Hell Let Loose News

Hey everyone,

Welcome to Developer Briefing #83!

Before we get stuck in we'd just like to say welcome to the new players that have joined us recently in the Steam Sale, we hope you're having a great time with Hell Let Loose - you've joined the frontline at a very exciting time for us.

This brings me on to today's Dev Brief, the First Person Perspective (FPP) Animation Overhaul Reveal!

Thanks again for everyone's patience whilst we prepared for this moment. To give you an in-depth look at what's coming in the near future Max and Spono have put together a walkthrough video for your viewing pleasure.

Over to you Max!




Hi everyone,

Initially we weren’t quite sure how best to show you what we’ve been working on today, to fully explain all the changes under the hood - and then how it feels to play - would take the better part of a day.

Finally we settled on putting this video together in an effort to describe what you can expect in Update 7. In watching it, we realised we missed talking about several huge additional new features and changes. We’re going to try and produce another video next week to describe everything we missed, as well as dive into the TPP side of things too!

What you’re seeing today has been the product of months and months of work from our incredible animation team. Rick, Jacob, Niko, Roman and James have all done huge amounts of work and re-work to deliver the system you’ll see in the video. Like the ballistics system, it’s not something you’d usually do with a live game, and to manage to integrate this, as well as optimise it has been nothing short of an Herculean effort.









From all of us here at Black Matter, we’re so excited to let you get your (photoreal) hands on it so that you can truly experience it.





Finally, we want to apologise for our delay in releasing Update 7. Many issues arose that we felt could compromise the introduction of the new system, and so we decided that several weeks more worth of QA testing would be the best strategy for ensuring the best experience possible. That said, we failed to properly communicate that, and as such we’ll be making larger efforts in the future towards transparency. We'll have news on a firm release date for you in the rather near future.





We want to remind everyone that Hell Let Loose is still in Early Access. We still have a huge amount of optimisation to do, as well as continual bug fixes and the introduction of more content. We continually read feedback given to us across our channels - please keep contributing, as it’s very valuable for us as a team - Thank You!

Enjoy the video:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]




That wraps up this week's Developer Briefing!

We'd love to hear what you think of the FPP Animation Overhaul that we shared today, so let us know in the comments and over on the forums.

As always, thank you so much for your continued support - you, the community are the heart of Hell Let Loose! We look forward to taking you through the Third Person Animation Overhaul next week.

If you liked what you've seen today and are yet to join the battle, Hell Let Loose is currently 25% off in the Steam Summer Sale:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/686810/Hell_Let_Loose/

See you on the frontline!

Hey everyone,

Welcome to Developer Briefing #82!

This week we're starting to formally reveal and go into detail on some of the content you'll be diving into when Update 7 drops in the near future.

This week, Lead Developer Max is taking you on an introduction to the next map coming to Hell Let Loose... Carentan!




Hi everyone,

Max here!

For a long time we’ve wanted to put together a proper urban map that took the more open-field combat of Hell Let Loose and placed it in a dense, built-up environment. To do that effectively and in a way that captured both the best of gameplay and the best visuals relied on us building up a huge asset library that would allow us to curate gameplay, as well as create a convincing urban landscape.

We’re incredibly proud to finally reveal that our next map will be Carentan - coming in Update 7 alongside our animation overhaul and many, many other additions.



Carentan is very different to every Hell Let Loose map you’ve played before. We studied all the feedback from Sainte-Mère-Église (our urban test-run). From this we boiled down key elements that made up great urban warfare and then set about building a pipeline that would allow us to deliver this in an optimised way.



Carentan is hugely iconic - first made so by Band of Brothers, and then by the countless iterations of the location in games - starting of course with Call of Duty 1. We wanted - in typical Hell Let Loose fashion - to recreate the town exactly and lay it out in a way that enables you to fight the battle at the scale of the real-life engagement. All the most iconic locations are present, but in their own location. You’ll be able to fight from the Cafe Desire Ingouf and the Cafe De Normandie, through the train station and all the way to the Arcades of the Place de la République before crossing the canal locks into the countryside.









