameplay, characters, and art style. It was my "main" game from around 2009 to 2012. 

Early footage was even more cartoonish than retail 

One thing that bothered me about the game were some of the aesthetic inconsistencies. This included the stylized lighting and muzzle flashes shown in early trailers, which were updated to be more realistic. Another example were the default blood splatters used for gunshots or gibs. The "Meet the Team" animated shorts featured explosive splashes of solid red blood. The default blood splatters were more subtle in color and shape (likely for gameplay reasons). 

 

Blood splatters: Gameplay vs "Meet the Spy"

GameBanana is an online community where people share custom mods for model, textures, and particle effects. I installed several mods to fix these inconsistencies. However, I noticed that nobody had created any mods for the stylized blood splatters needed to complete the aesthetic. 

SPLAT!

Since nobody else had created mod, I figured I'd do it myself. I downloaded a mod that had custom blood decals and reverse engineered how the textures were loaded into the game. Once I had that figured out, I just had to draw the actual blood splatters.

I took screenshots from the various "Meet the Team" shorts to trace the splatter patterns. I don't have or know how to use a tablet, so I had to trace them by mouse. 

Since the blood splatters were a single shade of red, I just had to get the overall shape right and fill in with the paint bucket. Since there weren't too many examples of the blood splatters, I had to draw some custom ones (can you tell which ones?). 

Once they were all complete, I exported them with a transparent alpha channel and packaged them into a tidy file for installation. I created three different variations: 

1. Large splatters
2. Small splatters
3. Paintball mode (rainbow-colored splatters)

Epilogue

There was one feature that I wasn't able to figure out: overlapping splatters. As seen above, the splatters are still transparent, which means the sprites overlap each other rather than combining into a single shade of red.  Upon further review, I found that on September 2019 a fellow contributor was able to figure it out! It only took 8 years, but somebody finally solved it.

Even more so, the splatters have been added into a custom mod pack that has explosive blood splatters and gibs that greatly resemble the animated shorts. I'm proud that my work from so long ago has contributed towards these community projects (and I'm still credited for it as "hawkus"!)