Attention Officers!

Following the reveal of Ready or Not Console during the Galaxies Games Showcase, we’re excited to share more details about our upcoming free update, Stories from Los Sueños, launching alongside the console release.

This update introduces new content and improvements, with PC players getting full access to everything on day one.

Here’s what’s coming in Stories from Los Sueños:

4 New Weapons (Available Day One for PC Players):

• TRPL Pepper Ball Pistol
• MK-V .50 AE Pistol
• 590M Shotgun
• M32A1 Launcher Primary (Gas and Flash rounds)

Other features

• 2 old but new maps, reimagined from the ground up (familiar territory, with a whole new coat of paint)
• Revamped Training Mode
• Difficulty Selector
• Full crossplay between all platforms.

We will also introduce various engine updates, system optimizations, and bug fixes for a smoother, more stable experience

Note: Console players will be able to access the MK-V, 590M, and M32A1 through preorders, while PC players will get immediate access to all weapons as part of the update.

Watch the Console Announcement Trailer here:

Attention Officers,

Welcome to the 84th edition of our Ready or Not Development briefing, March 28th, 2025!

Today’s briefing will cover some of the progress that we’re making in optimization, some details into our AI difficulty system dev process, narrative content pieces, and convention merch.

Note: These development briefings serve to keep you in the loop about parts of our ongoing support for Ready or Not, however the briefings do not encompass everything that we’re working on at a given moment. Please keep in mind that the content in our development briefings may still be a work in progress and subject to change.

Optimization

A whopping 1,200+ assets are being updated in pursuit of our persistent optimization efforts. So far internally we have seen some noticeable gains that prevent CPU bottlenecking, which should allow for higher GPU usage and therefore overall performance.

Stuttering across levels has been reduced by an effort to ‘instance’ assets, meaning that multiple otherwise duplicated assets are being grouped together to be treated as just one asset (e.g. for walls). Many excessively performance-intensive materials are also now optimized, decreasing unnecessary shader complexity in scenes.

Collisions were updated across over a hundred assets to be more performant, including fixing some complex collisions across the game.

We began adding Simplygon to our development pipeline, affecting our characters models and some other assets. By doing so we are decreasing the presence of ‘quad overdraw’ in the game, which is when multiple pixels are computed for rendering even when some of them may be hidden under another, and therefore unnecessarily harming performance.

We fixed an issue with long hair physics in-game that could cause a large frame drop.

SWAT AI underwent a performance pass to help its systems run more smoothly, and we did a shadow pass across base-game levels in order to reduce any shadow-related performance hinderances.

Our animation team sorted out some notable bottlenecks in the character movement systems, and are working on tying in some additional animation fidelity improvements that are being polished behind the scenes.

AI Difficulty System Process

Our game design, engineering, and QA have been hard at work hammering out the new difficulty system across all missions in the game. We are now entering a phase of intensive difficulty playtesting that will focus on three missions: Ides of March, Elephant, and Dorms.

The reason these three levels are selected for intensive playtesting is that they each represent key suspect AI archetypes and scenario types that exist across Ready or Not. By dedicating intensive playtesting efforts on these three missions, we are able to get a solid representative idea of how the global difficulty mode modifiers broadly affect the game as a whole.

Ides of March was selected due to being a barricaded suspects scenario that has a high proportion of skilled professional suspects with usage of traps. Elephant is meanwhile highly dynamic with amateur suspects in an active shooter scenario, including bomb defusal. Finally, Dorms has inexperienced suspects that utilize melee, accompanied with a high proportion of civilians— yet is a more manageable level size compared to a mission like Twisted Nerve.

With a solid understanding of how these global difficulty modifiers function in gameplay for these controlled environments, we can better analyze how they function in other levels and set up the mission-specific difficulty modifiers to be carefully tuned for each mission.

Automated AI Behavior Tests

A new automated test program created by a member of our programming team is accelerating the testing process for AI difficulty system behaviors across all levels. This automated testing procedure artificially speeds up in-game and executes actions that allow over 50 types of AI value modifiers (i.e. hearing range, accuracy, vision) to be tested in a matter of a second, with every level in the game able to be loaded into and tested in a total of just 15 minutes.