As you can see from the tactical map below, the key to Carentan is owning and protecting the bridges crossing the canals to the north, as well as the four main thoroughfares through the town itself.



The town is huge - easily the largest playable urban landscape that we’ve ever attempted. Building a photoreal town from to-scale reference is no easy feat - and to achieve that we’ve taken the liberty of closing off many of the 2000+ gardens that lay nestled behind the street fronts.

Like the battle itself, we wanted to consolidate the combat to the streets, squares and houses. As such, we’ve curated key locations and access points as happened in the real battle. We’ve tested player density considerably and are confident in the brutal street-to-street and house-to-house fighting.

We’ve changed much of our level design ethos and systems in the last six months. We’ll explain this far deeper in it’s own Dev Brief, but you’ll notice that Carentan has a much higher level of consistent detail in every location.









Beyond the town itself are the low lying flooded fields, the outlying farmhouses and the Mont Halais position - a hilltop flak position that overlooks the train station.





We’re starting to prepare for the launch of Update 7 in the coming weeks and the coming dev briefs are going to contain some of the biggest changes to the game that we’ve ever made.




Thanks for all of your submissions to the recent HLL subreddit competition that was run by our very talented community illustrator MoscaTnT. We were very taken back by the response from the community and we will be sure to do more of these or similar comps in the near future! So if you haven’t done so yet, make sure to follow the subreddit for all the glorious future content!

If you would like to check out the other submitted captions here is the link

The Winners

We decided to give an extra key away, as the judges were torn because there were so many good captions!

1st Game Key goes to _SGP_
For:


2nd Game Key goes to PANZERmx
For:


*Drumroll*
And the winner of a Custom Designed Avatar from Art creator MoscaTnT and Game Key goes to

Uomodelmonte86
For:


The prize in all its glory:





Prepare for Carentan, grow your unit, join the battle right now in the Steam Summer Sale with a 25% discount:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/686810/Hell_Let_Loose/

The battle for Carentan draws near. Be ready for battle.


Now, about Dev Brief #83... We can confirm that next week's Brief will be on the Animation Overhaul!

You've all been very patient, thank you. We're incredibly excited to finally share this game changing overhaul with you.

To tide you over until then, we've got a screenshot for you...



See you on the frontline.

Hey everyone,

Welcome to Developer Briefing #81!

This week we've got a message from Black Matter and a very juicy AMA where Game Director Max answers your questions.

We're also excited to let you know that starting next week we'll begin to share with you some first official looks at the new content coming in Update 7...




It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year since Hell Let Loose first entered Early Access. As a team, we’ve worked hard to introduce as much content as possible, while also polishing, bug fixing and overhauling significant aspects of the game that we knew could be better.

This AMA interview was a great opportunity to sit down and chat through the philosophy behind the game and Black Matter as a studio. Over the course of the development of Hell Let Loose, our remote little team has grown in size and process - from individuals to departments. All the while, we’ve never felt better about pushing the quality and scale of every aspect of the Hell Let Loose experience as far as it can go. We hope that our upcoming Update 7 will best demonstrates that.

We also have to recognise how great it is for us as Developers to have such a fantastic community - that is both positive about the title and patient with us. This encourages us to be as open as possible about the future of the game, and the way that we work on it. It also enables us to continually question what could be better - or what aspect of the game needs work.

Ultimately, this is still the early stages of the development of Hell Let Loose - when we think about the years to come. The next Update will complete a huge part of the structural foundation for the game moving forward towards our release from Early Access. We’re incredibly excited to show you what we’ve been cooking up and we hope it excites you for what lies ahead!




Here's Chuck:

Over the past several weeks, volunteer staff from the HELL LET LOOSE community have worked closely with the content production team at TEAMDIXX to combine and organize questions from loyal community fans and produce this highly anticipated Ask Me Anything video.

In this interview, Max, the CEO and Game Director at Black Matter, and TEAMDIXX founder, CHUCK DIXX, discuss the journey from the game's start-up, progression throughout the year, and features still to come.

Check out the AMA in all its glory below:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Be sure to check out the video description for any and all links, and timestamps!

