Since the release of our Early Access on Steam earlier this year, we have been hard at work behind the scenes on an Engine upgrade to Unreal Engine 5.7.4 and decoupling the project files to allow for a streamlined process for our developers to work on their respective parts of the project. Developers you ask? Responding up until recently has been a solo developer venture, being a passion project for our lead developer DySands. Recently we have expanded our development team with the official addition of two new developers, an animator and a 3D/environmental artist, with the intention of bringing more developers on soon. It has always been our goal to expand our development team and we are excited to have begun this next step in Responding’s development journey. Whilst we await the release of our next game patch, here is a development update, and a revival of our Trello roadmap.
Trello Roadmap:
We have created a new Trello roadmap to better reflect our current development goals and progress. The aim of this roadmap is to provide insight towards the current and planned additions and fixes for Responding. Whilst we aim to provide our community insight into the future of Responding, some things we would like to keep a surprise, so please note, our roadmap is not a full and complete indication of what is to come. We have an exhaustive list of bug fixes, content additions, and asset updates planned behind the scenes on our internal task tracker. Items marked as public on our internal workflow tool will be automatically updated on our Trello Roadmap.
View our roadmap here: https://trello.com/b/GoGTzoNi/responding-roadmap
Buildings Overhaul:
Our new 3D environmental artist, Neurotic, has been hard at work creating a variety of high quality custom modular residential and commercial building assets for Responding, which can be easily modified to create unique building variants throughout our map. Building ground floors, facades, textures, weathering, brickwork, and decorative extras can all easily be swapped out and tweaked with each variation, breaking up repetition and to better replicate from reference images. The buildings are not only more detailed, but also better account for sloped terrain, as seen below, with windows and entranceways not clipping through the ground as many of our current building assets do. Whilst the modularity of these buildings gives us great flexibility for reusability, all our custom assets are being modelled directly off reference from real NYC buildings to help capture the atmosphere of Upper Manhattan. Here is some of the changes in quality you can expect in future world updates.
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Responding v Real Life Comparison
Animations:
In terms of our animations, we are planning on overhauling everything throughout development, starting with the framework for our core character movement and locomotion, followed by improvements to sidearm animations and vehicle interactions. Our new animator, Ruan, has recently completed a varied set of these new sidearm and vehicle interactions. These have not yet been integrated into the game, pending the locomotion overhaul. We don't want to spoil too much with our new animations at this stage, but are excited to show you their future implementation at a later date.
Driver-Side Enter Vehicle:
Enemy AI Rear Unholstering:
AI Post System:
One of the missing pieces in our AI has been logical movement and positioning. Recently, we have created a rudimentary post system that allows AI to intelligently evaluate and choose cover positions in the world based on a variety of factors. Each potential position is scored and weighted according to factors that matter in the current situation. The AI evaluates line of sight to the target using four different peek positions (such as looking over cover or around the left and right side of it), and reachability, allowing the AI to favor positions that are both effective and practical to reach. This Post System acts as another layer on top of our existing AI framework, helping the AI make decisions that feel more intentional, believable, and tactically sound. It also opens up a lot of possibilities. We can now:
Predefine tactical positions, such as stacking up on a door before an entry.
Encourage officers to favor cover behind a vehicle door or behind the vehicle itself.
Dynamically generate defensive positions to secure and protect areas such as crime scenes.
Expand these principles into many other gameplay situations as development continues.
It is still in its early stage but is a major step toward making the AI behave less like bots and more like characters that understand and react to their environment.
Thank you
Thank you to everyone who has played and given feedback on Responding since the launch of our early access. We are actively monitoring and noting all feedback as it comes through. As we continue to work through bugs, implement new features, and release new updates, we encourage your ongoing feedback through Steam discussions and on our Discord.
Central, show me 10-61.