Interview with Blackmill Games, developer of Isonzo
Feature
Discussing the new "Caporetto" expansion and the development process for Isonzo
Dan L:
That kind of leads into the next question I had, which was when you're recreating a real location, you know, how do you like what compromises do you make for the sake of gameplay? If anything?
Jos Hoebe:
Yeah, I think a big as I mentioned before, first of all, the scale everything is scaled from one to five in real life. [Meaning maps are usually 1/5th the scale of real-life locations.] But I think the real locations are pretty barren, you have like a trench in the field, [but otherwise] you're surrounded by nothing, it's just a farm field with crops, and there's literally no cover, no nothing, just in the trenches in there. So that's not really fun, and there's no gameplay there.
So the designers go in, from just purely from a blockout perspective. You need to think here, and cover there, etc. So it's, it's a constant challenge to make sure that it looks like it's empty enough so it mimics real life, but while still providing enough cover. And this was a constant struggle throughout development.
Dan L:
You mentioned in one of the recent steam blog posts that most of the maps are sunlit. However, this map is rainy and overcast. Did the process of creating rain, puddles, puddles, and upper water interactions in real-time, on top of the usual fires, smoke, and so on, present any specific challenges for you and the rest of the team?
Thomas Jager:
So, particles, in general, were a big topic during the development of Isonzo. It's something we wanted to improve on. We wanted to have more, and better, muzzle flashes, as well as muzzle smoke, footstep particles, etc. So we spent a lot of attention on this and we made new rain effects in the same timeframe. So, yeah, I think [from a technical perspective] the work itself wasn't much more challenging than any of the other particle effects. I think the particles in general are tricky to get right. Because you don't want them to be comical. They need to feel realistic. They need to blend in to be from a visual standpoint, which is a challenge in of itself.
But yeah, I would say that the rain being always present on Caporetto was a little bit of a challenge from a performance standpoint, like [in an early internal build] the rain was sort of around the player. It's kind of like a tiny rain cloud moving with you. But that meant that the second you spawned in, suddenly it started raining or something, whereas before it didn’t, so that would look weird. So we also had to add it to the map and have it rain down, of course, from the correct angle, and then it had to sort of not move with the player. This was, I think, the trickiest part of the rain. No, actually, that's not true. It shouldn't rain indoors. That was the last thing we worked on.
So yeah, that was the last issue we worked on with these particles, which was sort of new for us. We do have a sort of indoor detection for audio, which makes sure that, for example, gunshots echo differently when you are inside, or when someone else is inside a building. This was custom-built for [Isonzo], and I think I think we managed to do it pretty well, and pretty quickly.