Sep 15, 2020

Squad - Krispy

Greetings Airborne and Ranger Founder Squaddies!

As you all know, we have been laser-focused on the development of Squad itself. If you haven’t been checking out our development blog, it’s worth taking a read - from new announcements to in-depth game design discussions, there have been a lot of fantastic posts going up lately and a lot of great new content planned for the game.

That said, we wanted to take a quick moment to update you on the Kickstarter rewards, both digital and physical, so strap in.

We are pleased to share that we have almost completed production on all of the physical rewards! So much has changed in Squad and we wanted to make sure the map booklets you receive reflect these changes - while we had already made them up, we are now in the process of reprinting them as a result. With COVID impacting businesses worldwide, this is impacting both the production of items as well as our team safely accessing the offices in order to start packaging things up. In addition to new map booklets, we are also working on getting an embroidered patch made up as a bonus, and thank you for your patience!

We apologize for the delay and look forward to sending physical items out as soon as we can! Please keep an eye on your inboxes for information in the coming month or so that we can request your updated mailing address information.

For those still waiting on the digital rewards, your Steam Inventory Weapon skins should be accessible in the Squad update hitting Steam on September 23rd.

To view and enable your Founder’s Weapon Skins, while In-Game, Go to Settings Menu -> Steam Inventory to view your weapon skins and enable/disable them in the menu. This menu will also allow you to enable and disable your Squad founder’s uniform patch. If anyone encounters any technical issues with this feature once it’s live, we ask that you contact us via the support button on joinsquad.com and then clicking ‘submit a request’ in the top right corner.

Last but not least, if you were part of the Company Clan Backer level, we will be contacting you or your Company Clan Leader within the next month with information about how to get your clan’s uniform patch up and running in Squad. All Company Clan Leader backers will initially have a “Squad Legion” Company Clan uniform patch to showcase that they were a Company Clan backer. Once your Company Clan Leader has received and responded to our information request, you will be able to enable and disable your clan patch in the same In-Game Settings Menu -> Steam Inventory.

Thank you so much for your support and patience.

Offworld Out!

Offworld Industries

Aug 19, 2020

Beta 21.1 Released!

Squad - Krispy

Hello squaddies,

After some initial delays, our followup patch for B21 is here, containing significant meta changes that you'll undoubtedly want to read up on (especially your SL) before you head out for duty.

With Beta 21.1, the team has two new gameplay features intended to have a significant impact on the current meta leading up to this patch. Firstly, the Rally Point system has become a physical item that Squad Leaders will need to replenish to deploy throughout a game. The new RP will cost 50 ammo to rearm and be picked up similar to the Ammo Bag, though it still retains its 2-minute deployment cooldown.

Now you, keep an eye on your SL to make sure that they pick it up!

Up next, a change to FOBs so that there is an opportunity to recover them. We call it the FOB Bleed-out system, and this will allow teams to recover a FOB Radio within the first 60 seconds of it being destroyed by the enemy. Friendlies will use their shovel within that timeframe to recover it and bring the radio back into play (or disassemble it, if they wish). We hope this change will incentivize more than surprise attacks on FOB Radios and encourage squads to strategically plan to hold sustained attacks on FOBs to ensure the radio will be taken out. Note that not all UI feedback is currently implemented, so don’t be surprised if the radio just won’t seem to die. (kill it harder! For no reason!)

Since we anticipate these new changes will significantly impact how Squad currently plays, we'll be keeping a close eye on feedback and discussions regarding them during their initial launch.

For a full list of the fixes and changes, please read on:

Gameplay Features

Rallypoint as an Inventory Item

This feature will change the way the Rallypoint is used and the meta behind its usage.
The RP is now a physical item in the Squad Leader’s inventory, similar to the ammo bag that Riflemen deploy. Squad Leaders will need to rearm the RP.
The intention behind this change is to reduce the effectiveness of attacking and rushing while only utilizing the RP. This change is expected to encourage better supply lines and coordination with ammo-bearing vehicles, and discourage Squads from acting autonomously for long periods of time.
Resupply cost for the RP item will initially be set to 50 ammo. This value may be modified in the future based on feedback and our observations.
The SL can pick up the RP like an Ammo Bag. The 2-minute deployment cooldown remains in effect.
We acknowledge that this feature will change the behavior of Squads and SLs somewhat dramatically, and will be making observations and taking feedback about its implementation. This feature will be under development, and may be modified or even removed if it is shown to not contribute towards Squad’s core principles. We value your feedback and encourage you to let us know your experience with this mechanic once released.

