I'm officially a "professional" game designer!

Okay okay, maybe that title is a bit of an overstatement, but I have very exciting news!

Among my many hobbies; one I've been doing since the beginning of the pandemic is level design, specifically for the game: Team Fortress 2.

I'm excited to share that today Valve purchased a level that I worked on (with a team of 8 others)!

By Patrick Hennessy

Game Server Monitoring 

I was brought on to the TF2Maps.net staff team to bring my technical expertise to help maintain and improve the state of our systems. 

The first thing I did in order to get an idea of how the servers were used was to install some monitoring software. 

By Patrick Hennessy

Procedural Texture creation

For a while now i've been learning to use a program called Substance Designer. It allows you to procedurally and nondestructively create textures for 3D programs to use. For me i've been trying to use it to emulate the Team Fortress 2 Style.

By Patrick Hennessy

Database-Linked Dataclasses

The most common use of a class in Python is acting as a data container. Throughout the development of our backend libraries at Narrative Science, we’ve seen several generations of code that attempts to make modeling this data easy.

Finding a simple to use abstraction for these type of classes allows us to focus less on writing mundane classes and more on our business logic.

In this post we will outline the evolution of this code and the pros and drawbacks of each approach.

By Patrick Hennessy

Learning 3D Modeling for TF2

For a while now i've been working on level design projects at TF2Maps.net, and something that has been a huge need in the community is getting models for the game tailored to certain game play needs or to fit into a theme. 

By Patrick Hennessy