What

Using different visualization techniques, I examine some of Valve’s games and compare their style and content. Since I am interested in the changing development style, I will look at Left 4 Dead 1 (2008), Left for Dead 2 (2009), and Team Fortress Classic (1999) and Team Fortress 2 (2007).

Why

Valve has many critically acclaimed games, such as Counter Strike, Team Fortress, and recently Left 4 Dead. As a private company they have been responsible for some of the most successful first person shooter games in the past decade.

In Valve’s recent blogging about their newer game design principles, their developers talk of forgoing realism for fun and attempting character recognition in an instant. That is, they design their main characters to have distinctive silhouettes. This is especially important in Valve’s newer games, L4D2 and TF2, where they pioneered these principles. I want to help visualize these techniques.

How

Using Valve’s built in demo recording system, I can take performances by me or by other people from the web and output an image sequence.

Using the sequence, I then create an uncompressed video of each game capture so that I can experiment with image effects and processing for visualization.

ImageJ provided some of the effects, such as edge detection to better find the silhouettes. Also, projection through time and space about the Y-axis helps me produce a projection map of the whole recording sequence, but compressed into a 2D image. I also used it to plot the colors and luminance over time for one recording.

I also take advantage of http://yooouuutuuube.com/ to create real-time video mashups. By controlling the javascript I can have http://yooouuutuuube.com/ generate different effects that allows us to see the game changing over time.