Hey Everyone!
Welcome back to another Incursion Red River Dev Blog.
In this one, we’re taking a closer look at some of the bigger things we’ve been working on recently. We’ve made improvements to AI, added new utility items, and progressed on both Outskirts and Delta. We’re aware of the areas you all are looking forward to seeing more of, so we wanted to give you a preview of where things are currently at.
We’ll also be going over some quality of life changes, smaller gameplay improvements, the new M14 rifle, and a few other improvements that should help make the overall experience feel better across the board.
New AI Overhaul
AI Director
Inspired by games like Left 4 Dead, our system manages how many bots are dispatched to search for an enemy, better handles how bots share perception data, and limits how many bots get activated each frame. It will automatically group players to handle when players are split off from each other. So bots will be dispatched at a reasonable rate to each group.
Danger Zone System
Dead bodies for AI now have nav-mesh modifiers attached to them. Bots will dynamically avoid areas where friendlies have died. If multiple bodies are stack up, it will increase the cost further, up until it fully blocks that area. Grenade avoidance will also make use of this system.
Other Improvements
The search system used by bots has been re-worked and reworked. It uses a new, separate system to pre-calculate search areas when the raid starts, rather than calculate everything from when a bot decides to start searching, making it much more optimized. We’ve updated the avoidance logic for bots as well. Then now avoid bumping into and walking into each other. Currently, we're still researching whether to implement full crowd simulation or not. Performance at scale is the biggest limiting factor for us. We’re not ready to show off specific details yet, but we are working on giving bots the ability to detect when a player is illuminated by lights in the world. Once this is fully working and ready, it will give bots much more realistic vision at night. We also have been doing an optimization pass on all things AI related. Implementations for their animations and movement resulted in substantially better behavior. There are hundreds of little changes in addition to those aforementioned, and we’ve substantially reworked the code-base and simplified just about everything back-end wise without affecting their in-game behavior.
New Outskirts & Delta Progress
As a part of making Outskirts our most realistic map to date yet, we’ve taken heavy references from real world businesses and our community Vietnamese advisors. The first two major POIs we have to show off are the gravel/concrete processing plant and the Bike Shop. Both are located within the industrial zone controlled by the UICS.
The Bike Shop is a CQB zone with high value mechanical loot. Be sure to watch your corners and prepare before entering.
Alternatively, the processing plant is an open construction site where cover can be sparse and will take some strategy to cross safely.
The school is one of our largest POIs on Delta that has several objectives tied to it, with the player exploring and passing through it fairly often.
As with all of our locations, a lot of effort has gone into making sure it looks and feels authentic, but also fits within the occupied nature of the village.
Classrooms have either been looted and left in disarray, or repurposed as small makeshift command centers where troops eat and sleep but also monitor the surroundings to plan their raids.
New Grenades & Utility
With the next update we’ll add new utilities for players to use during fights and approach different combat scenarios. To complement the newly added frag grenades with our last update, we are now introducing a new flashbang grenade, a smoke grenade and a tear gas grenade (more on that in the lore part). These tactical throwables should add variety to both your arsenal and playstyle, and can create new gameplay scenarios. Along that we also added a very niche feature that may help players to play a bit more stealthy. You now have the option to put bullets into your quickslots and throw them like a grenade essentially. They obviously don’t explode, but still make noise that might distract AI and expose them to your position. We can’t wait to see what you will do with the new utility!
For the showcase please keep in mind that animations, models and sounds are placeholders at the moment!
New Boss (Concept)
Introducing, Торговец.
Born in Russia and abandoned by his parents, Торговец was left to scavenge a life for himself. Small gangs and the criminal underground hardened him, he learned its language. Before his connections grew unmanageable, his “mentors” saw that he wound up in prison. Someone controllable on the inside was just too valuable. While in the echoes of Stalin’s prisons, he took to playing the different criminal “families” against one another. Through the years his status grew and by the time the Soviet Union fell and he was released, the name Торговец had spread. The Iron Guard Corp and their benefactors in Russia recognized his utility and assigned him to Vietnam. The position there was not what he wanted, but he knew how to thrive in unideal places and with people of his own to command it wasn’t long before he was indispensable. Playing people against one another was always his sharpest tool but he is not to be underestimated in the field.