Our QA team would otherwise have to manually go around these levels, finding suspects in the level and testing each stimulus value manually, such as by shooting at the suspects or throwing grenades. With this automated process we are able to much more rapidly iterate on and fix AI behavior without requiring additional QA testing time for these tedious aspects of stimulus value testing.

(Video Below: The automated testing program in action, if you blink you’ll miss it. To the right of the viewport are a handful of the checked stimulus values outputting once the test concludes)

Narrative Content Pieces

Our marketing and narrative team are creating a few promotional content pieces that will be rolling out in the near future, which will help expand on Ready or Not lore and world building. These sorts of pieces may also include details drawn from behind the scenes narrative building that are not explicitly visible in-game.

If you’re not subscribed to the VOID Interactive YouTube channel already, now’s the time!

Convention Merch

For those of you that will be attending gaming conventions over the next six months or so you could have a chance to snag some exclusive Ready or Not convention merch!

We will not necessarily have a booth nor merch at all these occasions, but if you run into some of us while supplies last there’s a chance you could be given a bag of goods!

Other than that, we’re fleshing out a bunch of new designs and merch items to be offered later on.

Conclusion

As you can see, one of our big focuses for the next content update is quality of life improvements, particularly around optimization. Our updated AI behavior testing process is now fixing a variety of strange quirks that have persisted across suspects and civilians, while helping us create the difficulty system. Lastly, with creative content and conventions on the way there’s plenty more to pay attention to on the horizon!

This concludes our 84th development briefing, thank you for joining us. Be sure to fall in next time for more development news!

Attention Officers,

Welcome to our 83rd Ready or Not Development Briefing, February 28th, 2025!

After years we’ve homed in on the current state of difficulty for Ready or Not, meanwhile every player is subject to their own personal preference on how it could be. Now it’s ready for a refresh. Read on below to discover how we’re approaching the in-development new difficulty mode system, with ‘Casual’, ‘Standard’, and ‘Hard’; and how we’re taking in measurable player feedback to help inform future development.

We loved to see your reception to our last dev briefing where we dove deep into our design philosophy for the Home Invasion levels and Ready or Not as a whole. Especially from people in our modding community or pursuing game development! For those of you interested in our level design process—the second half of this dev briefing breaks down our “Leviathan” mission from Dark Waters with the help of one of our Level Designers, Tisa!

Note: These development briefings serve to keep you in the loop about parts of our ongoing support for Ready or Not, however the briefings do not encompass everything that we’re working on at a given moment. Please keep in mind that the content in our development briefings may still be a work in progress and subject to change.

New Difficulty Modes

Our game’s level of difficulty is now in a more mature state, with our playerbase growing and players’ skill level ever increasing. We find ourselves in a spot where it suits us to refine the standard difficulty experience and offer options for officers to either ease themselves in or challenge themselves further.

Introducing our in-development new difficulty system with the modes of ‘Casual’, ‘Standard’, and ‘Hard’.

This is a largely mission-by-mission fine-tuned process considering a vast range of values affecting Civilians, Suspects, and SWAT officers. The system is still evolving and preparing for our internal testing phase; therefore, some details may change and we will also not outline all of the potential values being considered.

More details will be provided when these modes eventually release with changelogs!

Note that in order to unlock certain achievements you may be required to play on a specific difficulty mode, for example meaning you may have to play ‘Standard’ or ‘Hard’ to unlock them.

• ‘Casual’: Provides an ‘easier’ or ‘more casual’ introductory difficulty for players who are new to the game and less familiar with the genre
• ‘Standard’: The standard experience for officers, aiming to offer a rewarding and diligent challenge. This mode will be a slightly refined version of the current game difficulty.
• ‘Hard’: Provides a more challenging difficulty compared to ‘Standard’, heavily emphasizes coordinated team-play and masterful decision making.

In a general sense, the difficulty modes will modify values like reaction time, likelihood of surrender, accuracy while moving, accuracy at distance, and much more. For suspects specifically, changes to their threat level (stimulus tracking, reaction times, values that might affect the Suspect’s “time to kill” the player) as well as a number of other modifiers to things like traps, stuns, rules of engagement, and squad behavior are all options.

Since these difficulty values are able to be set on a global as well as a mission-by-mission basis, it allows us to tailor the difficulty to the context of each mission.

For example, we have the ability to adjust the maximum suspects in a level, but we may avoid increasing the number for levels that require a specific number of suspects for level-specific story or gameplay reasons— shifting to other ways to modify the difficulty for that mission instead.

