Intel Report

Hello!

We’re back with another Intel Report filled with dev news and sneak peeks for our upcoming release GROUND BRANCH V1036.

Today we’ll go over some details on new game systems and mechanics — including AI — as well as another map reveal, some brand-new character art for a new enemy faction, and finally some more player customization options. Let’s get to it.

Upcoming systems and mechanics

Though we aren’t able to do a proper visual showcase of these updates just yet, we thought it would be nice to take the time to talk about some of the changes and additions currently being worked on by our programmers for game systems and mechanics.

Here are some recent developments on the coding front:

AI

In V1036, we’ll be bringing significant improvements to enemy AI beyond new art assets.

💡 New dev team member Zachary Ledbetter is working on our enemy AI while Chris pivots over to focus on the friendly AI and Extraction (aka PvE Hostage Rescue — more on that soon!).

A key consideration in the design of our locked doors was to avoid players getting completely stuck on a map. Even if a player runs out of breaching tools, they can still shoot at the handle of regular doors with a regular firearm to break through, and buildings with reinforced doors will always allow at least one unlocked door to enter/exit from if no breaching charges or other explosives are available.

Our door system will allow mission designers to either set locked doors manually, or use a system to randomly lock a specified number of doors. Here’s a quick visualization in which the system is being told to lock 5 doors of a total of 10:

💡 We will continue to test and prototype the door system with our AI and tester feedback to the find the optimal amount of doors locked for our missions.

Remaking Rundown

Those of you following GROUND BRANCH for a while know that we’ve been overhauling John’s original maps over the years to update visuals, improve or expand layouts, and thematically integrate them with the campaign stories that are being worked on behind the scenes.

In our last Intel Report we showcased Airbase, a full remake of the 747 map, now set in Libya. This week we’re revealing Hospital, a complete rework of CQB favorite Rundown that is being helmed by level artist Elliot.

📋 A derelict Soviet-era hospital just over the Russian border now serves as a command center for PMCs.

The design philosophy behind the Rundown update was all about improving the close-quarters battle experience, while giving players a more organic and intuitive structure to fight through. To achieve that, we’ve opened up the exterior a bit to create more space and angles from which players can approach the central building — which has itself been transformed from an abandoned school into a deactivated hospital.

The first step in that transformation was moving away from the overused asset pack that so many games rely on for Soviet-style structures, so we built our own from the ground up. The surroundings now better reflect the campaign’s location and tie into the story far more cohesively than before.

The basement has been expanded into a fully fleshed-out play space, complete with multiple entry and exit points. Up top, the roof has been reworked into a viable defensive position, giving teams a solid foothold to hold and fight from. To help players keep their bearings, each floor now features a consistent wall paint scheme that makes it easier to tell what level you’re on. Elliot also introduced a clear visual distinction between the front and back of the building, making callouts and communication much more effective.

We’ve also given the garage some love — it now includes a playable second and third level, complete with windows that offer firing angles to defend the structure or provide overwatch for teammates pushing toward the hospital.

💡 Creek is also receiving an overhaul that we'll showcase in a future Intel Report (there's a small sneak peek further below!).

New enemy character assets

Another set of character assets that Pau has been working on more recently is a Western PMC faction, which will be known in the story as Citadel Research Group.

📋 Citadel Research Group is a risk management company that specializes in maritime security in and around the Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf. We will learn more about them in Operations mode.

As explained in Intel Report #029, Pau has been creating character assets for the enemy mobs over the last year (see the full post here for more details and previews). Much like the MENA faction from our last report, these assets can be mixed-and-matched to create more variety.

For these assets, we have also created a number of accessories that can be used to add visual interest to loadouts, like the carabiner, radio PTT and knife seen above.

💡 One idea we have for the future (post-V1036) is allowing players to add these types of small accessories as cosmetics to customize their platforms (helmets and vests).

Since a handful of these assets are unspecific (as in unmarked with the “Citadel” logo), they are also being used to compose a more generic militia faction that will be replacing the old “Riot” assets in non-campaign maps like City, Creek and Small Town. Here’s an example on the overhauled Creek map:

More customization

Though our next release is far from focused on cosmetics, character customization is always welcome in GROUND BRANCH and V1036 will be sure to deliver quite a few new items to the menu, ranging from character appearance to outfit variants.

