Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 News

Hey Everyone, it is me again, Andy Kipling, CEO of HSL and sometimes Producer on Bloodlines 2! I am here to give you an update on Bloodlines 2 development; or more specifically an update on how us developers are getting along.

First, let me start by saying that I hope you are all navigating these trying times brought on by this global pandemic in as safe and as best way you possibly can. At Hardsuit we have been working diligently to first and foremost ensure for the safety and health of all our employees while conforming with the Stay at Home orders of the state government. Second, we have been hard at work developing Bloodlines 2!

These times have introduced us to a whole host of new experiences, emotions and workflows: some good, some bad and some ugly. I figured it may be of interest to describe some of those to you.

First on the good side, full time exclusive WFH has been a pretty massive change for us; we typically favor in person interactions and the natural collaboration that takes place when you get multiple people in the same room together. But, at the same time we have taken this opportunity to become a better employer and developer and have fully embraced it. As a result, we have stood up new processes and workflows to foster and support creative development even when remote. We have updated and improved our back-end infrastructure to more easily support 100+ employees remotely pushing and pulling gigs of data to and from our servers. We are now more capable and flexible towards catering to individual needs by – be it mitigating a terrible commute through Seattle traffic, or working with individual talent outside of Seattle and outside of our time zone. All these things make us nimbler, and more adaptable in an industry that is constantly changing.

The bad part of the whole “never get to go into the office” (other than the Covid19 realities and its consequences) is that we miss out on a lot of what we have strived so hard to create, foster and cultivate at HSL: the positive work environment, the friendly random interactions with your fellow co-workers, and the general social dynamics of having a bunch of incredibly talented and creative people working together towards a common goal, all together in the same space. We, as a species, are without a doubt social creatures (much like our Vampire brethren…) and the day to day human interactions of being in the office can be very beneficial to our mental health. So, there are lots of discussions and considerations around staying healthy (both physically and mentally); trying to balance enough social interaction, while also stepping away from your computer – which may also be the only opportunity for social interaction.

In terms of examples this means that our in-person MTG games are now having to move online. Our tabletop gaming groups and campaigns are being conducted via Teams and even our after-work happy hours are shifting into video chat land where we can sit at our computers and enjoy each other’s company.

As a studio that strives very hard to separate and respect work and life for a healthy work/life balance, and generally frowning on the idea of “bringing your work home with you…” is seriously complicated when your work is unavoidably in, and inseparable from, your home. It can be challenging for the individual: suddenly finding yourself working 12 hour days, or waking up and going straight to your computer; and it can be challenging for the organization: how to support individual’s personal lives and time and ensure they are not overworking or burning out, but still being flexible to support what works best for them, be it working early or late. Disciplined communications, encouraging people to sign off and leave when the workday ends, respecting online status, managing co-worker expectations and more are all important steps we have taken and continue to take to mitigate this. But it is definitely the case that the “bad” of the full-time WFH means that work life balance is precarious and something we need to be ever mindful of.

Lastly, we have the ugly. Across the board we have all kinds of new offices and workplaces, new co-workers and office mates, and new protocols and processes. A few examples:

We have augmented our code review process to allow for external third parties; it has sped things up considerably and generally made us more efficient:


We have been able to bring on some highly qualified individuals who we previously didn’t have access to because they refused to relocate out of Scranton, Pennsylvania:


Additionally, we have even been able to take on a few interns while we WFH, though training them has proven more challenging:


We have had some new types of problems and issues to troubleshoot and debug:


Maybe from time to time we just need to shift gears from debugging our game to de-catting our workspaces. But honestly, George does love his cat.


We have also discovered a new species of cat who keeps popping up on our slack:


And finally, Nvidia’s new RTX noise cancelling support is pretty amazing. It can help convince your co-workers that, behind that Star Wars background in your Teams call, there are in fact no small children screaming and fighting. Just what we need when we are all stuck working from home.

But enough about us, and what we are up to. What about the game you say! Well first off, here is someone else’s WFH setup. Cannot say I know who it is though:


But seriously, stay tuned, we’ve got more developer diaries to look forward to, and we have some new media dropping Soon™.

Thanks for taking the time to check in on what we have been up to and how we are doing.

Otherwise, stay safe and healthy (mentally and physically)!