AI Community Sentiment Survey Completion

Thank you all for adding your thoughts to the recent AI sentiment survey, we received over 13,000 responses during the days that it was open! The data has been exported into internal documentation and shared across our relevant departments, accompanied by graphs and analysis commentaries for us to use as a valuable detailed resource going forward.

The survey data complements the existing feedback received across our other social platforms, such as in our Discord.

Improved Player Telemetry

We are adding metrics to help us better understand broad playerbase activity (telemetry), such as how many people are playing on a given DLC, what game version, and measuring player retention. This will help us measure the effectiveness of our development efforts.

In the process no personalized identifying information is collected, with all info anonymized and unable to be reverse-engineered— just as before this telemetry, we do not collect any personally identifiable info in the first place.

Level Design Deep-Dive on “Leviathan”

Continuing with our series of level design deep-dives, today we’re showing off behind the scenes on Leviathan. This breakdown is courtesy of our level design team member, Tisa!

Capturing the Experience

With the development of the “Leviathan“ mission, we wanted to offer a scenario that was a major departure from our usual missions while still centering Ready or Not gameplay DNA at the core. In particular, we wanted to immerse the player in a cold, wet, dark, steel-like environment, with giant ocean waves crashing in on them– far away from the familiar safety of the coast.

Leviathan Narrative Background

Rig HeavyWell A-101 is the first rig granted permission to drill in the highly lucrative heavy oil reserve off the Los Suenos coast. The battle for drilling licenses, the construction of the rig, and its work have been contentious subjects in Los Suenos since the first applications were made.

The UPF, an eco-terrorism organization, has assaulted the rig and taken the workers hostage. They are aggressive and firing without hesitation. Some crew are injured, others are dead. Several groups of hostages have been corralled in various parts of the rig.

The LSPD SWAT has been called to the rig, which is under their jurisdiction, since an amendment to the Adjacent State Rule of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act.

Background Research

Once we knew what the level was going to be, we started doing research and gathering references from all sorts of off-shore oil rigs, from smallest to the biggest.

To ground the environment and the purpose of each room as much as possible, we researched the specific machinery and tools that would be utilized on offshore oil rigs.

(Images below: Examples of types of oil rig machinery)

The oil rig portrayed in Leviathan is not any specific oil rig layout but rather the combination of all interesting rooms we found on different oil rigs.

(Images below: Examples of styles of rooms in oil rigs that ended up being considered as inspiration for Leviathan)

Out of the different sizes of real world oil rigs, the one that became Leviathan is the smallest type, believe it or not!

(Images below: Sizes and construction apparatuses of offshore oil rigs, and an example of the size of oil rig used in RoN)

Level Layout

Since the Rig is constructed in a way that the main drill tower is located in the center, and we wanted to have at least 2 floors on the Rig, I decided the level layout should be a good old fashion ‘arena’ style layout.

With the main landmark being in the center I could construct all rooms and passages circling around that landmark which will automatically create all the desired loops for our AI to move, run and flank at their best possible capacity which will create the desired gameplay for this level.

The landmark in the center also helps our players have a guide and not get lost or disoriented.

With this being a multi floor level I wanted at least 3 staircases connecting the floors for gameplay variety and to avoid any potential bottle neck in gameplay.

We also knew we wanted to introduce our new helicopter system so having plenty of outside open space for helicopter to spot and report suspects was also one of the considerations we needed to accomodate.

(Images below: Rig top-down level design layout)

Player Starting Points

For this level we planned to have 3 different starting points on 3 different heights of the level, giving players a unique approach each time they want to play this mission.

The first starting point is the Helipad; even from the loading screen players will see they are riding in the helicopter which will blend nicely with where they start from.

At first glance the landing zone is quite exposed, but we took great care into crafting the level to ensure players will never be shot in the spawn zone. Players spawn in the North-East side on the level on the highest point having access to both upper and bottom floor.

(Image below: Helipad starting point, with the blockout version on one half)

The second starting point is the Bridge.

Players start on a heavily shaking bridge connecting the big rig to it’s small addon. From here players get spawned in the middle and have access to upper and bottom floor on the North-West side of the level.

(Image below: Bridge starting point, with a mini photo of the blockout version in the corner)

The third starting point is the Boat Landing.

