What We’re Working On — Operation Athena
Welcome to ATHENA TRANSMISSION #01, a new way for us to keep you updated on what’s currently happening behind the scenes with Operation Athena.
Development is moving across a lot of different areas right now, with a major focus on strengthening and expanding the systems already in the game rather than chasing a single headline feature.
For this transmission, we’re covering some of the work going into expanded character and weapon customization, a new map, Team AI improvements, utility changes, additional weapon options, and our upcoming audio overhaul.
Expanded Character Customization
Character customization is being expanded with more material choices, variants, and additional customization options across existing equipment.
We’re also beginning to make some of these choices more meaningful beyond simply changing how your character looks.
One of the first examples of this is night vision equipment. Night vision will now rely on your character actually wearing compatible headgear and equipment rather than simply being available regardless of your appearance setup.
This is only a starting point, but we want equipment selection to gradually have more interesting considerations while still giving players plenty of freedom to customize their operator.
We’ve also continued improving the underlying customization system to make it more reliable and easier to expand with additional equipment and options going forward.
Major Gun Customization Improvements
Gun customization is receiving one of its largest updates so far.
Alongside a significantly improved and easier-to-use interface, we’ve been rebuilding parts of the underlying system into a proper baseline gun-part system that we can continue expanding instead of relying on increasingly specialized weapon variants.
Some of the changes currently being worked on include:
- Swappable laser and flashlight tactical devices
- Expanded attachment and customization options
- Additional optic support for relevant pistols
- Better attachment placement and customization controls
- A more consistent underlying system for handling gun parts and attachments
- Consolidating suppressed and unsuppressed weapons into a single weapon selection tile, rather than treating them as completely separate firearms
For example, instead of selecting a suppressed and unsuppressed version of the same weapon from two different slots, the suppressor can become part of the weapon's actual customization.
The goal is to establish a much stronger foundation for weapon customization so that adding new optics, tactical devices, suppressors, and other attachment types becomes considerably easier going forward.
New Map — Mansion / Antebellum
A brand-new map is currently in development.
Set around a Southern antebellum-style mansion at golden hour, the map is being built around a mixture of interior and exterior combat.
Players will move between the mansion itself and the surrounding property, creating a different combat flow from many of our more enclosed locations.
The golden-hour setting is also giving us an opportunity to push a very different atmosphere and visual style compared with the existing maps.
Utility Customization
We’re also exploring ways to expand the utility system.
Currently, players have grenades and flashbangs, but we want to give players more control over what utility they bring into a mission and how much of each type they carry, while keeping those choices balanced.
This would also give us a foundation for introducing additional utility and throwable options beyond the current grenade and flashbang selections.
The idea is to make choosing your equipment before a mission a little more interesting rather than every operator simply entering with the same utility setup.
Team AI Improvements
Team AI continues to be a major area of development.
We’re working on improving:
- Navigation and movement
- General usability
- Existing squad commands
- Door interactions
- Reliability when following player orders
- Additional functionality and command options
A major goal here is making your squad feel more predictable, capable, and useful without turning the command system into something overly complicated.
There is still a lot we want to do with the AI system over time, and this next update will continue building on the foundation introduced with the first version of controllable teammates.
More Weapon Options
We’re also looking at expanding the weapon roster further.
Nothing specific to announce just yet, but additional firearms are currently being considered alongside the larger weapon customization work.
The improved attachment system should also make future weapons much easier to support without needing numerous separate variants of essentially the same firearm.
Complete Audio Overhaul
One of the largest projects happening behind the scenes is our new audio system, which is now nearing completion.
We’re implementing FMOD alongside a custom audio engine plugin developed specifically for Operation Athena, giving us much more control over spatial audio, environmental acoustics, reverb, distance-based gunfire, and reactive sound behavior.
We want different spaces to genuinely sound different.
A small room, hallway, bunker, courtyard, or open exterior should each affect sound in its own way, while gunshots are being reworked to sound more believable across different environments and distances.
Once the system is fully in place, we’ll be redoing a large portion of the game’s sound design and mixing around it. We’ve also brought on a dedicated sound designer to help us complete this work sooner and push the overall audio quality further.
Overall Focus
There are plenty of additional improvements, fixes, and smaller changes being worked on beyond everything listed here.
And even this post doesn't cover all of the larger ideas we have for the next update and the updates beyond it.
We have a lot we want to do with Operation Athena, but we also want to be realistic about what we announce and what we can actually complete within each update.
We'd rather continue building these systems properly and show things when they're genuinely taking shape than promise an enormous list of features before they're ready.
Make Operation Athena better.
That means strengthening the foundations of existing systems, expanding the parts of the game that are already working, improving usability, polishing rough edges, and fixing as many outstanding bugs as possible.
At the same time, many of these changes are being built specifically so we have a much stronger foundation for the bigger things we want to do with Operation Athena going forward.
There’s a lot more happening behind the scenes, and we’ll have more to show as the update comes together.