~Andy

Hello everyone!

 February and March have been intense, for many reasons. Like many others in the US and around the world, the COVID-19 outbreak has changed how we work in the last few weeks. To help mitigate this unprecedented illness, our developers are all working from home. We have provided infrastructure and hardware support for that to happen, as well as provided more tools and procedures to help facilitate communication. The biggest challenge to us has been the separation. We shockingly like each other in this studio and have found it a little difficult not to be able to hang out during the week. But we also want to keep our developers and their families safe, so this is a small price to pay. The new working from home paradigm seems to be agreeing with people, and development is proceeding from the comfort of our own homes.

Speaking of which, we are seeing more and more of the game come together. On the road to “content complete” many features are getting locked including side quests, systems, and animations. We're getting to the point where the game you'll get to play at release is clearly recognizable through the construction dust. 

Side quests are where you really get to meet the World of Darkness in Bloodlines 2, just like the first game. They're also one of the main rewards for stepping off the beaten path and exploring our version of Seattle. Most of our side-quests are written, scripted, and locked down in the game, and we are very excited to share them with you. The narrative design department has been hard at work making sure these side quests feel every bit as integral to the fabric of the game as the main quests.

The game grew in other ways as well. It always was central to our vision to make players feel like a vampire through gameplay. One side of it is to create this freedom in movements that a mere mortal could never experience. This led us to the decision to expand your baseline Thinblood abilities to traversal - you can use Chiropteran Glide, Mentalism Pull for specific objects or Nebulation through vents at any time, regardless of your primary Thinblood Discipline choice. We went through the game, particularly the hubs, and investigated all the ways we could make them even more exciting and seamless for you to use. These powers have been with us for a long time, and we can fully leverage their potential uses throughout all levels for puzzles, rewards, and perhaps some secrets for you to find.

 We organized a mocap session in February, focusing on facial and dialogue animations. Our animation team has been polishing things like the feeding animations, combat, Discipline usage, and other vampire mainstays (no devs were hurt in the recording of this mocap session, proof in images). 



Thanks for reading and stay safe!

Hello everyone and Happy 2020!

Last year ended with a bang for us, as you may recall from our last update, the game is now in Alpha which is a very big milestone for the team. After celebrating, a large part of Alpha is to scope the remaining work into manageable pieces and bring them to the next step in development – Content Complete.

At this specific point in development, we are beginning to lock down certain features and quests. This means after extensive internal and external review, the feature or quest is considered complete and all work on the content is finished. This doesn’t mean the feature or quest is done however, as it still needs to be fully tested and reviewed for problems and bugs. We would of course love to tell you everything we’ve already locked down, but hey, spoilers.

What we can tell you is that much of the one-handed melee attack animations have been updated and locked, including animations for knives and lead pipes, the VFX team has finalized the telekinesis effects for the Mentalism Discipline, and the Environment Art team has wrapped set dressing of interior spaces in the domain of the Baron of Aurora.



For the first part of the year we are pushing toward “Content Complete”, meaning all content of the game is final and bug-fixing and polish become the priorities. AI engineers are populating the levels with different types of pedestrians and encounters, Environment artists are dressing side-quest spaces, Lighting and animation have their eyes on the conversations with NPCs, making sure they are well lit and fit well with the surrounding environment, and the narrative and quest design teams are hard at work adding some additional content and surprises.

Even when a blizzard struck Seattle earlier this month, that didn’t stop the snowed-in team from building content for the game. Inspiration can come from one’s surroundings, so much of the work around that time came from very important sources:



Thanks for reading the update, we will be back in February with another update!

The Bloodlines 2 Team

Paradox Interactive and Bloodlines 2 bring you Vein Pursuit, a new tabletop role-playing game vampire chronicle preceding the events of the game.

Bloodlines 2 takes place in the world of Vampire: The Masquerade, the iconic pen-and-paper game that lets you experience the rich universe of the Kindred, in all of its grit and majesty. The Vein Pursuit chronicle offers viewers a glimpse into events occurring before the plot of Bloodlines 2, narrated by World of Darkness Brand Editor and V5 developer Karim Muammar. Starring members of Paradox Interactive, the Bloodlines 2 development team and exciting guests, this group of Kindred will take on a perilous mission, relying on their unique skills and attributes as much as the roll of the dice to survive.