In loading screen players can see they are arriving by boat that blends into this starting point. For this starting point we wanted to leave players with a quick horrifying scene of workers hanging from the lowest floor of the oil rig to quickly alarm the players that these suspects mean business. From this spawn point players have access to the South-West lower floors that has a left/right options to choose from.

(Images below: Boat Landing starting point, with one image containing a mini photo of the blockout version in the corner)

General Gameplay Intro

Gameplay on this map is very CQB oriented despite its size, with some areas of longer lines of sight. This is also the first time we introduced our Helicopter system which gives the players a camera view from the sky. The heli reports any suspects/civis it spots walking around outside on the level and shines a searchlight on them to aid in closing in on spotted locations.

Threats

Since the level is built as an Arena type threats in this level can be anywhere.

With this in mind, we took great care in making sure our main objective is a room filled with tied up civilians and a couple of suspects guarding them, making those rooms quite challenging to clear without harming any civilians.

(Image below: Before/after of one of the hostage rooms)

Aside from carefully planning entries and checking fire for civilians, the level is also filled with high pressure pipes that will obscure your line of sight when shot.

Other environmental considerations include the drops of rain on the player’s vision, and visual sway effects that intensify when the player is closer to the edges of the oil rig.

(Image below: A shot high-pressure pipe emitting vapor)

Mission Objectives

The objectives for this level are as follows:

• Bring Order to Chaos.
• Rescue all of the Civilians.
• Stop the Livestream.
• Shut down Rig Drill.

The main objective of the mission is to Terminate the UPF livestream, located somewhere on the Rig. Each playthrough the location of the main objective is randomly selected. The livestream area is also populated with tied up Rig workers that have been taken hostage.

A hidden objective is to prevent the main drill from overheating. Players can stumble upon this objective when in the drill room, which emits a loud yet (hopefully) not annoying siren throughout the level until he manages to shut the drill down.

Interactables

Interactables (in-level game elements that change in response to the player’s interactions) were important for breathing life into this level.

To start, we added a reportable dead body of a worker to each player spawn area. This is so players can see that unlike the home invasion in our Lawmaker mission where the UPF faction is present, the UPF in Leviathan has grown more extreme in their actions.

Furthermore, we added worker voice lines for inaccessible areas behind the barricaded staircase in the crew quarters. These workers react with a range of voicelines when they hear gunfire.

Meanwhile, In the control room we have a radio which players can use to communicate with COAST to inform them that Rig has been taken over by UPF terrorists, and LSPD SWAT is on board.

Last but not least, a hidden keycard that unlocks one of the computers in the fire control room suggests that there may have been an insider working with the UPF terrorists.

All of these interactable were designed to immerse the players into the story and give the level that “Ready or Not” environmental depth we all love.

Conclusion

New ways to challenge yourself are on the way in the future, and so is development better informed by your current feedback. Combined with improved telemetry, we are solidifying the foundation we have to continue supporting Ready or Not.

Now that you have a refreshed perspective on Leviathan, it’s a great time to dive back in (combined with the ongoing Steam sale on our DLC if you, or a lobby host, don’t have the Dark Waters DLC already!)

This concludes our 83rd development briefing, thank you for joining us. Be sure to fall in next time for more development news!

Attention Officers,

Welcome to the 82nd edition of our Ready or Not Development Briefing, January 31st, 2025.

Welcome to the first dev briefing of the new year! Today we’re highlighting the new NPC AI sentiment survey, discussing a newer approach we’re taking to optimization, and offering a deep-dive breakdown to how we create RoN levels– utilizing examples from the Home Invasion DLC.

We are re-gathering and doubling down our efforts to continue development on Ready or Not after returning back from our winter break about a month ago. Right now, we’re nearing the end of a flurry of careful planning and prototyping.

The breakdown of our level design process in this dev briefing will help contextualize just some of the work that goes into each content release of Ready or Not. Meanwhile, this comes in theme with our community mapping contest closing shortly (check our official Discord for more details)!

Speaking of which, much of our community will be happy to hear that some of the next upcoming yet-to-be-announced levels we’re working on will be on the smaller-scale end. This will help balance out the grand scale of some of our more recent levels (i.e. large levels like Leviathan, 3 Letter Triad).

