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Army Ops news time!

Welcome to 2020 soldiers!
Time to talk about a release date, monetization, gameplay and future roadmap!

The new year just started and I'm back at work. And I want to start 2020 with all the power possible and want to start with a heavy focus on Army Ops! So let's dont waste time and get started:

Release:
Army Ops is going to start Early Access on Steam this year!

Monetization:
Army Ops will be a Fair-2-Play game, meaning the game is entirely free to play, no content is locked. There will be no ingame shop or micro transactions. If you want, you can play and unlock everything in Army Ops without paying a cent. However there needs to be a way to earn money to continue the ongoing development of new content. The progression speed of the base version is limited and you will earn XP to rank up very slowly. You will be able to unlock your account for a one time fee to rank up at normal speed. Army Ops will also feature a season system which, after buying a not expensive battle pass track additional stats for a set period displayed ingame to all players. Besides this we will accept donations which will unlock unique donator badges ingame.

I'm currently planning a crowdfunding campaign launching ~ April 2020. By backing Army Ops with the right rewards you can get instant access to all development versions and can play the game!

Gameplay:
Army Ops is a tactical multiplayer FPS with focus on realistic combat scenarios within small fireteam units. Army Ops is modeled to follow the U.S. Army's seven core values (LDRSHIP) and builds a unique ranking and unlock system around this. Prove your knowledge to become a medic or show your skill on the shooting range to become a deadly sniper.

Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Honor any many more core values will define your overall rank, which will unlock new weapons and training courses. You are required to complete hard to master training courses to unlock certain player classes. Only players with a certain rank and a completed training will be able to play a specific class - if you as a grunt see a sniper on a server, you know this person can play the game!

Speaking of classes, Army Ops will features 6 unique classes. All with their own strengths and weaknesses, special equipment and weapons.

Rifleman
Equipped with Assault Rifles, default class

Medic
Equipped with SMGs, able to heal players and stop bleeding. Requires unlock.

Sniper
Equipped with Sniper Rifles.Requires unlock.

Pioneer
Equipped with Shotguns or Grenadelauncher, able to plant/defuse bombs faster, can unlock doors without making noise. Requires unlock.

Support
Equipped with LMGs, able to resupply teammates with a limited stack of ammo. Requires unlock.

VIP
Special class for certain missions, only one player per server, open to select for everyone on assigned escort team.

Army Ops will provide the classic Operations gamemode where 24 Players will fight over several key objectives or need to escort/ambush a VIP on compley small to medium sized maps.

Roadmap:
In the next weeks and moth I will heavily work on all aspects of the game, one core part to test and get running the the account master server and with this the rank system.
I will work on new Maps, weapons and classes. Everything done right now is set to be a placeholder for final art. Meaning Weapon Animations will be very simple for the most part right now. They will be replace later on in development but it'S easier to get started with more weapons and simple animations.
Army Ops will launch in Early Access this year, this means the game is not finished on Early Access start. Trainings and working unlocks are planned to be implemented at some point during the early access phase. The game will get more complex over time, new features will be added.
Like America's Army 2 had it's major patches (like Special Forces, Coalition, Overmatch ...), Army Ops will follow the same pattern and add with named major updates several core features every several weeks/month to the game.

Hooah!

Hooah Soldiers!

Army Ops development restarted some month ago and and finally the game is taking shape. After a very long stage of prototyping we have now a running, "cheat secure" und very modular code. Which is not only removing all of the issues of the prototype, it's also running a lot faster and smoother.

New Gameplay on Bridge:


New informations are coming soon!

Bleeding & Hit Effects

Here is a short video showing some of the many changes:


Players can now bleed after being shot. The amount of bleeding depends on the projectile and hit zone (Arms, Legs, Upper Torso, Lower Torso). The Medic Class is now able to bandage wounded players (currently without animation and it's instant => work in progress).

The hit player will now receive an aim punch effect and as lower the health gets the vision gets more unclear. How do you like the effect? What should I change? (no bloody screen!)

Also new is the ability to switch to the pistol.

This will never happen!

I know how to convert data but I'm not even looking at it. It's illegal and I'm not doing illegal stuff.

Development of Army Ops is very expensive and I want to sell this game so going for old graphics is probably not the best solution. Sorry to destroy you dreams but graphics will be a new style and more like AA3 while gameplay is more like AA2.

Army Ops Alpha #001 Recap

Gameplay Video:


Army Ops Alpha #001 was running last weekend and I'm done evaluating the server statistics...

It was a blast!
In fact it was running so unexpected well, I decided to create a short demo real out of some recorded footage.

In it's bare bone and higly unfinished stated Army Ops survived the first test wave with pride. The dedicated Server survived over 100 (re) connects in 1h and never had a hard crash. Pings where excelent (~40ms Ping from USA to Germany), no rubber banding occured and the netcode did what he was supposed to do.

In conclusion a very successfull first test and even we found some bugs and the game is very unfinished ... I think I speak for all tester: We had a lot of fun!

Thanks to all who helped testing Army Ops!
Alpha Test #002 is on it's way!

And another short update:

This footage is from Beyond Enemy Lines 2 (

There's some pipes laying around. So Hospital?

should be obvious, it's Mountain Pass!