Q&A

This is a collection of random questions I’ve been asked over the years.

Where did the idea for TTT come from?

Check out the History for a bunch of words about this.

Who made TTT?

Just me! I wrote all the code1, wrote all the text, made the Detective hat model, built the website, and whatever else.

Do you still work on TTT?

I am not actively working on adding new things to the gamemode. The first version was released over 10 years ago and has been stable/finished for years now. There are still very occasional additions (like new languages) or fixes happening, usually from community contributions. I review those to help keep the quality/game design/etc consistent with the existing game.

Are you working on other games?

No. There’s a few reasons for this. One is that I have not found a platform/game engine that checks all my boxes. Another is that I just haven’t had a specific game idea that felt both achievable and not already better served by an existing game. We live in a period of massive amounts of indie games in most genres and niches you can think of. Instead of spending hundreds of hours making another one, I could play some of the excellent stuff that already exists.

Still, never say never. However, I can tell you it’s very unlikely a new game will be anything like TTT.

Will there ever be a commercial version of TTT, sold as a new game?

Not likely. It would be a large undertaking to rebuild TTT from scratch in a different game engine, and I’m personally not really interested in the type of development work that would entail. I also think it’s difficult to sell the best TTT gameplay experience to people, because it’s so dependent on the people you play with, and I can’t exactly sell you a TTT box with 8 friends in it.

If you’re interested in more TTT-like games, since TTT came out there have been more games with a similar concept. It seems like “social deduction game” is what people call the genre. Among Us is probably the most famous, and it avoids one of the fundamental problems of TTT by giving “non-Traitor” players more to do. This is something I could never fix in TTT because it’s so dependent on the map.

What is your opinion on RDM?

For those who don’t know, “RDM” refers to “random deathmatching”, a term that (I think) originally comes from the roleplaying community. In TTT the meaning depends on who you ask, but generally refers to killing another player as a non-Traitor without “sufficient reason” (evidence/clues). Many servers have rules about this to discourage RDM. TTT itself has the Karma system that disincentivises it, but it is generally less strict because it cannot take all subtleties into account the way an admin can.

Personally, I think the best way to play TTT is with a group of friends/people you know who will play in good faith. In those scenarios, RDM is not really a problem. However, this is of course not always possible, and public servers have to account for a random collection of people playing together.

Nevertheless, I generally favour faster rounds (which means killing faster with inevitably less certainty) with looser rules, and I don’t think rules-lawyering is fun. Of course griefers should be banned, but beyond that if I was managing a server I would not lean towards heavy admin involvement. Maybe I’d try to tune the Karma system to be extra strict instead. That’s also not easy, it’s essentially game design and every variable in a game affects every other one (especially with humans involved happy to exploit any advantage), but when you’re making strict rules that directly impact gameplay the same is true.

Now it must be said that I’ve never managed a server, and I haven’t even played the game much in recent years, so my opinion is not that interesting. But people ask! So there’s the answer.

What’s your favourite map?

The vast majority of my hours playing TTT were much earlier on when I was still building the gamemode. Most TTT-specific maps did not exist yet. So my favourite map is probably ttt_thething, which seems largely forgotten now. I also remember ttt_67thway which seems pretty well known still. There’s also several maps originally made for CS:S or H2DM that we played in TTT, such as the classic dm_richland or cs_office.

Do you still play TTT?

Not really! I put a huge amount of time into developing and playtesting TTT when it was under active development years ago, so I’ve already played it a ton. I also can’t really play it for fun without “game design goggles” on, focusing on whether certain things are working, how players are responding to things, etc. This also goes for other similar games, so I haven’t played Among Us either to name an example. I just stick to other genres instead.

How do you spell Innocent backwards?

Tneconni.

  1. There have been community contributions to the code, but those have been primarily bugfixes/optimizations and additional languages. The original 99% of the codebase is entirely my fault. ↩︎