Note: These development briefings serve to keep you in the loop about parts of our ongoing support for Ready or Not, however the briefings do not encompass everything that we’re working on at a given moment. Please keep in mind that the content in our development briefings may still be a work in progress and subject to change.

NPC AI Sentiment Survey

As you may have already noticed, we just put out an NPC AI sentiment survey yesterday! Please fill it out here:
https://forms.gle/DsVQT2x76qEpvWvj8

We are grateful to see that we received an astonishing number of responses already, and we’d love for yours to be one of them– every bit of feedback counts and helps us interpret your experiences!

If you are not sure what to put for a given question, chances are it is not a required question and you can skip it! If for some reason you fill out a question that was required but you did not have an answer to, please feel free to explain in the written response sections.

One of the ongoing goals we have for the game is the continued refinement of SWAT AI, Suspect AI, and Civilian AI. This survey will help us gather more concrete data on the current state of AI following Dark Waters’ release, which included bug fixes and improvements across several areas of AI that we want to analyze the impact of and double-check for unintended issues.

One of the big focuses on this survey is breaking down the specific functions of AI that affect how the player perceives their level of difficulty, and how the AI behaviors can lead to frustration or satisfaction. Although gathering feedback from across our social platforms and feedback channels (like the one in our official Discord) are helpful, this allows us to target specific areas of the AI and gather that info in one place.

Optimization Efforts

We are now intertwining the system called “Unreal Insights” deeply into our ongoing performance optimization efforts to make the game run as smoothly as possible. This system shows the performance metrics of specific game events and processes, allowing us to pinpoint specific problem areas with greater efficiency.

Already we have seen noticeable early performance improvements by integrating this into our workflow, and as our technical artists and engineers continue to implement its use we expect the benefits to become even greater.

[Image below: General example of the Unreal Insights task graph analysis view-port, from the UE5 Developer Page]

Ready or Not Level Creation Deep-dive

The wonderful members of our level design team (namely Tisa for this one!) chronicled their efforts creating levels for Ready or Not and DLC 1 in specific.

The result is this piece that shares our philosophies and processes on how we go about creating levels for Ready or Not in general, using new BTS photos of Narcos development throughout the stage explanation and at the end using a full example of Lawmaker from DLC 1 in particular:

Creating a level in Ready or Not follows a multi-stage pass process from idea inception to final polish.

[Image below: The levels covered (Narcos and Lawmaker) are influenced by the feedback y’all gave in our Home Invasion map poll]

Stage 1 (Planning)

It all starts with production or deciding what level to make. At VOID every member gets a chance to pitch in an idea for what they find would be an exciting level to make, keeping in mind inspiration from community feedback.

Everybody involved writes their ideas in the form of a game design document (GDD) that gets added to the stack and from there, based on the target theme for the DLC and the fun + innovative factor, gets picked to be the level we’re gonna work on.

Our narrative designers and concept artists start to sketch out various ideas for the level and the lead level designer will create a Design brief that each level designer will receive to start the prototype pass.

[Image below: A sketch of the layout of Narcos, along with doorways and other key elements]

Stage 2 ( Prototype)

Level design gets into the first so-called ‘prototype pass.’ We quickly make several versions of the level to explore what’s fun about it and how we want to approach creating the alpha version. Since Ready or not is a realistic game with heavy themes, we like to ground our levels on real life as well.

That means we do extensive research, gather real life references, if we get the chance, go to real life locations, make sure the architecture fits the target level for this area etc. At this stage, it is not unheard off to scrap the level if we find it to be lacking in any way. Prototype passes are there for this particular reason, like sketches for artists, level designers do quick block-outs they can toss if it doesn’t meet the quality bar we hope to achieve for our levels.

[Image below: Layout of Narcos based on research of similar neighborhood development design, made to look like a GPS view]

Once each level designer has created what they wanted, they pass it on to be reviewed by our lead level designer. The lead level designer will then do a review on each prototype and together with the level designer for that level, decide which of these do they want to use for the Alpha pass.

Note that very often each prototype has something of value, so the Alpha may become the joined version of all these prototypes. The best parts of all if you will.

Stage 3 (Alpha)

After the best prototype has been chosen, we start to go more in detail with the blockouts, adding navigation, doors, AI, cover and making the level playable. Once we have the level in a pretty good shape we invite our combat designer who gets in and starts tweaking the AI to get the desired combat behavior. After they’re done our internal QA also starts doing runs on the level to flush out any important issues at this stage.

