A demo version of Little Inner Monsters will be available during the Steam Next Fest (21 to 28/Feb), a special event on Steam showcasing game demos.

Watch a session of streamers playing the demo and talk to the devs in the chat. We'll answer questions and get feedback from players.
It will be on 22/Feb.

Play the demo, give us your feedback in the Community Hub.
Add the game to your wishlist to be notified about the full release.

Good luck!

Dear Nine Dragons Community,

The servers will undergo maintenance and server update today, February 22, 2022, at 18:00 server time. The downtime will be approximately 3 hours.

Reason:

• Routine server checks.
  
• Expand the memory capacity limit for the client processor to occupy a 32-bit based OS (larger scale of memory capacity). This will address the error of Can't Create Texture.
  
• Fixed an issue where the GS sometimes fell into an infinite loop when dismissing martial art effects from a weapon.
  
• Fixed an issue where a party member goes into Combat Mode status if another member in the party gets disconnected from the game.
  
• Initialize character Combat Record due to the Combat Mode status bug.
  
• Improved the overlapping text issue in the Guardian skill list UI.
  
• Adjust the width of the client options window GUI so that the string does not extend outside the window.

Thank you for your patience during the maintenance

before we fully focus on chapter 4, we decided to publish a small update with ideas from the community. It was suggested that you can select the individual chapters in the main menu to play them again without having to start from the beginning:



Once you have unlocked a chapter, you can select it from the menu at any time. Please note, however, that if you press "New Game", all progress will be lost. This also applies to the unlocked chapters. So if you want to start from the beginning without losing your progress, please select "Chapter 1" in the selection.

Furthermore, we have made a few small changes in chapter 3, which are not mentioned here for spoiler reasons. The performance has also been improved in some areas and should be noticeable for players with weaker systems.

Feel free to send us more suggestions and ideas so that we can implement them in future updates! We can't say it often enough, but: Your feedback is incredibly important!

Until then, have fun with Psych, and we'll get back to work on Chapter 4!

See you soon,
Dan and Andreas

New Functionality:

• Added a flashing battle marker on the mini map, so you can see the world battle location more easily

Bug Fixes:

• Rebasing aircraft were unintentionally engaging in combat
  
• Naval combat was occurring between Japan and UK before Pearl Harbor
  
• Production Queue click-detection/tooltips in the Information Panel was misaligned by a few pixels causing the wrong item to be shown sometimes.
  
• Fixed error with RebaseAir command not allowing selection of distant airbases that are legal targets in some circumstances.
  
• Fixed bug where Units Report Select button (which zooms the map to the unit) couldn't find unit and went into loop, hanging the game.
  
• Fixed bug where movement arrows were drawn incorrectly when the movement arrow needed to be drawn exactly vertically. This happened in a few regions near Hawaii. Arrows should now be drawn correctly.

- Various bug fixes

Added more music
Added helicopter attack

Our next major update on the 24th of February brings some big updates and new content. First off, the Merchant of Wonders, Fugoro will find himself trapped in the Roguebook for those who purchase him as DLC.

He will also be available for all players in the new Story Tournament mode.



Story tournaments are a competition between players to see who can complete a run the fastest, or score the most points. While similar to a “daily run,” story tournaments are special in that they start at the exact same time for everyone. This means that in order to finish first, you’ll likely need to be there at the starting line.

We wanted to make these runs a special event that occurs only a couple of times per day. The idea is to make these runs a more social and spectator-friendly version of what is normally a daily run - something that is available for 24 hours and you can complete at your leisure. There is a bit of a gap in those between yourself and the other players that we wanted to close a bit.

We imagine that some players will gather and rush to be the first to complete the tournament as soon as it starts, then those players who remain will go for the highest score.

Your “Finish time” will always be from the time the tournament officially begins. For example, if the tournament starts at 6pm and you finish it at 8pm, your finish time will be 2 hours.

Each tournament has a designated set of heroes and 3 special modifiers. Embellishments are set the same for everyone, and everyone has the same exact seed.

It does not matter what DLC you own when competing in a tournament. All heroes are available to everyone in any tournament.

After the fastest players have finished, players can then compete to score the most points.


Twice a day, a new Story tournament is generated. We aim to start these tournaments at staggered times in order to accommodate as many players across the world as practical.

• Everyone plays on the same run seed
  
• The run is set to “Epilogue 6” difficulty
  
• All hero cards are unlocked
  
• A baseline of embellishments is applied to the seed
  
• These embellishments are completely independent of what the player currently has. Everyone will have the same.
  
