Welcome to the 84th installment of our Ready or Not Development Briefing, dated March 28th, 2025!
In this update, we’ll delve into our advancements in optimization, provide insights into the development process of our AI difficulty system, explore narrative content elements, and discuss convention merchandise.
Note: These briefings are designed to keep you informed about aspects of our ongoing support for Ready or Not. They do not cover everything we are working on at any given time. It’s important to remember that the content in our briefings may still be under development and subject to change.
We are in the process of updating over 1,200 assets as part of our continuous optimization initiatives. Internally, we have observed notable improvements that mitigate CPU bottlenecks, enabling enhanced GPU utilization and thus improved overall performance.
Efforts to ‘instance’ assets have minimized stuttering across levels, resulting in the treatment of multiple duplicate assets as a single entity (e.g., for walls). In addition, numerous materials with high-performance demands have been optimized to reduce unnecessary shader complexity in scenes.
We have reworked collisions for more than a hundred assets to improve performance, addressing complex collisions throughout the game.
Integration of Simplygon into our development pipeline has begun, impacting character models and various other assets. This integration aims to reduce ‘quad overdraw’—where multiple pixels are rendered even if obscured—harming performance unnecessarily.
We resolved an in-game issue with long hair physics that could lead to significant frame rate drops.
The SWAT AI has undergone optimization to streamline its system operations, complemented by a shadow pass across base-game levels to mitigate shadow-related performance issues.
Our animation team has identified and resolved notable bottlenecks in character movement systems, working to integrate additional animation fidelity enhancements currently being refined behind the scenes.
Our designers, engineers, and QA personnel are diligently refining the new difficulty system across all game missions. We are entering a rigorous playtesting phase focusing on three missions: Ides of March, Elephant, and Dorms.
These missions were selected for intensive playtesting as they embody key suspect AI archetypes and scenarios present throughout Ready or Not. This dedicated effort allows us to gain a thorough understanding of how global difficulty mode modifiers impact the overall game.
Ides of March is tested due to its barricaded suspects scenario with a high presence of professional adversaries and traps. Elephant offers a dynamic environment with amateur suspects in an active shooter scene, featuring bomb defusal. Dorms contains inexperienced suspects utilizing melee tactics alongside a significant number of civilians, offering a more manageable size compared to larger missions like Twisted Nerve.
With a comprehensive grasp of these difficulty modifiers in controlled settings, we can better evaluate their functionality in other levels and fine-tune mission-specific difficulty modifiers accordingly.
A newly developed automated testing program by our programming team is expediting the testing of AI difficulty system behaviors across all levels. This process artificially accelerates in-game time and actions, allowing over 50 types of AI value modifiers (e.g., hearing range, accuracy, vision) to be tested within seconds, enabling all game levels to be loaded and assessed in just 15 minutes.
Previously, our QA team would manually navigate levels to locate suspects and test stimulus values, such as by firing at targets or using grenades. The automated process significantly speeds up iterations on AI behavior without necessitating extensive QA testing for laborious aspects of stimulus value testing.
(Video Below: Observe the automated testing process in action—it happens in the blink of an eye. To the right of the viewport, a selection of checked stimulus values is displayed upon test completion)
Our marketing and narrative teams are crafting promotional content pieces set to be unveiled soon, designed to enrich Ready or Not’s lore and world-building. These pieces may also feature details from behind-the-scenes narrative elements explicitly visible in the game.
If you haven’t subscribed to the VOID Interactive YouTube channel yet, now is the time!
For those planning to attend gaming conventions over the next six months, you may have the opportunity to secure exclusive Ready or Not merchandise!
Although we may not have a dedicated booth at every event, you might encounter our team members who could offer you a bag of goodies, as supplies allow!
Additionally, we are developing numerous new designs and merchandise items for future release.
As demonstrated, our primary focus for the upcoming content update is on enhancing the quality of life, especially in terms of optimization. Our revised AI behavior testing process is resolving various peculiarities affecting both suspects and civilians, aiding the development of the difficulty system. Furthermore, with creative content and conventions on the horizon, there’s much to look forward to!
This concludes our 84th development briefing. Thank you for participating. Join us next time for more development insights!
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VOID Interactive