Hey everyone,

Welcome to Dev Brief #131!

This week we've got a bumper Dev Brief that proceeds an exciting weekend for Hell Let Loose. Did someone say leaving Early Access?

On top of that Max has stopped by to explain our plans for Hell Let Loose both as we leave Early Access and beyond.

Then, as a couple of cherries on the cake we've got news on our next PTE(s), including a rather special one next week as well as a first look at the overhauled Sainte-Marie-Du-Mont coming to the game as part of Update 10.

Now, there's lots of Dev Brief goodness for you to get through, so let's get stuck in shall we...



We want to let you know about an exciting announcement taking place during the Future Game Show event this weekend. You may have seen something about this via our social channels already.

THE FUTURE GAME SHOW
Sunday June 13th - 4pm PDT - 7pm EDT - 12am Midnight BST - 1am CEST

Max will announce the date for Hell Let Loose leaving Early Access. And we will tease and show off the 2nd map of the Eastern Front. We know you might have guessed it already...



We are very excited to be participating in this event, we are sure we will be in great company with some amazing people, companies and products that will entail the Future Gameshow.

Be sure to check it out!

Watch live on the day at the following locations:

GamesRadar Twitch
GamesRadar YouTube



Hi everybody,

We’re excited to announce that we’ll be leaving Early Access with the launch of Update 10 in the coming weeks and the introduction of the Soviet forces. For us, it represents the solidification of several foundational elements for the game. We know that there will be many questions around us leaving Early Access and what that might mean for the future of the title. Don’t worry - as you’ll discover below this represents the completion of some key infrastructure beneath the hood - including finalising workflows that will enable us to work far more efficiently in the future. You’ll also see that we’ve got huge things planned for the game that we’ll talk through below.

Our Goals During Early Access

Hell Let Loose is an epic journey for both the whole development team and community.

Beginning in 2015 as a hobby, we’ve both expanded and learned so much during the development of Hell Let Loose.

When launching into Early Access, we had several key goals to accomplish during the period:

• We knew that there were several fundamental infrastructure overhauls that we’d need to achieve during the period in order to make sure we were best set up to support the title well beyond our Early Access period. Our animation system required more than 50 handmade animations per item, our texturing systems meant both our vehicles and weapons were so expensive on VRAM usage that they needed to be crushed in quality, and there was a total absence of ballistics in-game - to name just a few significant absences or issues.
  
  
• On top of this, we also wanted to build out the core offering of maps, roles and vehicles - and expand and polish Commander abilities.
  
  
• Lastly, we also wanted to expand the size of the studio and bring on new team members who could join us in refining and building Hell Let Loose long term.

For us, Update 10 represents the success of these initial goals and our leaving Early Access. All underlying infrastructure in the game has been rewritten for much easier iteration, expansion and optimisation and were used to help us introduce the all-new Soviet forces to the game.



As developers, we’re aware of every issue within the game - both technical, bug or features that could be polished, changed or refined. We’d be happy to stay in Early Access for several more years, however as part of our original commitment we felt that it’s important to draw a line under what we’d consider to be the “base game”.

As mentioned above, Early Access represented a time for us to implement huge infrastructure overhauls to the underlying code of the game - including entirely reworking our animation, sound effects, ballistics, mapping and texturing pipeline in a way that means our future work is far easier to adapt, optimise and expand.

We are also aware that every player will have their own feeling about what would be considered critical to achieve before leaving Early Access - and that there won’t necessarily be consensus. That said, it’s important to reassure the community as a whole that this is the end of the first foundational stage of our development.

Lastly, leaving Early Access will help us as a studio to continue to work on and support Hell Let Loose well into the future.


When will we leave Early Access?

We will be leaving Early Access with the launch of Update 10. We will be doing a special announcement this Sunday with the exact date as well as first teaser footage of the second unrevealed map and our new Eastern Front trailer.


Are you leaving Early Access because of the console development?

No. Many Early Access games stay in Early Access while also launching on console.


Will you honour Kickstarter Backers pledges?

Yes. We are fully committed to honouring these pledges and will be following up with specific backers. For example, we are currently testing one of the kickstarter uniform rewards in the PTE.


Does this mean the meta or “feature/bug I don’t like” will never be fixed or changed?

No. Hell Let Loose is an enormous game with hundreds of features that all need to coexist and all will continue to be refined or changed as we always have.
New content will continue to shift the meta towards our ultimate vision for the title. For example, the introduction of halftracks will shift the way in which teams stage attacks into enemy territory, while the new armour rework will shift the power of AT from the straight destruction of vehicles to component damage.


Does this mean that updates and work will slow down or end on Hell Let Loose?

No. This simply represents another milestone in our development journey. We will be releasing a roadmap soon to outline what you can expect to see in the future. This roadmap will include large amounts of content underpinned by continued polish, fixes, balancing and optimisations.