• Three special tournament modifiers (mutators) are applied

Each run has 3 special modifiers applied to it.

The first modifier will always be a Global modifier that affects everything in the run.

The other two modifiers have a chance to be deck randomizers or a hero-specific modifier.

The end result should be a dramatically unique run each tournament, and hopefully only rarely broken.

• Your current highest ranking placement medal (This ranking is dynamically updated live)
  
• Time elapsed since the beginning of the tournament
  
• Global statistics:
  • Players: Total players entered into the tournament
    
  • Deaths: Total players who have been defeated in the run (or abandoned)
    
  • Finishers: Total players who defeated chapter 3

Once the tournament is close to ending, there are several lockout notifications that occur to players attempting to join, or currently playing.

• Less than 4 players remaining:
  New players will be warned that only 4 players remain.
  
• Less than 1 hour remaining:
  Players are locked from joining the current tournament. You must wait to join the next.

This is to prevent players from joining a tournament that they likely will not be able to finish.

When a tournament’s time expires, all player runs end and a new tournament begins.

Only the first run (win or lose) will only count toward your leaderboard placement.

Afterward, you may retry that tournament as much as you like until the timer expires. You will not change your placement, but you can still earn pages.



As we previously mentioned, the speed category involves completing the run as fast as possible from the starting point of the event which means you'll want to arrive on time to compete at the same time as the rest of the players. The scoring category works different, players earning points for winning battles, and completing other objectives. You'll want to decide which category you're aiming for and act accordingly.


We hope you enjoy this new major feature for Roguebook. We hope it will be a way for you to enjoy the game with friends and compare your performances in very special circumstances.

This feature is being released simultaneously with our new hero, Fugoro - and the very first tournament will feature him.

This means everyone can play with Fugoro for free right away by participating in the first tournament. After that, he will have a chance to randomly appear just like all of the other heroes.

You’ll never have to own him to play with him in a tournament.

Thank you for playing Roguebook!

The week long Open Beta for Battle Bands is now over, thank you to everyone who played and extra thanks to all the awesome people who helped us by providing feedback!!
It was truly a blast to see you all play and to battle with & against you!

If you are hoping for more insights and imput into Battle Bands as we approach launch come on over to our Discord!

If you can't wait to grab the game when it goes into early access on March 17th 2022 visit the store page!

Thank you again to all who watched, played, and participated it meant the world to us and we hope our continued work and development of Battle Bands into and through Early Access will continue to entertain!

Welcome to the eighteenth devblog for Operation: Harsh Doorstop. In this update, we will be reviewing the work that the team completed in the month of January 2022.

To start, I wanted to give everyone a quick update on the status of the singleplayer demo, and the multiplayer playtests that are coming up:

The team is still cranking away and pushing towards getting these out into people’s hands so they can start playing and checking out the game. Unfortunately, some of the tasks that are being worked on are taking a bit longer than anticipated, namely all of the UI overhaul work that is happening—this task requires a significant amount of programming work: not only are new systems being built and changed to, but the programmer is taking this opportunity to also refactor and update a lot of the older underlying systems that go into this, which will lead to a more robust and polished experience across the board.

Our current singleplayer demo release roadmap is as follows:

1. We want to finish the main menu UI. This will not only include a complete revamp to the aesthetic of how it looks, but also include things like functions to allow people to start matches with bots without the use of console commands, change more keybinds (finally), lay the foundation for a more robust server browser and filter system, and so on.
   
2. We will be implementing character class variations that the character modeling team has been working on (see below). This will allow for some more variety on the battlefield, so you won’t be looking at carbon copy clones of the same character model all the time. This should also hold us over until we implement a more in-depth character customization system that will allow players to have more control over how their characters look.
   
3. We are going to polish up many of the animations that need attention after the animation overhaul that we did a few months ago. As most of you have likely noticed, there are some funky animations that look weird or are just straight up broken as a result of moving to the new animation system (which is largely due to using animations that were initially created on the old system, but that don’t integrate well with the new systems). There will probably still be a few funky ones, but we hope to tackle the major issues here soon.
   
4. We will be implementing the first iteration of voice callouts for the bots. Soon, bots will start to make callouts when they see an enemy, get shot at, get hit, reload their guns, and so on. This will take some time to get right, but having a basic first version should help a lot with adding more flavor and variety to the gameplay experience.

When all is said and done, we anticipate that these tasks will be completed sometime around the end of February or early-to-mid March. We know a lot of people are excited and wanting to get in as soon as possible, but we want to make sure that we get all of these things done so that everyone has as solid an experience as possible in these early stages. The team is working as fast as possible to complete everything, so hopefully we will have the demo and playtests out to people here very soon!