[Image below: Blockout version of Narcos]

When we have a strong Alpha candidate, each level designer writes a level handover document consisting of all the important information, screenshots, references and reasoning for each part of the level. That level and the handover document then gets passed on to the Environment artist assigned for that level. This is also the time the rest of the team starts working on the level to get all the features out, like audio team recording all the voicelines needed, character art team creating the suspects and civilians etc.

Throughout this time the level designer is in close contact to all teams working on the level in case anybody has any questions, and to make sure the design intent doesn’t get lost in the process of going through other departments.

Stage 4 (Beta)

After the Environment pass has been completed and the level gets its shine, level designers return to the level to do multiple passes.

• Collision pass – The level designer will create blocking volumes around the entire level preventing players/AI from going in non playable places, optimizing movement.
• Visibility pass – The level designer will add in visibility blocker to any cracks in geometry to prevent AI from shooting players in unfair ways.
• Navigation pass ― Level designers will at this point polish up navigation and make sure there is no navigation in a non playable space. Our system relies heavily on navigation, spawns stack up, cover, clear, rooms and other points on the navigation itself so for optimization and to avoid any AI bugs this step is quite important.
• Door pass – The level designer will make sure all doors and it’s features are working correctly for the player and the swat AI.
• Cover pass – The level designer will make sure all cover points are generated and are in the right positions for AI to use them.
• Interactable pass – The level designer will make sure all custom logic still works and is implemented correctly.

[Image below: Blockout of iinteractable related to the Informant on Narcos]

[Image below: Red blockout triangles in Narcos indicate the sightlines from one doorway to another. The goal is to allow the player to easily see each new doorway without exposing them to too much danger of being shot in the process]

Stage 5 (Content Complete)

In this stage level designer will communicate with all other teams to make sure all the features for this level have successfully been implemented and are working as intended. Throughout this process the level is heavily tested by QA, making sure it’s ready for public release.

DLC 1 Lawmaker Design Dev Commentary

Lawmaker Layout

For Lawmaker we wanted to create a mansion, big rooms and wide corridors.
Most mansions have really unique layouts and weird corners you won’t find in ordinary houses, and that is something we found extremely fun and unique in a sense that we don’t have many yet in Ready or Not.

Even though mansions do have multiple weird angles and unique layouts, they are very structurally accurate and if you look at it from the top down there is almost always a good architectural plan for the building.

The Lawmaker simplified plan was 2 rectangles intersecting with the third rectangle at 45 degree angle. This gave the building those nice connecting 45 degree corners and unique look we wanted for the rooms and corridors, making it look and feel quite satisfying when clearing out rooms.

[Image below: Lawmaker basic layout concept draft]

To make the mansion feel more manageable to clear we made the rooms a lot bigger than our usual RoN rooms and capitalized on all the affordances from that.

• By making everything a bit wider we gave players and AI more maneuvering possibilities, preventing any bumping into players and getting stuck on small passages.
• Even though the mansion does look huge, by making the rooms bigger the number of rooms is pretty much the same as in all our maps, removing the frustration of having too many doors to breach and staying in line with our Ready or Not formula.
• And lastly, bigger rooms and hallways was something we wanted to target for this level as that is something that is unique and true to real life and we know our players enjoy realism and a good challenge.

[Image below: Lawmaker room sectioning]

Lawmaker Gameplay:

We also have to consider what kind of gameplay we want to have in these spaces before we even start creating anything. For Lawmaker we knew we had a home invasion\hostage situation and we wanted to develop systems for our AI to act in correspondence to that.

The invaders are a group of eco-terrorists, not necessarily the hardest group to fight. Other than the two boss characters the group doesn’t have much weapon training, and are quite surprised they actually managed to pull this off and enter this house. So behavior like hesitation, cowardice and running away is expected.

So how did we plan to make this group feel like a threat and make them harder to capture?
Aside from increased hostage taking where you really have to watch not to shoot the civilian, we implemented our zones system across multiple floors.

What that means is the suspects will fire at players if they spot them, and if given a chance they will either try to flank the players or retreat to another zone in hopes of surprising the player again.
In the case of Lawmaker, if they manage to get away from the player they will move up a floor, so if the players fail to catch them individually on the bottom floors, they will have groups of suspects to deal with on the top floor. Which also brings us to the next thing we wanted to add.

