Hello soldiers!
Before we get into meeting a new developer, we have a small request for you all o7
Isonzo Survey
We're asking for you help! We've created a survey for you, the Isonzo players. We want to make sure that we’re putting our development focus in the right areas, and to keep our fingers on the pulse of the WW1 Game Series community.
Answering these questions will help us make a better game and will also help us bring in new players and communicate better with our fans. Click here to be redirected to the survey. By partaking in the survey, you'll join our giveaway as well!
Thank you so much in advance!
Now for the man of the hour, meet one of our progammers!
Meet the Dev
Hello! Could you introduce yourself
Hi! I’m Tijmen, a programmer on the WW1 Game Series. Unlike many of my colleagues, I didn't purposefully enter the game industry, it was a rather gradual transition from making websites and backends to becoming a fulltime game developer. I’ve been doing this for about 15 years, and I joined the WW1 Game Series team in 2016.
What is your role in BlackMill Games and for the games?
At BlackMill Games we luckily have a very flat structure, everyone is invited to contribute in their own way. For me that fluctuated over the years I’ve been here, but currently I'm the generalist programmer, focussing on performance and graphics.
Where did your passion come from?
Although the creative aspect of making games is appealing, what I enjoy most is collaborating with so many talented people to make an idea into reality. It's really exciting when that character movement you’ve programmed gets hooked up to a 3d model made by an artist, walks through the world thanks to the animators, and syncs up perfectly with the footstep sounds from the audio designer. No individual could do all those things, making a game like ours really reliant on so many expertises.
This was really apparent during the weeks and days before Isonzo’s release. The whole team and product came together and delivered one of our best games so far.
What was the first thing you made in Isonzo?
For the series in general, the first big thing I worked on was the Horrors of War update for Verdun! That certainly feels like 100 years ago.
For Isonzo in particular it's quite difficult to say, we didn't have a clear point where we went from working on one game to the other. Especially considering how much we still work on our older titles, the lines get a bit blurry.
From the archives i can see i’ve added the italian main menu on Tuesday 6th of August 2019, and added a goofy placeholder image as a game icon.
What is a memorable moment in the development of Isonzo?
Spawning has been a large part of my work, seeing all that come together is great. It's a system that has evolved with the series, and our ever increasing scope.
For Verdun our mappers manually placed each and every possible spawn point, but with Tannenberg’s increased map size this became unfeasible. We created an algorithm that would evaluate the safest spots on the map, think trenches and dugouts, and automatically place points there.
Isonzo’s maps are even larger, so we continued with this automatic system. However the Dolomiti map especially made it quite obvious that this game is very different. A crater in the flat Poland map was a great spawnpoint, but a similar crater in the Italian Alps might just have a cliff right after, allowing the enemies to shoot and potentially spawn kill you. We tried many different ways of improving our algorithm, including searching vertically as well.
However this never really got the right results, our playtests still were plagued with poor spawn locations. The solution came from one of our mappers, who casually suggested they would really like to paint how safe a particular area is. The idea would be to augment the algorithm with human input. A week later, our safety-painting-tool was born:
Our AI programmer instantly jumped on this opportunity, and made the bots also follow these safety suggestions. This is why they will prefer to walk in a trench, rather than in an open area.
With this added data we can generate all spawnpoints, remove the ones near enemies and other dangers, and then pick the best one.
A system like this is really tough to develop, working on this alone in my basement trying to estimate how players would behave is very difficult. The playtests we do really help, but it's not until the game is out with a lot of players that you can really fine tune a system like this. No game gets it absolutely perfect, but I feel like we’re in a pretty good spot with spawning at the moment.
Can you show off some of your work process and tell us what you’re doing?
I’ve just wrapped up a bunch of work to improve our sector drawing tools. We need a way to know and shade in what area of the map you are, and when you are in a capzone. The artist draws these areas in engine, however those tools were quite dated.
Next up, I'm addressing how we bundle assets in our game. Currently, even for a minor patch, there is a small download, but Steam takes a long time to patch the relevant files. This is because all our maps are currently in the same file. If we split those up patching will be much faster.
Which other game dev/studio inspires you?
We certainly learn a lot from other studios, resources like GDC, Siggraph etc. are invaluable to us. If I had to pick a certain studio, I’d say Guerilla Games does tremendous work with their Horizon series, despite being in Amsterdam ;)
Favourite game atm?
I don't have that much time to play games right now, but whenever I have a moment to spare I enjoy a game of Hearthstone Battlegrounds.
Anything else you wanna share?
Yeah I’d like to thank the community for so many great interactions! We have a dedicated channel to highlight fanmail and cool community projects, and that never fails to put a smile on my face.
And for our Steam players, keep an eye out for a future announcement 👀