Moving on to January’s recap:

Expansions

The character model team made a few new variations of the PMC and Insurgent factions:



There are several more variants that they are working on as well in addition to these that we will show off next month. For instance, some of the PMCs will be receiving a new jacket, as well as a new headset:





Progress was made on a M240B model that will be used in Invictus, and will of course be available in our library of weapons at large for use in any other expansions:




More character variations were made for the US and Russian soldier models:



And even more for the US and NVA factions:



All of the factions for each expansion have more variations being worked on as well, so we should have more to show on next month’s update.

Maps

The level design team incorporated new time of day and weather layers to Lam Dong, as well as rearranged some of the foliage, added hard cover to various spots across the map, and cleaned up/polished certain areas overall:





Khafji also received new time of day and weather effect layers:



Argonne also received a couple of variations of weather effects:

Animations

One of our animators has been working on a much needed overhaul to our third person walking animations:









Various third person animations for primary and secondary weapon movement in different directions

In addition, the weapon animator made a few new animations and redid a bunch of existing ones:













New M16A2 and AK74 reloads, RPG-7, and various grenade animations redone

Objects, Models, and Textures

Monte Cassino’s foliage was completely overhauled and redone:




The US base on Lam Dong was facelifted and received a bunch of new props to detail it:



A blockout Humvee was created for upcoming vehicle work and testing:



Please note that this is just a blockout model, and it intentionally leaves out a lot of detailing while the team works on the mechanics behind the scenes. We will be creating a more proper model once these initial phases are completed.

Upcoming and WIP Features

New blood splatter and hit impact effects were created:



The blood spray is a bit exaggerated, however, we felt that this will work out fine as it effectively doubles as a hit indicator at distance without having to add any annoying UI elements to tell you when you hit someone.

We also finally did away with the annoying default UE4 hit sound effects!

A member on the team also began experimenting with night vision goggles/effects in his free time:



The in-game UI overhaul has now more or less been completed:



We will continue tweaking and working on other features that we want to integrate into this over time, but the main parts are now done and functional.

Work also continued on prototyping an in-game contextual interaction system:




Please note that all of the images shown above are from a side project that the UI team is working on, and none of the design/aesthetics of the menus, icons, and so on are final. We are still experimenting a lot with how we want this to look and function before actually diving into creating a system in-game (plus the programming team is tied up working on other things right now).

As mentioned in a prior devblog, we obviously take a lot of inspiration from the interaction system from the popular ACE mod for Arma 3, as well as SWAT 4’s interaction menus. Our goal is to create a system that can blend into the world in a way that is not obstructive, is highly functional, and has the ability to account for a wide and deep range of potential scenarios in as intuitive a way as possible.

One of the key features that we are working on for this system is the ability to have an essentially limitless amount of nested menus that are easy to navigate so that it can be used in any number of scenarios. While this likely will not be relevant to the base O:HD experience, we want it to be capable of going further for modders that might want it to do so (much like other systems and features we work on). Potential scenarios where you might see this being used would be on modded life/RP-style servers where more menu options for interacting with objects in the world will be necessary, or more hardcore milsim communities that want to add extra layers of depth to their respective community’s experience, or anything in between. This will be an important part of our goal in creating a robust mod tool kit for the community to get creative and make some really cool mods for everyone to enjoy.

The AI programmer did some improvements to the bot’s combat behavior by further refining the issue of them constantly mag dumping their weapons, they should now switch to other weapons when they run out of ammo, and they should also occasionally use grenades. Improvements were also made to their navigation logic, so they should have better movement/pathing and run into walls less often.

In addition, work began on implementing the first voice lines/callouts for the bots. As stated earlier, bots will start to make callouts when they see an enemy, get shot at, get hit, reload their guns, and so on.

More sounds have been swapped out and replaced, as we continue our audio overhaul. As stated in last month’s devblog we will be preparing a more thorough showcase once more sounds are in and configured, so nothing to share for that this time around, although if you have access to the game you can go and experience them yourself now. Please keep in mind that while the audio is in such a transitory state, there will likely be many sounds that will sound off, too loud/quiet, and so on.

—

That’s it for January, thank you for taking the time to check the devblog out! We look forward to getting the singleplayer demo out as soon as possible, as well as getting the multiplayer playtest sessions underway. We will keep everyone posted when we have more concrete timelines/dates for those.

Make sure to join the O:HD Discord, and be sure to follow our Steam announcements to track updates. See you all next time!

-Goomes, Lead Community Manager

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