Without getting into specifics too much (we like to keep a healthy level of suspense), we’ll be adding new hair and facial hair styles, kneepad variants for most pants, a new shirt type, a drop-leg holster, running shoes, fingerless gloves, and the neck gaiter, among other things. These conceptual shots by Rangda showcase some of the new cosmetics (and a few additions that aren’t purely cosmetic) in a sensual — but still classy — fashion:

💡 GROUND BRANCH V1036 will feature more than enough new weapons and attachments to keep the armory interesting as well. Stay tuned!

This has been Intel Report #030!

As always, thanks for making it to the end of the post and keeping up with GROUND BRANCH. We hope you enjoyed this dev blog, and we’ll have another one for you soon enough.

We’ll go back to getting this thing done now. Until next time!

Hello, everyone!

We’re back with our Intel Reports, this time as we make our way to GROUND BRANCH V1036.

On the road to our next major release we’ll be trying to do these dev blogs more often, as our schedules permit. We don’t want to take too much time away from development, and these posts can be a lot of work. So, in order for them to happen more frequently, we’ll have to keep them a little shorter (which we assume is okay with most of you anyway).

With that out of the way, let’s get right into it.

Pau Peñalver officially joins the team

We’re happy to finally announce that artist Pau Peñalver, who has been blessing our Intel Reports for years with his amazing character art, has been officially integrated into the GB dev team!

What started as a freelance contract to build our clothing, equipment, and model skins has evolved into a full-time role. He is now focused on updating our campaign and enemy assets and polishing new player content.

Pau has spent the best part of last year creating dozens of character assets for an in-game faction we’re dubbing MENA (Middle East and North Africa) for now. Though these assets were primarily created with our future Libya hotspot in mind, they will likely be used for multiple different factions in GROUND BRANCH’s campaigns as they’re versatile militia-themed assets.

🛑 WARNING: Pau renders
Keep in mind these renders by Pau use some very nice processing and far better lighting than our engine and systems can handle in real-time.

💡 Some of the MENA character assets have also been adapted for player use in V1036. These include the Fingerless Gloves (a couple images below) and Running Shoes (second image, bottom-right).

Though not as modular as player characters — both to simplify our workflow and maintain performance (more parts = more textures to load) — these new enemy assets are still very modular, allowing us to easily set different colors to different areas, as well as mix-and-match parts (heads, upper bodies and lower bodies, plus optional accessories like headgear and vests) to create a good degree of mob variety.

💡 Pau has since moved on to the US PMC faction, which we'll showcase in a future report.

New maps incoming

As the first developers on the team to start working exclusively on V1036, our trusty environment artists Will Bullen and Elliot Burgess have been very busy with a handful of maps: some new, some remakes. We’ll be showcasing one of each kind today.

Airbase: a 747 remake

The 747 map, originally created by John (who created the classic 747 map in Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear for those of you ancient enough to remember it), has received a remake by Will and is now known as Airbase.

💡 With the exception of the airliner, this is a complete remake of the map.

Like Power Station, much of the general layout has been preserved, with landmarks being roughly in the areas you would expect. Though not technically much larger, the new map feels like a bigger environment — likely due to the more numerous and fleshed out buildings, as well as other environmental details.

Now officially set in Libya — sharing a mission hotspot with Power Station — Airbase still portrays a small airport in the desert, but has had its boundaries slightly expanded and a considerable amount of infrastructure added to fit with our campaign mission’s story. These include a control tower, hangars, hardened aircraft shelters (HAS) and several other points of interest.

📋 Originally serving as an airbase for a former regime in a resource-rich part of southwestern Libya, this facility was subsequently converted into a small civilian airport by the UN. Following a recent breakdown of martial order, locals have since retaken control of the airfield with support from a network of insurgents.

The terminal has of course also been remade and expanded. Here’s a quick look at the ground floor:

And here are some of the new MENA characters on Airbase:

New map reveal: Border

The bulk of Elliot’s time over the last year has been dedicated to a new map called Border (formerly “Checkpoint”), teased briefly in Intel Report #028.