See you on the frontli... Battlefield!




That wraps up this week's Dev Brief!

We hope you like the AMA, there's a lot of great questions in there that have some exciting answers.

From next week, as promised, we'll be sharing new content in our briefings on the run up to Update 7.

You've all be incredibly patient and we look forward to finally starting to pull back the curtain on what you'll be getting stuck into in the near future.

Oh and in regards to the caption competition from last week, we've picked a winner and will be revealing all in the next Developer Briefing!

See you on the frontline!

Hey everyone,

Welcome to Developer Briefing 80!

This week we're going to be detailing the Omaha Beach revamp which will be arriving alongside the Foy revamp AND a brand new map in Update 7.

Before we go into that though we want to let you know that we've got so many new features to show off, but we’re very keen to reveal these off closer to the release date.

To keep you in the loop on that we want to let you know that next week's Developer Briefing will be the Community x Black Matter Developer Q&A Session that was recorded with Team Dixx recently. The week after that you can expect us to start sharing brand new content, including the new animation system - Thank you all so much for your patience on this, we can't wait to share more and discuss it with you.

Now, back to Omaha!




Alongside Foy, Omaha has had a significant revamp leading in to Update 7. We’ve remodelled large parts of Vierville town (with more to do) in order to create better gameplay, better visuals and better optimisation.





We’ve also relit the map - learning from the photoreal techniques we used in Hill 400. This has better improved the atmosphere and unique feeling of that dark, overcast morning of the 6th of June, 1944. It’s also using photoreal values to create a far more natural transition from dark interiors and shadows into daylight.



After releasing Sainte-Mere-Eglise, we stepped back and started to heavily examine the ways we do urban environments and combat. Often we hear players excited for specifically urban environments, and so we were keen to break that down in order to establish what makes great urban combat in games that do it really well.



Previously, when creating a map we’d place buildings individually next to one another. Some would be open, some would be closed. We’d often then drop in buildings and individual props around those buildings, trying to shape them into the most convincing layout for the space and the era. While this worked, it resulted in thousands of tiny gardens and yards that ended quickly in tedious gameplay - where players would either be in one of the many rooms of the house, or they’d be sitting behind a corner in one of a hundred gardens. In addition to this, the sheer number of objects and their placement resulted in lots of “bitsy” gameplay that not only tripped you up as you moved through environments (especially before our new vaulting mechanics have been introduced), but resulted in ugly and uninspiring gameplay.



Revisiting this, we’ve started to build out many archetypal compounds for both urban and countryside usage. We’ve also created entirely new building assets. We’ll do a deep dive on this in a later dev brief, but our philosophy around mapping these locations has now changed for the better - enabling us to spend a much larger amount of time on medium sized portions of the built environment that we can then adapt into the maps.



The end result is not only a higher concentration of detail in the environment (with far more microprops and visual interest), it’s also a much larger mixture of cover, interesting ways to traverse the environment, as well far more considered lines of sight. We’ve also taken into account specific locations to drop spawnpoints and other deployables. We’ve also lit these environments to give them an especially atmospheric feeling (very useful for low light or night-time conditions). This also means attacking and defending is far more reliable. Instead of enemies moving in from all directions, these environments can be locked down far more successfully, while fighting through them is far more interesting (ie. crouching through a blown out hole between two buildings in order to uproot a sniper in the attic).



As new assets, compounds, buildings and props come online throughout the course of our Early Access period, we’ll be fleshing out strong points across all our maps to ensure that each presents a new challenge. We have a huge amount of work to do across the current Western Front maps, and we’re excited to bring each to the same level of quality while offering a unique experience per map.






With the implementation of the all new hands and arms for our animation overhaul, we’ve set about creating matching sets for all available uniforms in the game. We feel this not only is the expected visual to match your choice of uniform, we also have some interesting things in store when it comes to dynamic mud/blood and dirt...








You may have seen some hilarious and awesome Hell Let Loose comic strips floating around recently on our Sub-Reddit and Social Media pages.

These were created by community artist and all round awesome player u/Moscatnt (Reddit).

