Call to Arms - Gates of Hell: Ostfront News

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In today’s world, people will tell you they strive for independence. They want to call all of their own shots, make their own decisions, market their own products, manage their own timetable, find their own way.
That’s quite logical, isn’t it? Being the master of your own fate feels quite good most of the time. Independence rules, right?


Well, for us, independence means something else. As you may already know, we’re an independent studio, poised to release our own game - which is also our first. We make our own calls on all of the scenarios, gameplay, sounds, features and anything that will make it more realistic than any similar RTT/RTS game that came before it.
The only 2 big dependencies are about the game engine, for one because it would take us years to make our own and none of us would want that, and otherwise we depend on the amount of spare time we have as a team to work on this project. It’s a good thing we don’t need money to develop!

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At the same time, and because we develop in our spare time, we are extremely dependent on our community.
Fortunately, ours is a very supportive community. We receive support and positive reactions on a daily basis. We have some great supporters who voluntarily help us moderate community reactions - which is fantastic, considering we have never even asked them to do so.
Apparently, we have struck a chord with these great individuals and they seem to like the realism concept and they also seem to understand just what it takes to develop a game. Awesome.

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We get so many positive reactions we sometimes have to pinch ourselves. Of course, and about 1 in 250 reactions, we get negative comments as well. But generally speaking, we love getting your comments and suggestions.


So yes, we depend on you, the community, because we’re independent.
Yes, we are thankful to the community. Keep the comments going, positive and negative.
No, we don’t mind a bit of salt here and there. It keeps us awake.
No, that will not kill our resolve; we will push on until we’re done making the most realistic and beautiful RTS game you have ever seen.
With the backing of our community, we are unstoppable.

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Meanwhile, if you haven’t done it yet, subscribe and follow us on social media to make sure you miss nothing:

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Hi everyone, it’s time for another update! With the end of the year in sight there’s some things we want to tell you. We also promised to show you some new animations, so let’s cut straight to the chase.


Right now we are very busy with behind- the- scenes decision making and planning. This needs to be done before we give you any dates and roadmaps. Our previous two development updates showed you the “visual catalog”. In the past 18 months we also showed you the kind of mission and the kind of realism you can expect from us. This devblog gives you an idea of the new animations. All in all, we are getting closer to early access every day.


We’ve been working on some nice features, such as the use of smoke dispensers on tanks.
Several ways of generating smoke to protect tanks were used in WW2. Some used launchers that were fired from inside the tank; some had smoke grenade launching canisters outside the tank; some tanks had “smoke candle” installations. We will portray all methods that were used.
These will feature on tanks that had them in real life, so this is not a general thing for every tank or every faction. This represents our goal of realism in the game; it would be wrong to have smoke dispensers on every tank, or to make them available for scenarios in any year of the war. Maybe you know which tanks will have these? At least the one below does:

https://youtu.be/0Vz3Gm_iv94
Tell us what you think, is this any good? Would you use this feature in- game?


https://youtu.be/9gbJTtxhy5w
(From ‘Allo ‘Allo)


On to the next subject, which is also about really new stuff we’re putting in Gates of Hell.

As we announced earlier this year, we are using MOCAP to create a complete set of all- new animations. We are very glad to have a nicely ambitious developer as our dedicated animator.
His work will give Gates of Hell a refreshing bit of realism to speed up getting rid of same old animations for 14 years. For instance, soldiers will not always simply fall over when killed; sometimes their struggle lasts a few moments and movements will occur until they are virtually dead.
Another one is that AI will know how to use a bayonet, but you may already have seen this in our YouTube channel.

So let’s show you a few of those new animations. Please keep in mind that these can be incorporated into the game at any point, so the fact that we are making these with the MOCAP software is not delaying early access. Here is a selection:





Remember that these are WiP, with some polishing here and there being planned. That is a difficult process by the way, but we will show you more animations very soon, without waiting for a devblog to show them to you.
So tell us, what do you think? Would you welcome the first new animations, after all those years? Do you like the idea of smoke screens?


