Hello everyone!
With our latest map Piana up and running, we’re full steam ahead and working on the White War expansion! No news on its maps and release date, but we’ll be sure to notify you all once we’re ready to do so. In case you’ve missed it, here’s our latest roadmap.
Furthermore, we want to thank everyone who filled out our player survey! We’re going through all your responses and analysing the data, which will be very helpful for Isonzo’s future. The winners will also be contacted by email before the end of the month, so please keep an eye out for your inbox (or spam folder).
We're the winners!
Isonzo was nominated for the Dutch Game Awards in the category Best Audio! Last night was the award ceremony and we’re happy to share that Isonzo was declared the winner!
Special thanks to Bart Delissen, Lars Tesselaar & Niels van der Leest (Game Audio Squad) for their amazing work on the audio for Isonzo!
If you want to read more about how the title song of Isonzo was created, be sure to read our devblog about it.
You can find the entire OST on Steam. The Isonzo soundtrack contains about 30 minutes of music. Purchasing the DLC will help out the development of the game! If you can’t afford it, you can also listen to it on our YouTube channel.
Now without further ado, let’s meet a new member of the BlackMill team!
Meet the Dev
Hello! Could you introduce yourself
Hi! I’m Aitor, a 25 year old (I had to double check) programmer from the Basque Country. I haven’t worked on anything you’ve heard of before Isonzo, so here’s some cool ragdoll tech I developed a few years ago.
I was also a musician for about a decade, before I got deep into game development. I have an obsession with learning new instruments, with my current tally at around 8, depending on how low your skill threshold for counting one is, and I’m a progressive rock nerd.
What is your role in BlackMill Games and for the games?
At BlackMill Games, every programmer does a bit of everything. But we also, as individual programmers, “own” systems based on what we’re interested in. For me, that mostly translates to three things: Third Person Animation, Physics and AI (the bot kind, not the copyright infringement
image generating kind).
Where did your passion come from?
As a kid, games always seemed like magic. They were things you could explore and learn inside and out. Years later, it clicked for me that they weren’t magic, that somebody had created that world, those systems, with the intention of them being explored. Since I already liked messing around with computers, it was a perfect fit. I wanted to be that somebody.
What was the first thing you made in Isonzo?
I did a lot of tweaking on ragdolls and the forces that are applied to them, making them feel heavier.
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I’ve spent many hours in my career setting up complicated scenarios, all to blow up ragdolls in. Game development really is a dream job.
What is a memorable moment in the development of Isonzo?
In programming, you generally try to gradually improve on what you already have. Sometimes, however, you need to completely rebuild the foundations to reallytake things to the next level. Of course, rebuilding the foundations means not having a house for a few months.
That’s exactly what happened with our third person animation setup – an animator and I spent months building it from the ground up, and let me tell you, it was terrifying! Thankfully we stuck the landing, and the new foundation allowed us to make dozens of animation improvements like the one Guido showed off in a previous devblog.
This is the result of all that work. Here you see just one of 20 layers that can affect the character animation! They don’t all run at the same time, of course, but for a player that is moving while firing at you, the final pose you see can be the result of around 10 different layers of animation, all being mixed together.
Can you show off some of your work process and tell us what you’re doing?
I spend a lot of time tweaking bots. One of the ways I do this is through a behaviour tree, a system that allows me to describe the way a bot will do something.
Then a bot is given the mission to contest an objective, the behaviour for that might look something like this:
Let’s say, I wanted to make sure bots healed themselves before fighting for an objective. I can make that happen by adding this new section at the left of the tree.
This was very quick, because I had already implemented these ‘Is At Full Health’ and ‘Heal Self’ nodes when making bots heal in a different situation. By making these modular pieces, I can easily get creative with bot behaviour.
Now, I’ll let you in on a secret: we have a hidden stat describing how emboldened a bot is. Which is to say in simpler terms, how 'dumb' they are. Assault bots are the dumbest (I will not elaborate). It’s also affected by many factors. For instance, every bot gets more emboldened during overtime.
So let’s make dumb bots ignore their bleeding and walk straight into the objective!
Done. Of course, in reality (in the game) this is a small branch of a tree, and those colourful nodes hide other trees. (You can imagine how ‘PatrolArea’ alone might get complicated). The whole thing is huge!
Which other game dev/studio inspires you?
Something I greatly appreciate about being a game developer is that I get to work with lots of extremely talented and creative people, and help make their vision come to life. The best games are made when all the different disciplines are working together towards a common goal.
As far as I’m concerned, no team has ever succeeded on that front as hard as Mobius Digital did with Outer Wilds. The story of that game isn’t just in the writing. It’s in the animation, in the music, in the textures, in the physics of the spaceship. An entire team firing on all cylinders. Awe inspiring stuff.
Favourite game atm?
I don’t usually play “forever games”, instead I obsess over one game for a few weeks, then move to the next game on my embarrassingly large backlog.
That said, I’m really enjoying playing Heavenly Bodies in co-op mode. Accidentally and irreversibly hurling my partner into the void of space while reading the half NASA, half IKEA mission debrief is amazing fun. Trust me, disable all the assists. This is a game that is best enjoyed through suffering.
Anything else you wanna share?
Working on animation has the benefit of experiencing the absolute best class of bugs in the medium: funny, non game breaking ones. Here’s a personal favourite.
That’s it for now!
If you’re looking for fellow players, want to let us know of issues you encounter with the game or just want to chat and hangout, be sure to join our Discord!