The future includes:

• Addition of new Western and Eastern Front maps
  
• Continued polish on all existing maps
  
• Addition of new forces and theatres
  
• Addition of new vehicles eg. halftracks, jeeps, heavy tanks, assault guns, specialist variants etc.
  
• Addition of new weapons eg. trench guns, flamethrowers, mortars, FG-42 and many more
  
• Addition of new gadgets and features (night maps, flare guns etc.)
  
• Expansion of types of deployable emplacements (HMGs, AA guns etc.)
  
• Expansion and continued balancing of Commander abilities
  
• Campaign mode to tie public matches together
  
• Solo and grouped matchmaking
  
• And much, much more.

Thank You

Fundamentally, World War Two is an enormous conflict, with thousands of different aspects worth exploring. As a development team, we’re fully committed to continuing to work together with the community to build on this core foundation of Hell Let Loose well into the future. We’re very excited to have you on the journey with us!



We would like to take a moment in this week’s Dev Brief to say a big thank you to all who joined us in yesterday’s PTE, once again we had an amazing turnout of players getting their boots dirty in the upcoming Eastern Front. We had a blast as a team fighting beside you through all the chaos and action.

Due to your profound commitment in providing feedback and bug reports we’re able to move forward with a greater confidence in knowing the changes we need to make. Some of the changes you experienced during the PTE were experimental changes that we wanted to test in a populated environment. Going forward we will continue to make alterations and additions based on your feedback and how we felt they impacted the flow of the game.

We have listened to the community feedback and will be running several more PTE’s over the coming weeks. Also next week we plan to host yet another PTE, only this time we have something very special in mind, something we’re sure you won't want to miss…

If you haven’t played in any of the PTEs before, or wish to receive notifications of upcoming PTEs, please join the official HLL Discord here where you can find all the relevant information:

YES I WANT TO JOIN THE HELL LET LOOSE DISCORD

We are still looking to host additional PTEs leading up to the release of Update 10, so if for any reason you can make this one, don’t worry!





Sainte-Marie-Du-Mont is by far the oldest Hell Let Loose map - being our initial Alpha map and the first one we ever made. As a result, we made several early mistakes in how we set the map up, including laying it out for a diagonal orientation (leading to one of the key locations - the town - being between two strongpoints).

In addition to this, many graphical aspects of the map were extremely low quality due to outdated workflows. As a result, we’re now seeking to unify the quality and look of all our maps - including starting to use uniformly optimised props, buildings and foliage. The idea being that we have far more consolidated points of control, so that we can uniformly improve performance and gameplay across all of our maps.

Included below is the new tactical map for Sainte-Marie-Du-Mont. We’ve kept all the favourite locations, while shifting the orientation and location of the map so that the key road (Rue De La Gare) runs straight down the map and so the town itself features as its own Strong Point. In addition to this, we’ve built out some more rational and exciting Strong Points, with a focus on keeping similar cover density to the original map.



Finally, due to shifting the map, we’ve opened up some ground on the south western edge that is slightly more dramatic in height - allowing for engaging long range vehicle and infantry combat.



More about SMDM

Sainte-Marie-Du-Mont is situated 6 miles (10 km) north of Carentan and some 3 miles (5 km) inland of Utah Beach. Saint-Marie-du-Mont lies at the end of a long causeway linking the beach to higher ground and was therefore a principal objective of paratroopers of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division.

Eglise Notre-Dame is a large stone church set in the middle of the town of Sainte Marie du Mont. This area of town and the church saw heavy fighting between the 101st and the German Wehrmacht. The fighting continued in the church with snipers using the belltower and, later in the day, Germans hiding in the confessional. There are still bullet holes which show the intensity of the battle, inside and outside the stone walls.





We'll be sharing more exciting goodies with you in the coming weeks. We hope you are all as happy and excited as we are with this next Update. Next week we will have a preview of some more new Soviet content.


Onwards to the weekend!

That wraps up this week's bumper Dev Brief! We've got an exciting weekend ahead of us and we hope you'll join us as we announce our full launch from Steam Early Access.

We'll see you on the frontline.

Welcome to the weekly news. :)



The new UI and HUD almost finished, we need to polish some things and fix the issues that were found. Unless there will be some changes, it shouldn't take much time. We can't wait to show you the new UI, but first things first.


Our level designer continues to upgrade the map, this week he was in the rock-mood, and the new upgrade includes a small canyon, so watch yourself, who knows what traps he put there. For viewers free of charge.






Have a great weekend and until next time. :)

Remade features:
Campaign training has been re-vamped from scratch. We've replaced the old functionality of putting people into buildings, and built an entirely new view where you can do everyone at once.

It should be easier to use, easier to understand, and bring lots of joy to the game :)

Recruit price adjustment:
The price of recruiting a new hero has been slashed.