Set at (and around) a bridge checkpoint on the US–Mexico border, this new map is a pure urban hellscape filled with alleys, derelict homes and commerce, a dirty canal, a small junkyard, a partially demolished road bridge, a deactivated multi-story public telecom building — which now serves as an outpost for the cartel that controls the severely impoverished Mexican town — and a lot of abandoned vehicles.

The bridge crossing, along with a small section of the checkpoint on the US side, is part of the playable area. Most of the action will take place on the Mexican side, however, where the majority of the play area resides.

💡 As you may have guessed, the Border campaign mission will share a hotspot with Ranch.

💡 We're not ready to showcase it just yet, but V1036 will also include an update for The Farm training map, a Creek overhaul, and a remake of Rundown. Soon enough we'll have all old maps remade or updated.

Armor system

GROUND BRANCH V1036 will be introducing the much-anticipated armor system.

We’ll start with 2 tiers of armor: soft armor (such as Kevlar, the most common material in “bulletproof” vests) and ballistic plates (typically thick ceramic plates that are inserted into plate carriers, such as the JPC and MPC in-game).

🛡️ Soft armor is lighter and provides more coverage as it is the predominant material of ballistic vests, but is mostly effective against pistol calibers only.

🛡️ Ballistic plates are heavier and generally only cover vital organs, but they offer good protection against rifle rounds.

Here is a quick visualization of the ballistic plates on the MPC Plate Carrier (straight from Kris’ editor), which holds a front and a back plate, as well as side plates:

The armor system is fairly straightforward:

• The damage and relative location of each shot is tracked, and radiates out like a dartboard
• The point of impact is where most of the damage will be assigned; the further away from the point of impact, the less damage is assigned
• Each subsequent shot is compared against the previous ones to determine the remaining effectiveness of the armor
• Once a certain damage threshold is reached, the armor will fail and the bullet will pass through, wounding the target character

To sum it up: more shots that are closer together are more likely to defeat armor.

💡 Needless to say, caliber and ballistics will all play a role in how easily the armor is defeated as well.

🪖 Helmets will work similarly to body armor, with some added tracing to check for bullet trajectory. Helmets don't hold very well against much, however.

And if you’re a fan of chest rigs but don’t want to miss out on having some armor protection, we have good news — in V1036 you will be able to equip them on top of the Ballistic Vest, as seen here:

And that’s what we have for you today, folks.

This has been Intel Report #029!

Thanks for keeping up with GROUND BRANCH! We appreciate each and every one of you who take the time to read through our comms here.

As mentioned, we’ll try to get these rolling more often, so stay tuned — we’ll have more sneak peeks and news for you soon. See you then!

Hello everyone, thank you for joining us for another Intel Report!

Today’s topic is a bit different than usual. As you may have seen here, GROUND BRANCH has moved ownership from BlackFoot Studios to MicroProse. The team behind GB fully moved over alongside John — BlackFoot Studios owner and GROUND BRANCH creator — who took an advisory role and helped us finish V1035.

This transition involved many moving parts, including changing over hardware infrastructure, licensing, and software ownership to MicroProse. During this time, our heads have been down, with the team focused with onboarding new developers and preparing our base code for a greater expansion of GROUND BRANCH’s future.

Recent developments

When we last spoke, we mentioned that we’ve been working on the transition from Lua to C++ and Blueprint. The decision came from the desire to increase the scope of our game’s campaign and to add features that we felt were now possible with the additional support under new ownership. Creating this foundation has provided us a springboard to create new features for our upcoming game modes and abilities, as well as the campaign logic we will need to finish the Operations mode (for which we provided a mission demo in V1035).

Each of our developers has been dedicated to retooling all of our core systems (yes, even the Tablet), to be prepared for this expansion. It’s been a large undertaking, but the light is at the end of the tunnel and we’re currently in the testing phase for most of our multiplayer modes. Doors have been updated to no longer desync online, fan-favorite Hostage Rescue is in the final testing phases, and the “Silent Reach” mission objectives are being broken out (along with the infil/exfil logic) to be used in future Operations missions so we can finally start putting those missions together. From there, we’ll be updating the GROUND BRANCH Mod Kit (SDK) in preparation for map modding and mission modding, before moving full steam ahead with finishing our next dev cycle for V1036.

New team members and a couple of farewells

As for the team, you may have recognized a few new faces on the Discord.