They now want you to caption the above image to win some sweet prizes:

• Custom Avatar Illustration
  
• Hell Let Loose Steam Key
  

To enter your caption you must post it in this Reddit thread.

Good luck everyone, we look forward to seeing what you come up with!


That wraps up this week's Dev Brief, let us know what you think of our upcoming improvements to Omaha!

Have a fantastic weekend, we'll see you on the frontline.

Hey everyone,

Welcome to Developer Briefing #79!

This week marks Hell Let Loose's first anniversary since it launched into Steam Early Access. Time has been flying by and so much has changed since we first clashed on the frontline of Hurtgen Forest.

To mark the occasion Lead Developer Max has stopped by to put together his thoughts and thanks to you, our community. Max has also taken the opportunity to look back at exactly how Hell Let Loose has grown and developed over the last six months, whilst also looking ahead to what the future holds.

Oh and we're totally revealing some new helmets for the German forces...




Hi everyone,

We’re excited today to mark exactly 364 days since Hell Let Loose launched into Early Access on Steam on June 6th, 2019. It’s been an enormous and exciting journey so far, and it’s felt like the year has flown by. Indeed - if Hell Let Loose launched with the Allied invasion force on D-Day, then we’ve been fighting in-game nearly a month past the German surrender! During this time we’ve had huge amounts of fun watching as you - the community - deliver us excellent feedback in order to help us continue crafting the best experience we can.

It’s hard to believe that the initial Early Access build featured only one tank per team, no leaning or vaulting, one gamemode and only three maps (Sainte Marie Du Mont, Hurtgen Forest and Foy). With more than 5000 submissions to our version control, and not a single day without one (including the weekends!), we greatly enjoy our work.

Below we’ve included an image that breaks down the largest additions or changes to the game. That said, for the best idea, the notes for each patch and update truly detail the full scope of the changes. For those of you who have not played for a couple of months, you’ll be returning to a very different game. For those of you who haven’t played since release - it may as well be an entirely new game altogether!






We want to say a huge thank you to the community - not only to those of you who have just joined recently, but particularly to the very first backers of our crowdfunding campaign - all the way back in 2017. Without your initial support, Hell Let Loose would not have got off the ground.

Over the coming months we’ll be making good on any final rewards promised to each Backer tier.

Because of the continued success of Hell Let Loose, we’ve been enormously proud to build the team up to better support the title in every department. Our small team of 7 at the launch of Early Access has now transformed into 15 - enabling us to overhaul fundamental aspects of the game in our ever present push to deliver the best experience possible.




If you’ve followed the development of the game so far, you’ll know that we enjoy dropping as much content as humanly possible - alongside large scale bug fixes and systems overhauls. The future for Hell Let Loose is incredibly bright, and our initial plan to support the title across new theaters.

We’ll be releasing huge amounts of information over the coming weeks about what our roadmap to leaving Early Access looks like - and we’ll also hint to the future beyond it. Please be assured that this is still the early stages of the development of Hell Let Loose. There is so much more for us to do - including new fx, sounds, environments, maps, customisation options, weapons, Commander abilities, optimisation and many other things.

Every step we take will be taken as it always has done, side by side with the community. Your thoughts, suggestions and feedback have been integral to Hell Let Loose's development and will continue to do so.

Our current goal right now is to integrate many of the new optimisation and mapping techniques that we’ve refined into all current maps. We have a good idea of what our 1.0 map list looks like and so we’re excited to make sure that each map is just as performant and fun to play as all the others. Once we release Update 7, we’ll be pushing forward to finalise a version of the game that we feel reflects a successful 1.0 launch, before we move on to more new features, content and lots more.

While so much has happened in a year, we expect the gap between version quality and total breadth of content to be even more significant this time next year. Some of the largest quality overhauls that you’ll experience are yet to come!

From myself and all of the team, thank you.




That wraps up Max's message!

So, at the start of the brief we mentioned new German helmets that are on the way - let's take a look at a few that you'll be getting your heads on in the near future:












Thank you for an amazing first year.

We'll see you on the frontline!