We thought you might also want to see some recent modelling that came from the 3D department. Here are a few renders for you; can you correctly guess what these are? You’ll have to look really closely:

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Let us know in the forums!

Meanwhile, if you haven’t done it yet, subscribe and follow us on social media to make sure you miss nothing:

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Thanks and see you next month!

Devblog #86: Visual catalog part 2


Hi everyone! Here we are, one more month has passed and it’s time for another update.
We have some “regular” progress to report, as always; besides that, part 2 of the visual catalog is due.


We’re quite busy and the results keep coming in. In the past month we’ve tested our new enumerator (the process that puts numbers and/ or text on a tank when it spawns) and it is NICE. For instance, on a tank turret it might read “for the motherland” in cyrillic, like in the photo below. We have a wide range of texts which will appear on Soviet vehicles.

T-34 tank at the Tiraspol Memorial of Glory

Meanwhile, we’re putting in some finishing touches on the missions, with some late textures and 3d objects becoming available. We’ve tried several weather types and we’re quite confident you will really like our missions and scenarios. If you’ve been following us on social media (see the links below), you may have seen the occasional screenshot already.


Let’s move on to the main topic. We’ve shown you a visual catalog of Soviet forces last month; this time, we put the German forces on display.
Generally speaking, we have had to model more German vehicles than Soviet vehicles in some of the categories; this may be down to the fact that German standardisation was rather rare compared to other nations. The Soviet army had better standardisation, which is illustrated by the difference between part 2 and part 1 in this catalog. So let’s get on with it!

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That’s it for this catalog! Our next devblog will appear in about four weeks. In the meantime, make sure you don’t miss a thing by following us on social media:

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Hi everyone!

It’s time for another update. In this issue, we want to tell you about development in general and besides that, we want to start giving you a catalog that simply shows you some of the assets we plan to include in the Early Access version of the game.


This week we announced that we will be going MOCAP. This will impact the way our game will look and with it, we will add something that will feel really new and look really good.
We also added new objects, reviewed mission scripts, refined the bug ticketing system (has to be perfect when we start the beta) and modeled some special railway assets. We will probably show this in a nice comparison between the real thing and the objects in- game, so keep an eye on social media (you can find the links at the bottom of the article).


How many times have people said that Gates of Hell “is just a repaint of MoW”? We don’t remember, and - to be honest - we shouldn’t care about such comments, because we know better. So we will repeat the same old statement with which we answered such comments: all of our 3d models in the finished game will be new.

Other assets such as houses, barns, industrial buildings, trees and all kinds of objects such as wood piles, water tanks, bunkers, AT objects, trenches, foxholes, fences and many more things also will all be new.


The original idea for this devblog has existed for a while. After the previous devblog was written, it was time to get going on this one - because we want to keep our promises as far as possible.
We wanted to show you what assets are there so you can get an impression of the equipment you will be getting to play out the missions we have told you about in many of our previous blogs.
The good news is that we have too much stuff to put it all in just one development update! That is why this one is called “part 1”. In this one we limit the catalog to Soviet vehicles, we will show you more in the next one.


So, let’s get on with it; we split part 1 in a few categories. You see the different objects in the screenshot, with a description below. Please be aware that we only show the ones that are finished today, and a last dozen is about to be added shortly pending texturing.

HD link 1) A group of armored and support vehicles. The T-20 and ZIS-30 will be added later

HD link 2) Artillery and the SU-76 SPG, more to be added later

HD link 3) Light tanks. The BM8-24, ZSU-37, BT-2, BT-7a and 4 more subtypes of the T-26 will be added later.

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HD link 5) A trio of SU’s. The SU-152 will be added later

HD link 6) “Large” tanks, actually 1 medium and 3 heavy

HD link 7) WiP equipment. Note the early IS-2 (KV-122) on the right

So here it is! Do you like what you see? We hope you do, and we’ll be working on part 2 in the meantime. The plan is to show that next month. At some point we will also make a listing of missions, as we are preparing for the next phase. If you like to stay tuned and see the stuff we don’t put on steam, make sure to subscribe to any of our social channels:

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Thanks and see you next month!