We went into the design of the new boss wanting to create a feeling of quiet intimidation. While he will be a challenge on his own, his context and guards around him will really flush out the difficulty.
New Main Theme Music
We have a new main theme for the main menu, the goal was to lay a foundation for future music and have a recognizable but not fatiguing vibe for the first introduction to our game. The instrumentation was heavily inspired by Vietnamese instruments and the Dan Bau can be heard playing the main tune, while still merging modern instruments and orchestra to match better the tone of the story.
One thing to keep in mind, is that the music is still a Work In Progress, and is not finalized yet. We are continuing to adjust, improve, and refine it as development moves forward. As always, we really appreciate all of your feedback, so let us know what you think and what you would like to hear more of.
New Movement Stance
Movement stays a focus point of this update cycle and after the overhauled movement speed & acceleration in the last update and the added high mantling, we are now introducing tactical sprint and a new low ready stance. The tactical sprint will help you to faster traverse bigger distances and to disengage easier from dangerous situations. Naturally it burns your stamina faster, but it can give you the deciding advantage in a fire fight. The low ready stance has been requested by our more tactical player community and we are happy to finally introduce it. While its gameplay impact is less deep, it does help with regen arm stamina faster, it mainly gives you the option to feel & play more tactical. There is also a gameplay immersion option that makes your character automatically go into low ready mode after 10s of being out of combat/in an idle state.
New Weapon
As already shown on our socials before, the M14 finally makes its appearance in Incursion! The weapon will fill the whole of an entry level long range weapon for the UICS and we made sure to include a lot of customization options as well!
Misc Improvements
Searching Containers
A new feature we also added is that loot is no longer instantly shown but searched by the player now. Search time is influenced by rarity of item and size. While this may feel odd at first glance, we believe that this will make looting a lot more interesting and will lead to more intense situations in a fire fight when you have to decide to keep searching or going back into action.
Loot Modifier
Another feature we are finally able to introduce are loot modifier/loot modifier volumes. While previously loot was only defined by how our level designers placed the loot boxes and loose loot, we now can further influence the loot that is spawned within these containers by loot modifiers. For example we could force a specific area to have only medical items, or only foot items, or have rarer and more loot than other areas. Generally we hope that makes locations more interesting to loot and you can get a feeling for where to get what rather than just expecting everything to spawn anywhere. By default night raids also provide better and rare loot, giving you another reason to go in the dark!
Auto Hacking
We know that the terminal missions have always been very controversial in our community, and while a lot of players love the command line “hacking”, a lot of players were also understandably overwhelmed by it and felt very stressed and kept away from the missions. To give that part of the community a chance to do the terminal missions in a reasonable manner, we added an “auto hacking” option that, once started, goes through all files in the terminal and executes every action one by one. This will eventually complete any mission goal and output any information you may want to have. Though the auto hacking is relatively slow and experienced players will still have an advantage to do it manually. Ideally “auto hacking” is used to get known to the mechanics as you can watch it in realtime and later on you can learn to manually hack it!
Weapon Viewport Position & FOV
Last but not least players also requested to be able to not only adjust the general FOV but also the weapon FOV (which is independent of the general one) as well as being able to adjust the weapon position in the viewport. We finally added the option, so players can adjust everything to their preference!
Chose Infill location
A lot of players also complained about the locked option to choose the infill time when you first start the game and haven’t unlocked the terminal upgrade. We have now re-enabled that option, while adding a new feature that is unlocked after upgrading the terminal. The option to choose the desired infill location at each map. This gives you another option to prepare even better for your raid and plan ahead.
Looking Ahead
As always, make sure to follow us on our socials to stay up to date with everything Incursion Red River. We’ll continue sharing progress, previews, and behind the scenes looks as development moves forward.
We also have more streams coming up soon, so keep an eye out for those if you want to see more of the game in action, ask questions, and hang out with the team live.
In the next updates, we’ll be talking more about the eat and drink systems, in-raid events, and showing more progress on Outskirts as that map continues to come together. There’s still a lot more we’re excited to show, and we’re looking forward to sharing those details with you soon.
Thanks for your continued support, and we’ll see you in the next one.