New sounds:
We're focusing on immersion for a bit. That means more sounds, and more animations for everything. This first patch focuses on giving sounds to rats and slimes, but incoming patches (sometime next week), will have updates to heroes, enemies, skills, including animations and effects.

This is a quick performance update. I found a bug in my reflection probe implementation that was causing a major slow down when lots of things were on the screen - in some cases it would drop frame rate by half!

I've now removed the reflection probe from the scene. The downside is that at night you may find your boat "glows" slightly due to the skybox reflections being too bright - I do have a fix for that :)

I've also removed the dual axis throttle option from the control config box. Don't worry, you can still set different axis for throttle up/throttle down, it was just the extra option wasn't required as you could already set different axis on the standard option.

This was causing confusion and conflicts between devices as effectively you could have 2 axis for throttle up and 2 for throttle down and the game wouldn't know which one to follow!

I will have a larger update ready shortly which will include the new start/finish gantry and some more race side objects, and of course work continues on the jet-skis!

Hello everyone!

The next Barotrauma update is on its way, to be released next week. Look forward to...

Cargo missions have been overhauled so cargo now spawns on shelves and in special Unit Load Devices. If you have none of those on your sub, a small amount of cargo will spawn on the floor. The more you can carry, the more money you will make.

Escort missions of various kinds have been added: transport NPCs safely from one place to another, or move dangerous prisoners between outposts, or even pose as a transport vessel to flush out plotting terrorists.

Pirate missions pit you against an enemy submarine, manned by hostile NPCs, that you need to defeat.

Starting with this update, you can also have two missions per round to complete more objectives in one go.

New weapons! The pulse laser and the chaingun, along with their own special ammo types, and a new kind of ammo for the railgun are being added to improve your submarines’ offensive capabilities.

Adding weapons to subs is now possible when docked at a colony.

Submarine upgrades now apply to all your subs, not to individual boats. This way, changing to a new submarine won’t set you back in the game, and you can safely switch to a new submarine even below crush depth.

Order persistence between campaign rounds means you will no longer have to assign the same order all over again at the start of every round. Crewmates – bots and people – will start a new campaign round with the same orders they had at the end of the previous one.

Singleplayer: Sell items directly from the sub without carrying them: simply walk to the outpost merchant and use the newly added tab in the store. If this works well, something similar will probably be added in multiplayer too!

Twelve new events that you can encounter aboard outposts for more story.

Read more about it on our blog, and stay tuned for the release of Thunder Under The Ice next week!

Weeks of planning, gathering clues and evidence needed to discover THE TRUTH, persuading strangers to join our merry party, gathering supplies and the necessary tools. All these activities, as well as the numerous events that took place along the way, finally led us to the most important point of the journey - the last mission, "Heist".



You have been asking us about "Heist" for many months, demanding specific information, and sometimes also gameplay fragments. We didn't do this for several reasons. The most important of them is, of course, the desire to avoid spoilers (well, this IS the end of the game), and the ability to refine this powerful fragment in even its smallest aspects. You must know that "Heist" shows all the elements that make up the core of Chernobylite gameplay.



"You must gather your party before venturing forth" - this Baldur's Gate quote is a perfect match for the beginning of the Heist mission. During the briefing, Igor has to decide who will go with him disguised as NAR soldiers, who will guard the rear with a sniper rifle, who will hack and who will be doing the diversion. With a full team, the division of duties isn’t a problem. Worse if someone withdraws at the last minute.

Our teammates may choose not to go on the final mission with us. They will turn their noses up if, for example, we won't collect enough tools or evidence to support Igor's theories. In other words, if not everything is 100% finished (i.e. not all the pieces of the puzzle will appear on the board), then there will be doubts among the team, and in the end it may turn out that some will start giving up participation in the mission. Even Mikhail could admit that he may be crazy, but not enough crazy to be part of it.



Another way to discourage people from coming with us on the last mission is to... discourage them from reaching the player himself. During the game, the player will have to make several decisions, which are crucial not only for the development of the plot, but also for the relationship between him and the recruited characters. For example, at the end of the "Hack NAR servers" mission, you must decide whether to delete the data after hacking the NAR servers or look for information about Tatiana. Choosing the second option, the player will worsen his relationship with Mikhail - which is not surprising, because he was risking his life for this mission. There are also missions where making a choice can change your relationship with two characters at once. For example, by deciding to follow the destructive path of Sashko, we’ll gain respect for him, and at the same time we’ll lose respect for common-sense Olga, and vice versa. So it's important to keep the right proportions if we want to have a full team for the last mission.

Everything is planned, the team is tight and ready, the roles are assigned. It's time to go!



We emphasize many times that in Chernobylite, as befits an RPG, all the decisions we make have an impact on the further course of the game. This is something for those who know the game inside out, and you can find another example of it in the chapter above. However, everything that you have seen so far is only a small foretaste of what you can see in "Heist".

