Isonzo News

Hello soldiers,

On this day in 1914, World War One had officially begun. What many initially thought as a 'short' conflict, turned into an international battlefield for 4 years and changed the world forever.
To commemorate this, we've enabled the Film Memoir mode for you all to experience for free, even if you don't own the Digital Goods. This provides a new experience in the game, so be sure to check it out! You can use this feature for free until August 4th. You can enable the feature by going to Options > Graphics.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

You can share your screenshots and video clips with us in our Discord or on our social media when using the filter!



[h2] Other ways to remember [/h2]

Additionally, we’ve arranged a list of activities you could do remember this important day in history.

• Visit a memorial monument
  Depending on where you live, there might be a WW1 memorial monument nearby. See if you could visit and pay your respects.
  
  
• Visit a museum with a WW1 exposition
  Again, this is depending on where you live, but potentially worth going there. Visit a museum with a WW1 exposition brings you a little closer to the events that took place. There might be even a special tour regarding this important day in history.
  
  
• Read a book regarding the Great War
  Books can be important means of media to remember history, but they can also be used for entertainment purposes. Fiction or non-fiction, there are many books regarding the subject of WW1. Here are a few you could read on this day.
  - A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire by Geoffrey Wawro. Delving into the “dark heart” of Vienna, Wawro shows how it goaded Serbia and Russia into war, before tracing the wavering fortunes of the Royal and Imperial Army as it faced off against two strong opponents and, ultimately, nearly collapsed after just three months of fighting.
  - The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1919 by Mark Thompson. Featuring many well-known characters of the Italian front such as General Luigi Cadorna, Ernest Hemingway and Gabriele D’Annunzio, it shows us what happened when Italy joined the First World War and fought so hard for a victory that was, in the end, a “mutilated” one that would poison her body politic for generations.
  - Death of a Hero by Richard Aldington. Semi based on the author’s own experience during World War One, the story follows George Winterbourne, who enlists in the British Expeditionary Army during the Great War and gets sent to France. After a rash of casualties leads to his promotion through the ranks, he grows increasingly cynical about the war and disillusioned by the hypocrisies of British society.
  
  
• Watch a movie/series centering WW1
  You might not have much free time to read a book or visit a place. Movies/series are also a great media to remember what happened and experience stories of what (could’ve) happened. Here are a few recommendations:
  - All Quiet on the Western Front (1930/1979/2022). All based on the novel with the same title by Erich Maria Remarque, it’s for many a must-watch if you’re interested in history and World War One. You might’ve only seen one movie adaptation. Now is a good time to give others a chance too!
  
  
  
  - 1917 (2019), directed by Sam Mendes. You follow the story of Blake & Schofield. The date is April 6th, 1917 and an infantry battalion assembles to wage war deep in enemy territory. It’s up to them to deliver a message that will stop 1,600 men from walking straight into a deadly trap.
  - Apocalypse la 1ère Guerre mondiale (2014). Originally a French, mini documentary tv series, it is highly acclaimed as it doesn’t solely focuses on the the relatively known Flanders and France battles, but also the generally unknown Italian-Austrian, German-Polish-Russian, Japanese-German, Ottoman Empire- Allied and African German Colonies, and other unknown or forgotten fronts and battles. Later translated into English for international audiences as ‘World War 1: The Apocalypse’.
  
  
• Play a World War One game
  Fully immerse yourself and experience World War One (to a certain extent of course)! Join the Western-, Eastern and/or Italian Front in our games. Hold a moment of silence before you start the battle with your fellow soldiers* in a match. And of course, can always play another WW1-inspired game in your library that you might have.
  
  *this not referring to a moment of silence that’s triggered by the game, more a suggestion of what you can do as players yourself.

[h2] Anniversary Sale [/h2]

Additionally to the free Film Memoir mode, you can find Verdun discounted with 75% off & Isonzo’s Veteran- & Reverse Units DLC on sale as well.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1815512/Isonzo__Reserve_Units_Pack/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1815513/Isonzo__Veteran_Units_Pack/

[h3] Lest We Forget [/h3]

Hello soldiers!

Before we get into meeting a new developer, we have a small request.

[h2] Isonzo Survey [/h2]

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.

Thank you so much in advance!

Now for the man of the hour, meet one of our progammers!

[h2] Meet the Dev [/h2]

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.



[h2] Still Sale-ing [/h2]

The Steam Summer Sale might've ended, but we've still have a sale going on! Besides Isonzo being available with 50% off, you can now get some DLC packs discounted as well. Get that dripsonzo.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1815511/Isonzo__Alpine_Units_Pack/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2214671/Isonzo__Expedition_Units_Pack/

Ooh and before we forget, be sure to keep an eye out for a future announcement 👀

[h3]Until next time soldiers![/h3]

Hello soldiers!

The dev team is working hard throughout the summer! While continuing to work on improvements, bugs etc. the team is also busy with the new map which will release this summer: Piana! We're currently not ready to show/tell anything about it, but we will eventually! Be sure to look forward to it.



It's time for you to meet another member of the BlackMill team. If you're part of our Discord server, as you should be, then he might be a familar face. Or should we say beak 🦆

Here's our Operations Director, Thomas!

