Devblog #61 - Meet the Dev 05
Isonzo was nominated for the Dutch Game Awards in the category Best Audio! Last night was the award ceremony and were 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. https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1556790/view/3280333372353228993?l=english You can find the entire OST here on Steam. The Isonzo soundtrack contains about 30 minutes of music. Purchasing the DLC will help out the development of the game! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2078340/Isonzo_Soundtrack/ If you cant afford it, you can also listen to it on our YouTube channel. Now without further ado, lets meet a new member of the BlackMill team! Hello! Could you introduce yourself Hi! Im Aitor, a 25 year old (I had to double check) programmer from the Basque Country. I havent worked on anything youve heard of before Isonzo, so heres some cool ragdoll tech I developed a few years ago. [previewyoutube=ByNPbbACf40;full][/previewyoutube] 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 Im 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 were interested in. For me, that mostly translates to three things: Third Person Animation, Physics and AI (the bot kind, not the [strike]copyright infringement[/strike] 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 werent 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.
Ive 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 really take things to the next level. Of course, rebuilding the foundations means not having a house for a few months. Thats 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. https://steamcommunity.com/games/1556790/announcements/detail/3649652637281432071?snr=2_9_100003
This is the result of all that work. Here you see just one of 20 layers that can affect the character animation! They dont 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 youre 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. When a bot is given the mission to contest an objective, the behaviour for that might look something like this:
Lets 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, Ill 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). Its also affected by many factors. For instance, every bot gets more emboldened during overtime. So lets make dumb bots ignore their bleeding and walk straight into the objective!
Tada! 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 Im concerned, no team has ever succeeded on that front as hard as Mobius Digital did with Outer Wilds. The story of that game isnt just in the writing. Its 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 dont 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, Im 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. Heres a personal favourite.
If youre 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!
[ 2023-10-05 12:37:21 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone! With our latest map Piana up and running, were full steam ahead and working on the White War expansion! No news on its maps and release date, but well be sure to notify you all once were ready to do so. In case youve missed it, heres our latest roadmap. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3032136251 Furthermore, we want to thank everyone who filled out our player survey! Were going through all your responses and analysing the data, which will be very helpful for Isonzos 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 were 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. https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1556790/view/3280333372353228993?l=english You can find the entire OST here on Steam. The Isonzo soundtrack contains about 30 minutes of music. Purchasing the DLC will help out the development of the game! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2078340/Isonzo_Soundtrack/ If you cant afford it, you can also listen to it on our YouTube channel. Now without further ado, lets meet a new member of the BlackMill team! Hello! Could you introduce yourself Hi! Im Aitor, a 25 year old (I had to double check) programmer from the Basque Country. I havent worked on anything youve heard of before Isonzo, so heres some cool ragdoll tech I developed a few years ago. [previewyoutube=ByNPbbACf40;full][/previewyoutube] 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 Im 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 were interested in. For me, that mostly translates to three things: Third Person Animation, Physics and AI (the bot kind, not the [strike]copyright infringement[/strike] 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 werent 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.
Ive 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 really take things to the next level. Of course, rebuilding the foundations means not having a house for a few months. Thats 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. https://steamcommunity.com/games/1556790/announcements/detail/3649652637281432071?snr=2_9_100003
This is the result of all that work. Here you see just one of 20 layers that can affect the character animation! They dont 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 youre 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. When a bot is given the mission to contest an objective, the behaviour for that might look something like this:
Lets 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, Ill 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). Its also affected by many factors. For instance, every bot gets more emboldened during overtime. So lets make dumb bots ignore their bleeding and walk straight into the objective!
Tada! 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 Im concerned, no team has ever succeeded on that front as hard as Mobius Digital did with Outer Wilds. The story of that game isnt just in the writing. Its 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 dont 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, Im 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. Heres a personal favourite.
Thats it for now!
If youre 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!
Isonzo
M2H
M2H
2022-09-13
Indie Strategy Simulation MMO Singleplayer Multiplayer
Game News Posts 161
🎹🖱️Keyboard + Mouse
🎮 Full Controller Support
Very Positive
(10705 reviews)
https://www.ww1gameseries.com/isonzo/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1556790
K Station Windows Content [17.84 G]
World War One expands to the mountains of the Italian Front - beautiful but deadly in equal measure. Inspired by the two year struggle for control of the Isonzo river valley and the Alps during World War One, Isonzo elevates the WW1 Games Series, figuratively and literally.
From the makers of Verdun and Tannenberg …
The new Offensive game mode puts you right in the middle of key historical offensives on the Italian Front. Lead the charge across stunning Italian landscapes as you choose your path to victory - cut paths through barbed wire, flank your enemies by following mountain trails, or man a mortar to blast a way through. Shape a dynamic battlefield by laying sandbags and wire, placing ammo crates, deploying trench periscopes or sniper shields, and more.