In real life suspects will likely move all civilians to the same room where they hold them hostage.
We wanted to add that to the mix as well, making it really important to know where SWAT officers land their shots if the room is full of suspects and civilians.

Knowing all this, we come back to the layout.
[Image below: Zone layout for Lawmaker]

We knew we wanted flanking behavior from our AI, and we wanted to restrain most of the fighting to the house itself and very little to the outside areas. So beside bigger looping paths, we implemented lots of mini loops in the house which the AI can use to do just that. This gives a lot of value to players who wedge the door behind them or watch their back.

Since Lawmaker is a 3 story mansion we also had to consider flanking and AI zone retreating between multiple floors. For that reason we made sure each wing and the center has a staircase connecting the floors.

All these decisions also increase replayability as each playthrough players can choose a different path to take based on the active situation. To increase replayability even more we gave players 3 unique player starts they can use to approach the house. Each with its own challenges.

• Main entrance is the safest to approach the building but places players in the center of the map, needing to decide which side to clear first.
• Side entrance gives players the option to enter through the center or the back of the west wing, but players are exposed to windows on the west wing while approaching.
• Back entrance is giving the players most possibilities of entering, center, west or east wing, but it is the most open as players are exposed to windows from all of these.

Narrative \ Interactables

Following the narrative for Lawmaker we wanted to create objectives and interactables to tell the story and help players connect it.

Once the eco-terrorists entered the mansion owned by Sven Anderson Lincoln, owner of the oil company they were protesting about, they started destroying the property, throwing oil and paint on priceless paintings, shooting sculptures, beating and rounding up staff that were in the house, taking them hostage etc. Sven’s wife and children were in the upper floors and managed to get to a hidden panic room, while Sven was caught somewhere in the house.

So we knew we wanted “Locate the family in the panic room” to be one of our objectives. We created the logic for that event making sure we tackle a few issues:

• The children must not be harmed in any way in gameplay
• Multiple locations for the panic rooms must be set so that each playthrough it’s different
• We were a bit limited to what SWAT voicelines were available to say, so had to take that into considerations
• Active panic room needs to catch the players attention when they find it

First we placed the wife and two children inside the panic room, and they would never come out as it is likely SWAT would prefer them to be safe until the team has cleared the entire property.
We then created a LIVE camera feed in the security room that also shows other cameras around the property. Some have been spray painted over and destroyed, making the one from the active panic room the only LIVE feed.

To ensure players do get the right picture we added an interact button they can press which switches all the security monitors to the panic room feed and its location in the house. To draw players’ attention to the security desk and that interactive button we placed flashing red lights on the active monitors. That made sure we tackled the first issue.

For the second issue we placed two locations for the panic rooms that get randomly selected when the players start the match. That also gets connected to our security room interactable so players can always see which panic room is active even before they reach it.

We solved the third issue by simply having the mother do all the talking once players interact with the panic room. Lastly, we placed red blinking lights outside of the panic room to indicate to players that this panic room is active. We also made sure these lights can be seen from hallways so that players don’t miss them, removing frustration in searching for them.

Another objective we wanted is to locate Sven, the owner of the house that is somewhere inside the house. For that one, similar to our panic room logic, we made sure Sven is in 5 different locations at the start of the map. It’s also worth noting that as an AI he can also flee on his own, making the search for him unique every time we play.

Conclusion

Please make sure you fill out what you can in the NPC AI sentiment survey, it is very helpful in contextualizing future considerations to our AI systems! Last but not least, here’s a final closing remark on our level creation process:

With every map we create we want to make sure we bring something new and interesting to the table, new kind of layouts, new kind of mood, new kind of gameplay, new challenges etc. Creating these is really something every level designer at VOID enjoys and puts their heart into, and we LOVE watching how our players tackle each new challenge we present them.

It is worth noting even though our maps are playtested by our QA team we take feedback from watching our players tackle each area in the level and if we feel certain parts need adjusting we are not strangers to addressing these issues in the updates. Our final goal is to create a unique and enjoyable experience for our players.

This concludes our 82nd development briefing, thank you for joining us. Be sure to fall in next time for more development news!

Attention Officers,

Thank you for joining us for the 70th edition of our Ready or Not Development Briefing, March 15th, 2024.