The first addition to our team was long-time contributor Pau, now our in-house character artist. Previously contracted on a freelance basis to create our clothing, equipment, and model skins, he is now with us full-time as he updates our campaign and enemy character assets, as well as touches up new player assets as required. We’ve also added a writer, Scott, who has been instrumental in bringing to life the story that we envisioned for our campaign. We also have a composer duo (Aleksi and Jonathan) who has recently completed our soundtrack, and 4 new programmers to assist us in bringing the game to life: Brian, Jonathan, Jesse, and Zachary. In addition, we are currently working with a voice actor crew to bring our briefings and characters to life for the campaign. We have also just (this week!) brought aboard tech artist Santeri to get more hands on the animation and rigging deck. Lastly, our 3D art team has been unofficially expanded for a few years by MicroProse artists Ian, Bogdan and Ivan (all under Mike‘s management).

As not everything can be good news, we’re also sad to formally announce that Matt, a.k.a. Fatmarrow, has decided to move on from GROUND BRANCH and on to different projects. Matt was instrumental in expanding and refining many of GROUND BRANCH’s features: from game modes Hostage Rescue and DTAS all the way to the Mod Kit implementation, it’s almost impossible to think of a department that Matt wasn’t involved in at some point. As an early member of the team, he also had a big role in helping shape the game’s vision and building the GROUND BRANCH community — regulars will remember the deadpan jokes and the bright orange profile picture as much as all of his amazing additions to the game.

We’re extremely thankful for Matt’s time on the project and wish him the best of luck!

💡 Matt is currently working on a prototype for a unique modern spin on old-school text parser adventure games. Hit him up on The Magic Hours Discord server if you want to stay in touch!

💡 Ol' Fatmarrow isn't going anywhere though as he also has a backlog of mod maps to get into GROUND BRANCH someday.

Finally, none of us would be here today without John’s vision and incredible determination as he painstakingly built a team and kept the dream alive over the years. From the germ of an idea to where it stands now, his name is inseparable from GROUND BRANCH and his legacy will be carried on going forward in development. Over the course of V1035 — our last update with John — he provided us valuable feedback and direction to ensure we had a path forward for development. We are all grateful for the opportunity we have to carry the torch and ensure GROUND BRANCH is a success for years to come.

Let’s all show John our appreciation and wish him good luck in his future projects under the BlackFoot Studios seal as well!

This has been Intel Report #028!

As always, thank you all for your patience and support. We’ll get right back to working on Patch V1035.2, and we’ll see you on the next one!

Hey, everyone.

Our last contact has been a while ago, in Build Update #060, when we released Patch V1035.1.

Although we usually reserve our Intel Reports for longer periods of quiet between major releases, Patch V1035.2 is taking a lot longer than initially anticipated, and we thought it was important to give everyone a quick heads-up on what’s going on behind the scenes.

🙌 Before we get into more detail, rest assured that GROUND BRANCH continues to be developed normally by the same folks you already know and love/hate, plus a few new faces! We're simply having to do some more refactoring to ensure longevity and consistency in our systems.

With that out of the way, let’s get into it.

A necessary shift: from Lua to C++ and UE4 Blueprint

As we continue development, we’ve made another difficult but crucial decision to refactor the game’s core logic—including all game modes/missions as well as much of the UI, the Mod Kit and more—away from Lua and into native C++ and UE4 Blueprint. This foundational change is the main source behind this delay, but we are confident it’s the right long-term path for GROUND BRANCH.

Our initial Lua-based systems ultimately proved unfit for purpose: over time, more and more critical logic was pushed into C++ and Blueprint to meet performance and complexity demands, which ironically negated Lua’s main benefit: rapid iteration. The system became redundant, and we simply lack the resources to properly develop and maintain two separate scripting environments.

💡 Though mods will also be affected and that is of course unfortunate, we have assessed that the vast majority of Lua-tagged mods are actually maps created in the Mission Editor, with only a tiny fraction being true Lua-based projects.

A proper map editor will ultimately provide more power and flexibility than the current Mission Editor + Lua combo could offer. The possibilities exposed by robust Blueprint support far outweigh what our current Lua systems can achieve, and it aligns with modern development practices. Also, new programmers joining the project are already familiar with UE4’s native C++ and Blueprint workflow, allowing them to become productive much faster.

