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To Be Franke

Valve's Moby Franke on the distinctive visuals of Team Fortress 2

Valve's Team Fortress 2 is one of the most distinctive looking games of 2007. With its sharp silhouettes, bold colours and gurning character design, it certainly stands apart from the rest of the first-person shooter crowd.

GamesIndustry.biz recently sat down for a brief chat with Team Fortress 2's lead visual designer Moby Franke at GDC Lyon, to discuss the distinctive style of the game, using art as communication and why videogames just aren't artistically inspirational...


GamesIndustry.biz: You've got a background in fine art and Valve was your first job in videogames. Do you think that helped you look at game art differently, you didn't start with preconceived ideas?

Moby Franke: Of course. If a company hires you on your Photoshop skills they're making the wrong move. You might know everything about Photoshop but if you don't have that foundation in art, those design and art skills, then you're pretty much useless. Taking a risk sometimes with people who aren't affiliated with videogames — they have a different language that they can add to the group. Not that I'm better than other game artists but I came with a different approach in a visual sense. Games are always trying to develop and become more visually cohesive and that's our job as artists. Team Fortress 2 plays off of that.

So what specifically do you think you brought to Valve and Team Fortress 2?

The values and the light and dark of objects. It's basically a visual experience that's simplified. Not in terms of content or how we created it, it wasn't a simple production, but we simplified it in the way that you can easily read the characters better to suit the gameplay. It's such a fast-paced game so you don't want to spend time worrying about the little things. Players need to get it straight away and we've done that with the silhouette and then the colours of each character. I guess that's what I brought to Valve.

How important was the visual branding to the game? I see a screenshot or a piece of character art and I know instantly that it's Team Fortress 2. You can't say that about a lot of first-person shooters — WWII or sci-fi games look very similar.

It's essential. When we take a screenshot of the game it has to say a thousand different things. World War II game are all going for that same look and they'll be very similar. With Team Fortress 2 screenshots they look more like illustrations. It's more composed, it has a foreground, a middle and a background. It has interesting posing because of the animation that we have in the game and it has interesting silhouettes because of the great character designs.

And it doesn't look like a Valve game either. Looking at the Orange Box packaging and title screen, Team Fortress 2 almost looks out of place it's that distinctive.

We have to have those different brandings for our products because we have to cater to different people and different players. Look at Portal, it has more of an abstract game design and gameplay in a sense and it's not focused on the reality of what it is. The Portal art style is more simplified than Half-Life 2 or Team Fortress 2. We need to categorise our products and the games isolate themselves, but at the same time they are completely different to what's out there on the market — other class-based multiplayer games.

Do you think there aren't enough games that have a visually distinctive style of their own, their own identity?

Of course, and it's really important for a game to stand out. I'm an illustrator by trade and I'm classically trained and I look back to the past a lot of the time. If artists copy each other and produce similar work, it would be pointless. Classic illustrators all had their own different language, editorial and advertisers would pick classic illustrators for their specified look and appeal. Game art should be the same.

When you talk about artistic influence for Team Fortress 2 I notice you never mention any videogames at all.

There's no inspiration to pull from other videogames.

Why isn't there inspirational art in videogames?

Because other games are too focused on realism. Everybody's focused on the smaller treatments and they are not solving the global problem which is the marriage between game design and visual design. Once you put visual design and proper gameplay together both of them can compliment each other. It comes down to the fact that one hand washes the other — in order to make a complete and immersive product you have to have that.

In a majority of videogames there's a friction between realistic artwork and unrealistic gameplay. It can be one of the most off-putting aspects of a game...

It completely doesn't work. In Team Fortress the Medic has a beam that shoots from a weapon. Not only does the player on the Medic's team need to know what this beam does but the enemy has to understand player's are being healed. It's a language thing. It's not just branding and a pretty picture, it's also a language by which people can communicate. You can sit with a headset on and shout âheal me nowâ but it's easier to have those visuals so you know what's about to happen because of this stylised approach and recognition.


Moby Franke is lead visual designer at Valve. Interview by Matt Martin.

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Matt Martin

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Matt Martin joined GamesIndustry in 2006 and was made editor of the site in 2008. With over ten years experience in journalism, he has written for multiple trade, consumer, contract and business-to-business publications in the games, retail and technology sectors.