FOB Bleed-out System

We are introducing a short recovery window for the FOB Radio. After a FOB Radio has taken critical damage, a team has a short time (60 seconds) where they can recover the FOB Radio and prevent it from being wiped off the map.
A Shovel can be used to repair the FOB Radio to stop the Bleed-out timer. Repairs need to reach a minimal threshold in order to to stop the timer and prevent the radio from bleeding out.
Conversely, the Friendly team can use a shovel to dismantle the FOB Radio when it is in the Bleedout state. This is the only way to remove the FOB Radio while it’s in Bleedout state, other than waiting for the timer.
We are aware that the FOB Radio in its current status is very vulnerable to enemy attacks. No matter the defenses setup, the FOB Radio is still the weak point in a Forward Base. The act of watching over the FOB Radio can often be a dull and tedious element to gameplay, yet is often necessary to keep that FOB operational. In contrast, the act of being a stealthy attacker is usually more engaging, exciting and rewarding gameplay. When on offensive missions to attack FOB’s, Player’s get to experience moving through a wide variety of terrain, practicing being sneaky, having the opportunity to watch enemy movements and having the opportunity to pick when and what targets to engage. The opposite of looking after a FOB Radio, which often results in long periods of uncertainty, and often not knowing when or where the enemy will come from, which oftentimes presents dull moments of waiting for the fight to start.
Including the Bleedout FOB mechanic to the current FOB system is anticipated to help alleviate this issue and potentially flip around that dynamic. While sneaky FOB attacks will still always be valuable, with the Bleedout mechanic, they MUST now also be followed up by a full attack from another element of your team. IE: you can send in your sneaky lone Combat Engineer to destroy the FOB Radio, but if that attack is not followed up by another supportive attack element, then it will just have been a nuisance rather than a crippling blow.
Note: The values configured for this feature (time until bleed-out removes FOB, minimum HP to enter bleedout state, minimum repairs to leave the bleedout state) may be subject to change and will be evaluated in this trial period for this feature.
Note: A future revision will include a UI icon on the FOB HUD to indicate the bleedout state using a UI that is similar to the medic incap UI.

Optimization / Stabilization

Added additional analytics for server network performance to support further 100 player server testing.
Adjusted the client bandwidth. This has been increased from 15kbps to 30kbps. This means that each client can receive more data from the server each second. This will help to reduce loading times while connecting to the server, as well as potentially fix other issues related to 100p testing. Further testing will be on-going.
Optimized and improved visual fidelity of all bullet impact VFX.
Optimized collision complexity of middle eastern rocks.
Fixed a Client Crash with the Music Player.

Infantry

Updated ADS duration values on some Rocket launchers to make sure their ADS transition animations sync up with the transition delay correctly.
Fixed an issue with SVDM optic vanishing while ADS on ultrawide displays.
Fixed SVDM showing old SVD icon in Deployment menu.
Fixed SVDM bipod recoil standard deviation being higher than prone un-bipoded deviation.
Fixed SVDM ADS not using input zoom sensitivity modifier. As part of this fix, it was necessary to reduce the SVDM optical zoom (from 8x to approx. 7.5x). This may be changed again in the future.
Fixed an issue with CAF Sniper having Incorrect kit limit: should be 2 Sniper kits allowed per team, one unlocked at 15 players and one unlocked at 20 players on the team.