In order not to throw words to the wind, we will use examples (avoiding spoilers) to show how our decisions can have a real impact on the game. Well, first of all, you need to be aware that there are so many options to complete this mission. This is evident at the very beginning, when the team has to get to the power plant. The road leads through the main gate, which is guarded by two guards. We have several options to choose from:

a) play a scene in front of the guards about transporting the prisoner



b) shoot the guards from a distance with a sniper rifle



c) choose a different entrance, away from the guards' eyes



Each of these solutions requires a different approach and the right person in the right place. If, for example, the team doesn’t have a sniper, then the choice will be limited to two options, etc. However, if by some miracle we lead to a situation where we’ll be on our own, then it remains a force solution. Very risky and hellishly difficult, but if we've got more than a revolver with us, MAYBE somehow it’ll work.

The phrase "choice is of great importance" can also be seen in the subsequent stages of "Heist". One of the better examples is when a team tries to get through the biogates. These can set off an alarm, which in turn will attract the attention of the guards. So you can ask someone from the crew to hack the gates, and then you can easily pass through them...



...or ask the sniper to distract the guards with a big boom! However, in the latter case, you have to bear in mind that the sniper will have to run away from the guards. This means that he or she will be disconnected from the party, and we’ll lose his or her "services" later in the mission. Maybe they will be useful, maybe not - you won't find out if you don't check it.



However, regardless of the situation, you need to be careful that each step is well-thought-out. One wrong move, and we’ll not only lose one of the options to overcome the next obstacle, but also... one of our companions. Yes, an inappropriate decision made either now or two minutes ago could lead to the death of a member or members of our team. And that’s thought.



As you can see, there are really many ways to go "Heist", and the mutual thread of connections between the decisions made leads to the most diverse consequences. Which path we follow depends entirely on ourselves. Therefore, it is worth going through the small fragment of "Heist" available in the Mega Patch even several times to know what awaits on the day of the premiere. And it's going to be a very long and bloody hard journey.



Take care, Stalkers!

Hello everyone!
After realize that the gameplay of Tower of Waifus are not satisfy to many player.
We decide to update a completely new gameplay for Tower of Waifus 2 and here is the new gameplay video and story reveal:

The game will be released on June 18, 2021.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1560770/Tower_of_Waifus_2/
Wish list now to grab it on launch sale!

We're excited to announce that The Persistence Enhanced is out now



Today we’re excited to announce that the Enhanced Edition of our critically acclaimed rogue-lite survival horror title, The Persistence, is available now!

The Persistence Enhanced dials up the intensity of the dark foreboding decks of the doomed deep space colony ship to new heights with improved lighting and particle effects and the addition of Raytracing via DXR and NVIDIA® DLSS specifically implemented for supported RTX cards.

The Persistence Enhanced is available as a standalone paid digital download and as a free upgrade for existing owners of The Persistence on Steam and includes a free concept art book and soundtrack DLC bundle.

The Persistence Enhanced will feature:

• DXR implementation: Realtime shadows, Reflections and Realtime Global Illumination
  
• Full DLSS support for NVIDIA® RTX Supported Graphics Cards
  
• Improved effects and particles 
  
• Improved UI
  
• Adjustable frame rate lock settings  - 30 / 60 / 120 / 144 / Unlimited

Quality of Life Improvements

• Below are the following improvements that have been possible to implement with this update:
  
• Improved menu screens, comfort options and HUD scaling  
  
• Manual language change 
  
• Game-feel improvements 
  
• Improved Windowed Mode
  
• Additional monitor support
  
• Customisable controls and Weapon Hotswapping
  
• HUD Scaling Improved Menu Screens
  
• VR Graphical Settings options
  
• Mouselook now free, rather than locked to the middle button 
  
• General bug fixes 

Follow The Persistence on Twitter for all the latest reveals and news, and share your gameplay content with us using #ThePersistenceEnhanced!

Hello everyone!
After realize that the gameplay of Tower of Waifus are not satisfy to many player.
We decide to update a completely new gameplay for Tower of Waifus 2 and here is the new gameplay video and story reveal:

The game will be released on June 18, 2021.
Wish list now to grab it on launch sale!

Dear Users!
Update news are here from Broken Universe development team.

Version 0.9.11 hotfix update has been applied.

Thank you!

• The effect value of the skill "Auto Repair I/II/III" has been changed from 10/10/10 → 5/5/5.
  
• The effect value of the skill "Shield Recover I/II/III" has been changed from 2/2/2 → 1/1/1.

• Fixed the issue where buildings were not destroyed when acquiring the "Core Shield" skill.
  
• Fixed the issue where the number of stars was displayed abnormally on the game result screen.
  
• Fixed the issue where some field elements and field effects behaved abnormally on certain PC.