Synopsis:
A group of couriers; some of the most badass Kindred of Los Angeles, has been sent on the perilous journey from Los Angeles to Seattle, tasked with delivering precious and secret cargo to a vampire in the Emerald City. What the couriers don't realize is that betrayal lurks in their midst. However, this isn’t their story.

Vein Pursuit follows the perilous journey of the rag-tag band of Kindred who've been sent to save the couriers of the Anarch Free State and see the cargo safely north. On this journey through the backcountry of the West Coast, through deserts and mountains, all their wits and resolve will be tested. Time is running out - it’s going to be a hell of a ride!

Follow the journey of the coterie of Kindred starring players out of Paradox Interactive and Hardsuit Labs teams, as well as fan-favorite streamer Outstar.

All episodes of the campaign will stream weekly on Twitch.tv/WorldOfDarkness starting January 31st, 2020, and become available for replay on the World of Darkness Youtube channel.



Starring:

• Karim Muammar as the Storyteller
• Florian Schwarzer as Falk Meyer
• Outstar as Veronica Ivanova
• Malin Castegren as Camellia
• Debbie Lane as Margaret "Peggy" Randall
• Rachel Leiker as Della Pearson

2019 is nearing its end, and with it comes our last dev diary for the year. It’s been a wild time for us, from the announcement at GDC in March, to meeting you at PDXCON. All throughout, we’ve been blown away by your enthusiasm. It’s now more than three years since Andy, Brian and Ka’ai pitched the idea of making Bloodlines 2 to Paradox. You and your support have made this real in a way that’s difficult to describe.

As Andy mentioned in the November dev diary, we’ve turned our attention inward for a bit. Right now, our number one priority is development, with the goal to make Bloodlines 2 the best game it can be. That’s starting to bear fruit. For example, we recently passed our Alpha!

This is one of the big milestones in game development, although in different places, Alpha can mean slightly different things. For us, it means that we are “systems-complete”; we’re done adding gameplay mechanics and features to the game. By contrast: Beta, which’ll happen next year, is “content-complete”. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the core game is done and ready to put in a box (“systems-final”). There are still quite a few people busy tweaking, balancing, and art-ing up the gameplay. It’s actually quite possible that our final game will ship with a few less mechanics than we had in the game at Alpha. In the end, we want to offer you really compelling, smooth gameplay. If over the coming months we find that something sticks out, we’d much rather put one less bullet point on the back of the box than shoehorn things in.

As you may imagine, work changes after Alpha. For some of us, it becomes much more about keeping the details consistent. For example: Earlier this year, some of our engineers and the UX team had come up with a better, more natural-feeling way of using elevators and choosing floors in the game. What this means is that we’re now going through all of our virtual Seattle and make sure all elevators fit this new logic. Not a big thing - but still, it involved diligent work by our technical designers supported by lighting, environment and UI artists.



In other places, systems-complete means that we get to add that extra in art that we didn’t want to risk spending time on before. Finally, we had time to invite everyone to the 'dismemberment meeting' - just another day in game dev. At the same time, the audio team are having a blast recording weapon foley, to make everything from picking up, to loading, stashing away and y’know, firing each individual weapon feel another bit more real.

Audio is also involved in completing the lines in the NPC Bark system - they work closely with engineering and narrative on that one. Barks are all those words and short sentences you hear AI utter in a video game. Often, that’s connected to AI states, like for example “aggressive”, “searching”, or “hurt”. Sometimes, it’s also tied to the NPC’s role in the world - a policeman will have different barks than a drunk barfly. Good barks are useful without drawing too much attention from the player, and it is not a piece of cake to find 15 different ways to say “I think I’ve seen something odd in that back alley”.

Of course, not all of us are chasing gameplay details towards that elusive “Final”. A big chunk of our team, our level and narrative designers, animators, environment, VFX and lighting artists are hard at work on the quests you will experience that gameplay. We’re looking forward to talking more about that race to Beta in the coming months. For now, to conclude this blog post, we’d like to share the work of our VFX team on blood effects. These are research prototypes created by Wesley Eldridge and Tracey Landau.



Time to put down the quill and wish you all great Winter Holidays! See you in 2020!

The Team at Hardsuit Labs