Vehicles

Updated the GB FV432 RWS APC to have an increased mag size for the GPMG: was 500, now 750 rounds.
Fixed RUS Kamaz5350 Logi Truck having Transport Truck Icon.
Fixed RUS Kamaz5350 Trucks having excessive X-axis rolling momentum.
Fixed RUS Tigr Armored Car having gear shift issues transitioning between 3rd to 4th gear.
Fixed RUS Tigr RWS not being able to rearm unless mag is empty.
Fixed RUS Tigr Open Top and RWS having "NSV" instead of "Kord" in the gunner HUD.
Replaced BRDM2 Scout Car with RUS Tigr Armored Car on the following layers: Mutaha RAAS v1, Yehorivka RAAS v1, Yehorivka RAAS v2, Yehorivka RAAS v4, Yehorivka RAAS v5, Yehorivka TC v1, Yehorivka TC v2.
Fixed incorrect FV4034 MBT hull front armour thickness, now 500mm.
Fixed the M240 & other GPMG vehicle weapons having misconfigured penetration curve (50cal penetration). These vehicle weapons now use 7.62mm projectile penetration.
Reduced cost of LAT HEAT ammo resupply from 40 to 30 ammo per-rocket, to compensate for competition with rearmable Rally Points.

Commander

Fixed an issue with Commander call-ins, when a player was killed by enemy heavy mortar strike or CAS strike, it was counted as a suicide for that player.

User Interface

Fixed an issue with the new Left / Right VOIP channel separation option, the settings were not correctly updating when being applied during a match.

Maps

Al Basrah

CAF Al Basrah Invasion v1 - Fixed CAF Helipad being partially outside of the map boundary.
Al Basrah AAS v2 - Updated INS vehicle layout: replaced T62 with BMP1 ZU23, replaced 1 Technical Dhsk with Technical UB32. Moved 2 flags closer to the eastern side of the map (Compound and West Outskirts).

Belaya

CAF_Belaya_AAS_v1 - changed team 2 from MIL to RUS.

Chora

Chora Invasion v2 - Fixed flipped INS MTLB spawning.

Fool's Road

Fools Road AAS v2 - Changed teams from GB vs MIL to USA vs RUS.

Gorodok

Fixed an issue with the water appearing black.
CAF_Gorodok_AAS_v1 - Changed team 2 from MIL to RUS.

Jensen’s Range

Fixed vehicle armor diorama: MTLB 6MA turret using opaque materials, duplicated BMP1 model.

Kohat

Kohat Invasion v1 - Fixed Hangu Orchard forward spawn point not being spawnable by INS.

Lashkar Valley

Lashkar Valley Skirmish v1 - Fixed Commander not being disabled.

Manic-5 (CAF)

CAF Manic-5 AAS v1 & RAAS v3 - Fixed CAF main base helipad not giving supplies.

Tallil Outskirts

CAF Tallil Outskirts RAAS v1 - Fixed RUS ammo crate clipping into vehicle repair station at RUS Main.

Skorpo

Skopro Invasion v2 - Fixed RUS team having Ural 4320 Trucks instead of the new Kamaz 5350 Trucks.

Yehorivka

CAF Yehorivka Invasion v1 - Added MIL Ural 375 Logi on the forward spawn.

Aug 12, 2020

Road to Fallujah, Pt 2

Squad - Krispy

Hello squaddies,

Welcome to another deep dive in our development world, and this time it's a long-overdue followup that many of you have been waiting for. Today, the Environment team will be detailing the work they've been putting in to get Fallujah, one of our most anticipated maps to date, ready for you to play on.

That's not all, be sure to join us tomorrow at 11 am PDT Thursday 13th August over on our Twitch channel where Community Manager Krispy will be sitting down with some of the Environment dev team to get your burning questions answered about this amazing map. Without further ado, read on soldiers!

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While for many at Offworld it feels like just yesterday, the first article in this series, The Road to Fallujah Part 1, was released almost 3 years ago. In that time a lot has happened, and Squad as a game has changed tremendously. Our team has been hard at work the entire time, but Fallujah as a map has taken many different forms and priorities over the many months it’s been in development. In this article, our level design and environment team will go into detail on their process for developing Fallujah’s many facets, giving a window into the development of this ambitious project.