![]()
Take part in historical offensives from the Sixth Battle of the Isonzo to the Strafexpedition. Reflecting the course of the actual battles, as the attackers advance the fighting will shift through vastly different landscapes within a single offensive: from hillside fortresses to mountain trenches and fierce urban combat on city streets. Everything is recreated based on research and field trips, from sound effects and uniforms down to the houses, vineyards and trenches you’ll be fighting over.
![]()
Call in support with a unique historically accurate flare system: flare guns can mark targets for artillery or biplane flybys, or different colored flares can be used to guide your team. Once the big guns have softened up the enemy, finish the job at close quarters with an Arditi dagger or mountaineer’s pickaxe. Man heavy machine guns, mortars and even mountain guns for more direct fire support.
![]()
Choose from six classes based on historical combat roles and build your loadout from a selection of weapons, equipment and perks linked to that class, giving flexibility and variety while staying grounded in what real soldiers might have carried. You’ll be operating wire cutters, bandaging yourself and wounded teammates, and blowing the whistle to start an assault. One shot can kill and even lighter injuries can lead to quickly bleeding out.
Being an effective soldier in Isonzo is not just about being a good marksman. Mastering the terrain is also key - the mountain can be a friend or foe. Learn how to navigate well to maintain cover and surprise your enemies or support your allies.
Finally… watch out for the dreaded poison gas. You’ve never experienced WW1 action quite like this!
Isonzo key features include:
![]()
More Games in the Authentic WW1 Game Series
Immerse yourself in more WW1 action with our other standalone titles Tannenberg and Verdun. Experience trench warfare on the Western Front in Verdun, or maneuver for control of key sectors in Tannenberg on the Eastern Front. These authentic WW1 shooters let players choose from a range of squads from across the war, as they fight for control of the ever-changing frontlines.
From the makers of Verdun and Tannenberg …
The new Offensive game mode puts you right in the middle of key historical offensives on the Italian Front. Lead the charge across stunning Italian landscapes as you choose your path to victory - cut paths through barbed wire, flank your enemies by following mountain trails, or man a mortar to blast a way through. Shape a dynamic battlefield by laying sandbags and wire, placing ammo crates, deploying trench periscopes or sniper shields, and more.
Take part in historical offensives from the Sixth Battle of the Isonzo to the Strafexpedition. Reflecting the course of the actual battles, as the attackers advance the fighting will shift through vastly different landscapes within a single offensive: from hillside fortresses to mountain trenches and fierce urban combat on city streets. Everything is recreated based on research and field trips, from sound effects and uniforms down to the houses, vineyards and trenches you’ll be fighting over.
Call in support with a unique historically accurate flare system: flare guns can mark targets for artillery or biplane flybys, or different colored flares can be used to guide your team. Once the big guns have softened up the enemy, finish the job at close quarters with an Arditi dagger or mountaineer’s pickaxe. Man heavy machine guns, mortars and even mountain guns for more direct fire support.
Choose from six classes based on historical combat roles and build your loadout from a selection of weapons, equipment and perks linked to that class, giving flexibility and variety while staying grounded in what real soldiers might have carried. You’ll be operating wire cutters, bandaging yourself and wounded teammates, and blowing the whistle to start an assault. One shot can kill and even lighter injuries can lead to quickly bleeding out.
Being an effective soldier in Isonzo is not just about being a good marksman. Mastering the terrain is also key - the mountain can be a friend or foe. Learn how to navigate well to maintain cover and surprise your enemies or support your allies.
Finally… watch out for the dreaded poison gas. You’ve never experienced WW1 action quite like this!
Isonzo key features include:
- Mountain warfare: Assaulting mountain fortifications, battling through ruined towns, and fording rivers are just a few of the challenges you’ll face as you fight your way through numerous enemy positions
- Tactical multiplayer FPS: Choose your role and loadout carefully to survive this high altitude combat - play a sniper to pick off the enemy engineers before they can cut your wire, use rifle grenades to clear enemy machine guns, and much more
- World War One Gameplay: Historical Offensive game mode based on real battles and focused on the unique challenges of Alpine warfare. Fight with 30+ WW1 weapons, poisonous gas attacks, and intense artillery barrages
- Build for victory: Place your own wire, sandbags, trench periscopes, and more! Whether you’re digging in or on the attack, shaping the battlefield to your advantage will be key to victory
- Faces of war: Make every class your own by picking from a variety of historically class-appropriate uniforms, accessories and headgear. As a finishing touch, you can even pick your mustache from several famous period-accurate styles!
- Authentic WW1 atmosphere: Accuracy in everything from maps and weaponry to music and the uniforms – fight for the Kingdom of Italy or the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy
More Games in the Authentic WW1 Game Series
Immerse yourself in more WW1 action with our other standalone titles Tannenberg and Verdun. Experience trench warfare on the Western Front in Verdun, or maneuver for control of key sectors in Tannenberg on the Eastern Front. These authentic WW1 shooters let players choose from a range of squads from across the war, as they fight for control of the ever-changing frontlines.
MINIMAL SETUP
- OS: Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GT 640
- Storage: 20 GB available space
- OS: Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- Processor: Intel i7-4770Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050
- Storage: 20 GB available space
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