While this transition means a much longer wait than we’d like, it paves the way for a more stable, performant, and moddable GROUND BRANCH for years to come. We appreciate your patience as we work to get this right!

Other updates and changes

One of the more popular PvP game modes in the game, Hostage Rescue, will finally return in Patch V1035.2 as all game modes are rebuilt with C++/Blueprint logic.

The update will also introduce a new Kit Restrictions system for server-side customization, a complete door rework to (among other things) hopefully resolve long-standing replication issues alongside new VFX and the return of frag and smoke grenade abilities for enemy AI.

On the gear front, you can expect new weapons like a stock (factory) G36K carbine, the AUG A1 and F88SA2 assault rifles, new Galil variants, as well as updated models for the HWS 553 (and a couple of new holo sights!), a remade ASR, revised M110 and M110K1 models to fix proportions, a new Ms2000 IR strobe, and a cleanup of the Tan/Coyote Brown platforms and pouches, among other updates.

—

We hope to have Patch V1035.2 ready in a few weeks.

Stay tuned and thank you for sticking with us!

Hey folks,

It is time for another Intel Report as we continue to develop V1035 of GROUND BRANCH.

As always, we have worked hard over this past month to design, code and fix all kinds of things, a lot of which we’ve previewed in our most recent series of dev blogs starting in August of last year (go make sure you haven’t missed any!).

Our focus this month has shifted more towards polishing things up, fixing up our bulging backlogs of bugs, and getting ready for the devtest stage of V1035. We are about to commence a limited internal devtest, and we hope to soon expand that to a public devtest build in which you can all participate (more on that when we have it!).

As important as this work is, it does not make for terribly interesting screenshots, videos, recaps, or deep dives, but we have a little bit of new content to show you. Thank you again for bearing with us as we get things fully in order for the new release.

We’ll then round off with a quick highlights reel from the past V1035 Intel Reports.

📌 Keep in mind this and previous reports are not an exhaustive list of V1035 features. For an overview of expected changes and additions, please refer to our roadmap.

Quick news

Randomize enemy count

In V1035, the main co-op game modes (Terrorist Hunt, Intel Retrieval and Defuse) will offer players a choice to randomize the enemy count:

The randomization option is now a regular mission setting for the above-mentioned three co-op game modes. It can be set on the Ops Board and prior to launching a mission, like other mission settings.

Three different randomization options are available:

• No — Disables the setting, so the amount of enemies you can encounter in the mission will match exactly the number of enemies set in “Expected enemy resistance”.
• A little — Adds a possible variance of up to ±3 enemies (i.e. your expected enemy resistance, plus or minus 3 enemies).
• A lot — Adds a possible variance of up to ±6 enemies (i.e. your expected enemy resistance, plus or minus 6 enemies).

The variance in enemy count scales with the amount of enemies selected, so that you will not see the maximum variation until you are at higher enemy counts. All of this is of course subject to change as we gather feedback and feel it out.

Campaign/mission UI progress

As shown in Intel Report #022, we have been steadily working on the UI to support campaign missions (you can see our first preview here).

We have since upgraded the looks slightly, and put further work into how the mission details will be displayed. It is all a work in progress, but we have recorded another little preview for you to check out the progress:

As the video shows, progress (both as a % and a progress bar) is tracked for each hotspot as well as each mission within. Due to missions being playable in single player (offline) or co-op (online), progress is displayed for each mode separately.

Once a hotspot is selected, a background briefing — the overall situation in the hotspot — is displayed. Hovering a mission will preview the mission briefing and objectives.

After selecting a mission, players will then be able to again read the full briefing and objectives under the Mission Details tab, as well as browse a few other tabs that contain a mix of operational info and some flavor: Environment (weather and terrain), Human Factors (enemy forces, alertness level and civilians), and Intel Assets. The latter is essentially a gallery of intel images, including an interactive “tactical overview” map marked with objectives, key locations and the source of the various intel images. Pointing at most of these markers will cause a tooltip with further information to pop up.

💡 The mission briefing screen will likely also be home to where you select and equip your team in the future. For the V1035 demo mission, your team will be pre-selected and equipped.

Once players have reviewed everything, they can launch the mission by clicking Deploy (Offline Mode) or Deploy (Online Mode). So how exactly does each mode work?