Before we dive in, we feel that it’s important to address the long wait. When work was originally started on Fallujah, Squad was a very different game than it is today. Additionally, our understanding of the Unreal Engine was still evolving, as was our experience with building and designing maps of this size and complexity. The map went through several revisions during this time, trying different approaches to technical problems, different inspirations and styles for the layout, and various processes for actually building the level and assets themselves. During all of this experimentation and learning, while visual quality and technical expertise advanced considerably, the overall design of the map itself slowly degraded due to all the experiments and processes being worked on. Eventually, it was decided that the map in its most recent iteration simply wasn’t up to the level of quality we wanted and that if we continued to develop it out, the end product wouldn’t do justice to a setting that we hold very dear in many of our memories. With this in mind, we began a full restart of the layout design for Fallujah. While none of us wanted to wait this long to be able to show off our hard work, we’re confident that the end product we eventually arrived at was very much worth the wait, and we hope you agree. So without further ado, let’s see and hear it from the devs themselves:

Squad’s Most Immersive Environment Yet

One of the most prominent things many players will notice when they load into the map for the first time is the great amount of detail that has been scattered throughout the environment. Not only does Fallujah have three times the complexity and object count of any other map in Squad, but as players fight their way through the streets they will likely notice that despite this abundance of detail, much of the decoration isn’t simply for show. Fallujah has been carefully populated with signs of battles past, inklings of narrative hidden in the destruction. Thus, in addition to the stories created by our players, the map itself has a lot to say through the art of environmental storytelling. Let’s take a quick look at some recreations of just a few of the stories that litter the battlefield:

A US Army fuel convoy is ambushed at a critical crossroads.

Middle Eastern Alliance vehicles weave their way through the ‘Highway of Death’ outside the city.

US Army vehicles stop for a spotted IED, caught in a thick sandstorm.

A light garrison of MEA troops desperately defends Fallujah's battered police station from an insurgent siege.

MEA troops receive fire from US Armor while barricaded inside a dense urban market.

Designing a Playable City from the Ground Up

Click here for a comparison shot

From the beginning, our intention with Fallujah has always been to push boundaries in both environment art and level design. When the design was started from scratch, multiple avenues of the layout were considered, but ultimately it was decided that our inspiration should come from the most reliable source: real life. Fallujah’s layout has been based on the true layout of the city, based on mid-2010s imagery, but the scale is roughly 2:1. This allowed us to use real-life photos from battles as direct references, and also gave us the flexibility to layout the map in a way that makes sense for Squad’s gameplay.

The level design team’s main priority, in the beginning, was developing a concrete concept for what we would like urban combat in Squad to look like, while the environment art team was hard at work upgrading our visual quality and creating a much more consistent look for Fallujah that matched as closely as possible to our gathered reference photos. While there was already some environment art completed when the design was refreshed, doing a bit of a refresh on the environment side as well helped us to make sure the level design and environment art integrated as nicely as possible. Once we had a vision for what our overall strategy and process would be, we then had to move on to laying out the city itself.

City Planning through use of Districts

Looking at the satellite map of Fallujah, it was clear that it would be impossible to recreate the whole city at a 1:1 scale. The ultimate decision made was to map out the key districts, roads, and terrain features of the real city, scale them down by half, and then fill them with buildings and props in a way that made sense for the space. This process also made heavy use of reference photos to guide how the blocks should look and feel. The design emphasis in this process was to create diverse types of gameplay, from high-intensity urban warfare to a more relaxed suburban environment. We also knew that fighting in a tense urban environment for long durations could be tiring, so the districts often alternate between types, keeping the experience varied. We also made sure that we kept some of the original points of interest from the much-loved PR map, so the mosque, four-lane highway, twin T-buildings, outskirts, and more should be recognizable landmarks for veterans of Project Reality.

This is an early shot of how we planned out the map’s districts, overlaid on top of a satellite image of the real city:

Here’s a list of what each color represents:

Orange:

Blue:

Tan:

Grey:

Yellow Circles:

Once the districts had been planned out we moved to focusing on core locations that would be fun and dynamic to fight over for players. We also made sure there was adequate spacing between these areas to account for our RAAS/AAS system and to give room for strategic maneuvers, FOBs, and daring flanks.