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Hello everyone, once more we have an update for you.

In this update we want to do 3 things; first, we want to tell you a little bit about what we’ve been up to and where our development stands at the moment; and second, we want to present a mission to you. Third, we have a little competition for you!
All in all, we have been very busy in these sweaty summer months, toiling to make progress despite the heat, but we will not shed a single tear about it.




The past weeks have been quite intense. We have produced many new things such as new textures, new maps & missions, and lots of secondary assets such as houses, barns and other objects. After that we started adding them to our new maps and into the ones we already had.
We have also added new aircraft - among which the legendary Ilyushin IL-2 - and a lot of work was done in the area of engine porting and other stuff.
Besides that, we’ve been testing new things, such as prolonged death animations, we have tested mission scripts and the like. As soon as we can, we will show you in- game footage.
We also plan to give a sort of “visual catalogue” of vehicles and other things in one of our next updates.


The second thing we want to tell you about is a mission that may well be the “mother of all missions” in Gates of Hell, set in the city of Stalingrad.

Soviet soldiers in Stalingrad.

Most of you will know about this battle, which made for one of the most bitterly contested battlefields in the history of warfare. Not only did the fighting take a fearsome toll; sickness and starvation added to the cruelty of war in a horrendous way. Also, many civilians fell victim to this battle, which ended when Operation Uranus was a success and the German 6th army surrendered.
Also, most of you will have seen movies and documentaries about this battle, which lasted from august 1942 to february 1943. By the time the fighting ceased, the city - that had been a proud, modern and beautiful city before the war - was reduced to rubble and ruins.


So how will we set this up in Gates of Hell? Let’s start with the name, which is taken from legendary sniper Vasily Zaitsev’s burial site at the Mamayev Kurgan war memorial. He once said: "For us there was no land beyond the Volga". Zaitsev killed no less than 11 enemy snipers and 225 other german troops.

Obviously, we will have street fighting; after the bombing of the city by the Luftwaffe, there was so much rubble blocking the streets that tanks had trouble moving about and they could not freely do what they needed to do. This will be represented in the mission.
We will also include the bloody Volga crossing scenes, with extremely risky ferry trips and German aircraft trying to prevent Chuikov’s 62nd army to reinforce the west bank with troops of all calibres. For these scenes we have built all- new naval units.
We will have fighting over ruins and famous buildings; we will show artillery bombardments that triggered the “hugging the enemy” tactics.

Just like it was in real life, we have created tunnels under the rubble and nests inside ruined buildings. Some of these buildings you can walk through, allowing for intense fighting - and the AI will put up a good fight as well. All in all these elements will make for some very intense gameplay that will favour the inventive player as much as the history- conscious player. Besides that, the map is quite large and it allows for a number of different scenarios to be played out.
We think this mission will spark your imagination, and that you will love it!

Now, let’s show you some of the visuals you can expect; but keep reading, next up is the competition we promised you.

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On to the third subject of this blog.
So now you know about just two of our Stalingrad related maps (Operation winter storm is the other one we have already revealed, see devblog #66).
What if we told you we will be adding 3 more maps related to Stalingrad to the game?

If you had to guess which 3 historic/ iconic Stalingrad locations we will add, which would it be?

We have decided to make this into a little competition for the community.
The first 3 community members to guess all 3 locations correctly get a free game key!
Simply go to the competition page on our website and fill out the competition form, and next week we will let you know who are the lucky three to receive a full game key. How about that?
The competition closes on sunday, september 2nd 2019, at 23:59 CET.

That’s it for this update, folks. Thanks for your continued support, it’s what keeps us indie developers going! Remember, you can always make suggestions in the forum, and don’t forget to subscribe to our social media if you also want to catch the stuff we don’t put on steam:

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Thanks and see you next month!