TeamSpec is a 12v12 team based first person shooter. The design pillars of this game are as follows:

• Casual: By having large servers with a high player count, the individual responsibility and stress of each teammate is lowered. You are only 1/12th of the team as opposed to 1/5. You could be friendly, and your team probably wouldn't even notice amongst the chaos.
• High time-to-kill (ttk): This is no Arma 3 and this is no CS:GO. I feel like there is a massive hole in the FPS genre for games like Overwatch and TF2 who have an average TTK over 1 second. Games that have high TTK essentially boil down to "who sees the other player first wins". This is because if you are being shot, you cannot possible retaliate. In TeamSpec, the movement is designed to give you a fighting chance as you can survive a single shot.
• Customization: TeamSpec is a team based shooter without classes. How is this possible? Simple! The classes are built from the ground up by the player using the complex loadout system. The goal with this it that there would be millions of possible combinations to alter your gameplay and keep the game feeling fresh. Cosmetics are planned to be added later on so you can customize your class even more!
• Not pay-to-win: I can't believe that this has become so common in the industry that I need to say this, but this game will never allow you to pay to alter your gameplay in any way. Every single weapon will be free to everyone, forever. Ideally, the monetization will come from paid cosmetics, but internal discussion is still ongoing about this. There will not be a battle pass system.

The game is balanced around three specs. These specs are "pick", "power", and "support". When creating a class, you have 10 points to allocate into any of these categories. Each point spent gives your class a small passive buff. If no points are allocated, players have 100 health, 5 m/s movement speed, and 0 health points regenerated per second. The weights of each point are as follows:

• Pick: +0.5 m/s per point.
• Power: +25 maximum health per point.
• Support: +1 health regenerated per point.

Items that you equip in your loadout to build your class are balanced in part by having "minimum point requirements". For instance, in order to equip a heavy minigun, players must have spent at least 7 points into power. This means that there are only 3 points free, and ensures that players with a minigun cannot run around as fast as someone with just a shotgun. Your points are not consumed upon equipping a weapon. In other words, you can also equip a secondary that has a power rating of 7. As such, when I say "costs x", I don't mean that you need to consume x points. It just means you need to have built your class with a minimum of x points.

For as long as I can remember, I wanted to make a game. As I spent years and years playing and enjoying games such as TF2, Overwatch, Minecraft, and more, I paid attention to the subtle details that make the game fun to me. This was back when I had zero skills on how to code anything, and thought that opening inspect element in chrome was "hacking". Flash forward to 2020. I had been researching for what game engine I wanted to use, and finally settled on one. I started working. I had zero experience, so I would get hopelessly stuck on things. I can recall there was this one issue that I couldn't understand how to fix with the default character controller. It had to do with how the x and z trajectory changed when climbing slopes. This bug bugged me so much that I spent the next 2 years completely re-writing the character controller. It took that long because I had no experience with vectors or using collision detection engines. I feel like spending that time was worth it because movement is a big part of the game I planned to make (with its biggest inspiration being Team Fortress 2).

Around late 2022, I was finally happy with my character controller. I was finally free to start working on other aspects of the game, like UI, gameplay systems, and most importantly, networking. Networking proved to be a challenge because of the lack of documentation on the engine for it. I also discovered a massive bottleneck that made it impossible to have high player counts in a lobby, so I had to spend a while coming up with a "hacky" solution to fix this. It was only after finishing the character controller that I decided on the main gameplay systems (the specs) and came up with the name while trying to fall asleep.

I mentioned that this game's main inspiration was Team Fortress 2. I was really upset when TF2 became unplayable due to bots around 2020, and it was a big motivation to work on TeamSpec. I would get upset that I cant play my favorite game and that Valve were neglecting it, and I couldn't find another game that offered the same experience, so I reasoned that the only option left is to make my own. I wanted to copy TF2's casual atmosphere and its high player count, but innovate on the customization aspect of the game.