Designing the Points of Interest

Click here for a comparison shot

The map design process is heavily based on POIs (Points Of Interest), which are designed to be centers of attention for the map, such as cap points and FOB locations. Placing large objects like buildings and designating negative space (like roads and alleys) were usually the first tasks of the team when creating these areas. This is so we can determine how the players move through the overall space, both at ground level and across the rooftops or interiors.

Taking the Crossroads POI as an example in this photo, the early blockout can be seen with blue and yellow lines depicting the flow of movement. Blue boxes show large objects that provide cover and red boxes are areas kept clear to ensure there are protected locations to build a HAB.

After the primary objects are placed, we tweak every aspect of the area from the player’s perspective. For example, can a player sprint from cover to cover and have a reasonable chance of surviving? What are the views from the rooftops and are any positions overpowered? What are the viewing angles and lines of sight? What benefits does a defender have and what options are available for attackers? These are all important questions that must be answered before the design stage can be considered complete.

The end result of all this planning has led us to a map that will hopefully provide plenty of opportunities for fun, emergent experiences without feeling repetitive or stale, and should be a platform to offer fresh gameplay for years to come.

Environment Art

In part one we shared a behind the scenes look into the pre-production phase of Fallujah’s environment art. We showed off the residential buildings that are now used on several Squad maps, such as Tallil Outskirts and Mutaha, and helped solidify the map’s artistic look by creating a “vertical slice”. The next kit that we began to work on was the all-important Urban Center set, which would eventually fill almost half of the map. This set was extremely important, and we spent a lot of time going back and forth between the designers and environment artists, making sure that the assets would suit our needs from every angle.

After collecting countless reference photos and researching past battles over Fallujah, the environment team got to work. From multi-story apartment buildings, marketplaces, Fallujah’s iconic blue mosque, open-air markets, and far too many others to list, the urban setting was an entirely different challenge than we had ever had to face before.

When it came to the creation of assets for Fallujah we studied real-world references from the city itself as well as the surrounding regions, especially when it came to the overall atmosphere and architecture. This isn’t to say that we were restricted or bound to only recreating existing buildings, the Environment Art and Level Design teams worked together to analyze them and extract the main elements of what made those locations what they are.

This process involved creating blockouts and really proving out the gameplay spaces of the assets thoroughly, which were then taken into an Alpha stage with basic materials, and then secondary and tertiary forms were added. The Beta stage came after and focused more on material development and the Final game-ready stage came after, which included a detailed pass with decals and additional props like air conditioning units, water tanks, and satellite dishes. This process was highlighted in the previous edition of this article, however, we did add some new complexities to it, such as our use of ‘prefab’ actors, which allow us to arrange many smaller actors into a large prefab, and then use it repeatedly to save time, effort, and performance.

Set Dressing and Polish

Once the POI design is complete and playtested we place decorations, such as rubble, awnings, signs, trash, bullet hole decals, etc. These don’t usually affect the gameplay, but they’re instrumental in making each location feel authentic and interesting, as well as immersing the player into the environment they inhabit.

Optimization

Last, but not least, is optimization. Fallujah is an incredibly detailed and expansive map, so keeping the map running within acceptable levels has been an ongoing battle since the very beginning. During the process of optimizing, we tweak nearly every aspect of the map. Explaining this process could easily fill an entire article on its own and so we won’t try to cover it here fully, but we thought it was important to mention at least a little because the final optimization process for Fallujah took around six months and required us to use every single tool in our toolbag along the way. We scrutinized every static, sound, particle effect, and piece of foliage then ran the map through several more CPT playtests to see how the map performed on different hardware configurations, on a full server. Fallujah is an extremely detailed map that pushes our current technology to its limits, but we’ve managed to squeeze through and create something we consider playable from it.

In Summary

Fallujah has undoubtedly been our most exciting and challenging map to create. It’s been a long journey through the initial design phase, the blockouts, set dressing, and through playtesting and optimization, and we hope the quality and detail we’ve created will provide a stage for some of the most immersive experiences ever had in Squad.

Offworld Out!