Offline Mode is recommended for those strictly interested in playing a mission like a regular single player game. You will be able to play alongside AI-controlled teammates and the game can be paused at any time. If you do not have a working internet connection, campaign missions will still be playable in this mode!

In Online Mode, players can play either with the AI-controlled teammates or with up to a certain number of players* who can join using the normal Host Game invite system. A mix of other players and AI-controlled teammates is not possible, and pausing the game will not be possible in either case.

💡 Team size in the V1035 demo mission will be capped to 4 operators: the player + 3 AI teammates, or 4 players. Future missions — though not all of them necessary — will likely allow more personnel.

As is true for all we share in our dev blogs, most of what you see is in active development and subject to change.

Mission Editor updates

✒️ This month, Matt "Fatmarrow" Farrow gives us a deep dive on new features for the Mission Editor.

As hinted earlier, not all the changes we have made in V1035 will be visible or apparent to players — in fact, there has been quite a lot of work going on behind the scenes in nearly every area of the game.

One aspect we will return to is the Mission Editor, which is used to set up the spawn points, objectives, guard points, patrol routes, and more for every mission in the game (including the new campaign missions). Back in the November report, we looked at changes to AI spawn points and the new day/night spawn system. We also looked at some fixes to the navblock system. This month we will very briefly look at a few other changes behind the scenes.

Mission meshes

Mission meshes have had a little do-over, and should now place flush to the ground when dropped into a map (let’s definitely file this under “quality-of-life”). In place of another drop-down with a very long list to scroll through, there is now another new “picker” dialog for quickly trying out and picking mission meshes:

As you can see, the list of available meshes has been expanded again — for our purposes. The aim of mission meshes is not to be an impromptu level design tool, though of course we must salute the creativity of mission modders and the works they have created with this tool. Hang tight and we will have proper map modding through the mod kit soon.

Campaign missions

We have also developed some new systems specifically for the new campaign missions. These are currently only functional for our in-game content, but it may be that these can be repurposed eventually for “regular” game modes and/or for modded game modes and missions.

Here we can see the new mission image editor for the new campaign missions. We are not presently providing the facility for modders to make campaign missions (easily, at least), but at some point this might be available for more general use:

And here we can see the new map annotation tool in the Mission Editor. Yet again, this is not going to be immediately available for modders, but it may be that this system can be rolled out more widely in the future:

The combination of new mission objectives and the new campaign mission features allows for a more interactive player map. In time, the Tablet map may include more of this sort of interaction.

Quick demo run on the new Power Station

As a way to showcase the Power Station remake, as well as new enemy meshes and other details you might catch, we’ve put together a quick gameplay edit of a co-op run for your enjoyment.

Intel Recap

Let’s now take a look at some of the highlights from this past Intel Report cycle.

🔗 Quick links

› Intel Report #021 (August 2024)
› Intel Report #022 (September 2024) 
› Intel Report #023 (October 2024) 
› Intel Report #024 (November 2024) 
› Intel Report #025 (December 2024 / January 2025)

Intel Report #021 (August 2024) [link]

We showed off Ranch for the first time, and showcased some new gear and a range of new weapons.

Intel Report #022 (September 2024) [link]

We revealed some updates to Depot for the campaign mission demo, previewed new AI loadouts, gave details on the new SLAM charge, and also aincluded some samples of the new OPFOR voice lines.

Intel Report #023 (October 2024) [link]

We previewed the new Power Station map remake, showed you the new mag check animations, and went into more detail on various new mission objectives in the campaign mission demo.

Intel Report #024 (November 2024) [link]

We detailed the new day/night spawn system, fixes to the navblock system, teased some more new weapons and the chemlights, and revealed the DBAL-PL attachment for pistols.

Intel Report #025 (December 2024 / January 2025) [link]

The new item customization UI was on display, we absolutely fascinated you with details about AI patrol nodes, revealed some map lighting and color tweaks, and shared some Ranch co-op footage.

This has been Intel Report #026!

We hope you have enjoyed this rummage through the tactical memory box of past Intel Reports, and will soon join us in testing V1035 of GROUND BRANCH.

As usual, thank you so much for keeping an eye on GROUND BRANCH and reading through today’s post.

See you next time!