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.

Upcoming map "Checkpoint"

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!