This week we’ll be covering work that’s being done regarding animation as well as an outline of our community feedback integration process.

In other news, the Steam Spring Sale has just recently sprung, so you can now get Ready or Not at 33% off from now until this March 21st!

Please keep in mind that everything in this development briefing is work in progress and subject to change.

Vol.70 Development Briefing summary points:
(not a changelog)

• We are building out our own comprehensive animation library filled with animations and movesets for future potential additions. WIP examples below:
  • Tased character collapsing animation
  • New ‘heavy’ animation movesets for suspects with light machine guns
  • 5 animation loops for perimeter NPC patrol officers
  • Higher fidelity shield animation movesets
• Lip sync animation system being implemented for increased immersion
• Outline of our community feedback integration process with four main stages:
  • 1) Player feedback on social media platforms
  • 2) Initial internal documentation of community feedback, organized and centralized
  • 3) Directors/leads assessing and delegating tasks to address community feedback
  • 4) The creation of development tickets for tasks to be fulfilled and implemented

⬇️ ⬇️ ⬇️

Read the full briefing here:

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1144200/view/5970156536062778290

Attention Officers,

Thank you for joining us for the 69th edition of our development briefing, March 1st, 2024! We hope you’re all having a nice day.

This week we’ll be providing insights on multiple areas of Ready or Not’s current development. The subtopics covered are preliminary discussions around AI behavior advancements, optimization, crashes, and audio reverb improvements.

Other than the topics covered in this briefing we have upcoming bug fixing and top-secret RoN progress occurring behind the scenes.

Please keep in mind that everything in this development briefing is work in progress and subject to change.

Vol.69 Development Briefing summary points:
(not a changelog)

• We have ongoing internal roundtable discussions across our development departments (taking into account community feedback) to experiment with advancing the AI behaviors of suspects, civilians and SWAT
  • Please continue to leave specific feedback regarding your experiences with AI behavior in our respective Discord feedback channels for consideration!
  • You can expect a comprehensive analysis of our approaches as we carefully vet and solidify specific development routes.
  • One early example of an initial analysis is that we’d like to improve pre-combat behaviors for Suspect AI; they can be too eager to fight at times
  • Resulting experimentation could entail building upon as the hesitation system and making the onset of firefights less readily predictable
• Optimization is being improved via avenues like:
  • Scalability settings that more effectively allow high/medium/low graphics settings to tailor performance
  • 2D Level of Detail elements (LOD “impostors”) for distant foliage, rocks, etc.
  • Shader caching to reduce remaining stuttering (note: Enabling V-sync may help) and decrease load times
• Resolving crashes related to the common issue in games, “DXGI_Error_Device_Hung,” that primarily affects RTX 4000 series cards
• Immersive improvements to our audio reverb system using “reflection probes” so that reverbs sound more 3D and accurate to environmental materials, all without costing performance
  • Video demonstration included!

Read the full briefing here:

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1144200/view/4202491691452777916

Attention Officers,

Thank you for joining us for the 68th edition of our biweekly development briefing, February 16th, 2024!

We had a momentary pause between this one and our last edition. This week we’re thrilled to bring you our public Ready or Not Roadmap for 2024, highlighting future milestone developments to the game! Although we’re unveiling this roadmap to solely cover 2024, we have many more plans that we’re charting further out.

Please do keep in mind that the content we’ll show and discuss as part of this roadmap is still subject to change. Game development is a fluid process, especially for a small indie team like us with this level of a project, so certain priorities and timelines may shift based on necessity.

Vol.68 Development Briefing summary points: (not a changelog)

• Ongoing 1.0 bugfixing/patches for Winter 2024 with Hotfix #4 arriving shortly.
• Both DLC 1 and the 1.1 update are planned for Spring 2024.
  • DLC 1, currently named “Home Invasion,” will be free for Supporter Edition owners, as originally intended.
• DLC 2 is planned for Summer 2024.
• The 1.2 update is planned for Fall 2024.
• All of these DLCs are planned to come with free new weapons for the base game, one DLC-exclusive player outfit, and new maps.
• DLCs will also be accompanied by bugfixes for the base game.
• Updates 1.1 and 1.2 will include additions, improvements, and bugfixes to the game.

Read the full briefing here:

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1144200/view/4196861557830831882