Hello! Could you introduce yourself

Hey! I’m Thomas, I’m the Operations Director at BlackMill Games. I’m 30 years old and I’m from Groningen in the northern Netherlands. To people in Amsterdam or just not in the North in general, I live north of the wall in Game of Thrones, but honestly it’s been weeks since I last saw a White Walker.

Besides working in games I enjoy cooking (mostly Mexican and Chinese but you can wake me up for almost any cuisine), and the occasional board game (The Crew is one of my favourites).

What is your role in BlackMill Games and for the games?

I work at BlackMill Games as the Operations Director, although I started as a Producer almost four years ago. My task is that everyone knows what should be made next and when it should be done.

For every update, I make sure that all work is started in time, everyone is aware of deadlines and priorities, and I communicate with our lovely marketing team, external QA, localisation, et cetera. I’m a bit of a spider in the web! 🕷

Where did your passion come from?

My journey in games started in 2011 when I studied Communication & Multimedia Design. I chose the game branch because of the awesome people and because the collaborative nature of game development resonated with me!

I had a small company first, made a small Steam game called Super Flippin’ Phones. After that I did some freelancing. Then in 2019 I wounded up at BlackMill Games! My drive is to remove planning stress from the team, so they can focus on making great code, art and more; and to cultivate a good studio culture based on trust and empathy.

What is a memorable moment in the development of Isonzo?

One of the major improvements I worked on for Isonzo’s development was the Closed Testing. Verdun and Tannenberg both had an early-access release, but we didn’t want this for Isonzo, so we needed to make sure our initial release would be worthy of a full release. Seeing our Closed Testing community play our game for the first time was incredible!

After the first session, we updated the game 33 times pre-release – and know that every release takes a lot of effort from the team, even if we’ve done it 1000 times – all while still developing the game. We did 38 testing sessions in alpha and beta, and I’m extremely happy with the results and the effort of our testing group!

Can you show off some of your work process and tell us what you’re doing?

A downside of my job is that I rarely have shiny creations to show, haha. Currently I am working on managing the next couple of Isonzo updates. Every update has a big checklist that starts approximately two months before release.

We usually start planning the trailer for an update eight weeks in advance, and a map has to be ready a month in advance. This adds up, with dozens of small steps (like making store images for new DLC) that all need a time, a place and a developer. This isn’t counting development, which needs to be 90% done around this time! My job here is to track all of these small steps and inform everyone if there are changes.

It isn’t always chronological, either. Currently we are working hard on the special game mode that will be in the map update after Piana, while we also did a huge technical update for Isonzo two weeks ago. As you can hopefully see, this requires a lot of juggling of priorities, and it’s my job to make sure that the other developers can focus on their job instead of worrying which patch to focus on this week.

Which other game dev/studio inspires you?

My most played game in the last five years has been Hunt Showdown. Other than playing it, I’m also watching Crytek’s update strategy and how they communicate with the community. They have similar issues in that they have to stick to era-appropriate weapons (somewhat) so it’s interesting to see how they deal with this!

What is your favourite game at the moment?

Hunt Showdown definitely deserves a second mention here. Please check it out; it takes place around the turn of the 19th century so it has a lot of WW1 weapons. I would have previously pitched it as a small-scale battle royale, but since its release, “extraction shooters” have gained popularity, and Hunt is also easily pitchable as a smooth, no-nonsense extraction shooter without tedious inventory management.

Other than that, I’m playing some science-fiction games currently like Citizen Sleeper, which is really special. It’s a weird blend of narrative adventure and resource management, you constantly feel chased but you’re also making friends along the way (who aren’t doing much better).

Anything else you wanna share?

No, but I would be very grateful if you (the reader) would please send me their favourite comfort food recipes in the comments or in the #food channel in Discord! Thanks for reading :)

[h2]The Summer Sale is still going[/h2]

The Steam Summer Sale is still going! You can complete your Isonzo collection by purchasing the DLC or go to the other fronts in Verdun & Tannenberg. Additionally, you can also participate in our giveaway on Twitter!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2214671/Isonzo__Expedition_Units_Pack/




[h3]Until next time soldiers![/h3]

Hello soldiers!

The Steam Summer Sale has begun! You can now find Isonzo with a 45% discount and additional cosmetic DLC with 30% off.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1556790/Isonzo/



[h2] On the other fronts [/h2]

If you would like the other fronts; now is your time! Both Verdun & Tannenberg are currently discounted with 75%. Perfect time to join the Summer Retreat Offensive that currently going on.

[h2] Meet the Dev [/h2]

In case you've missed it, last week we released a devblog were you got to meet one of our animators! Be sure to read it

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1556790/view/3649652637281432070?l=english

[h3] See you at the front soldiers o7 [/h3]

This small update fixes issues you may have experienced after our big technical update from last week.

• Fixed players sometimes not being connected to the correct region and not seeing all available matches
  
• Fixed players switching teams defaulting to the Mountaineer class
  
• Fixed turning FSR on or off after changing Resolution settings causing the game to stop working
  
• Fixed being able to bypass the match joining pop-ups causing the player to get stuck in a previous match
  

This update weighs in around 35 MB. It updates the network version, so make sure that you update to play online with the majority of players!

We are aware of continuing issues like falling through ground, and are working on fixes. We hope for your patience while we keep working on solutions.