Today's Development Diary by Podact
Hi everyone and welcome back to another dev diary for La Résistance. Today its time to cover the art and music part of the expansion plus showcasing some of our new historical operatives. I will also be sharing the rest of the diary schedule until release. Enjoy!
Music
Let's start here so you can listen to some samples while you read!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYVHAQ7ExSs
For La Résistance we got 4 new tracks:
“Imperterrita” - Our Spanish theme song. Really good buildup tune that I think will also fit well to the spanish civil war.
“A Storm Coming” - Kinda classic HOI4 axis-y march tune we use at war and for nations going fascist.
“Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” - Our french theme song. A great song for democracies with plenty of drums.
“Cloak and Dagger” - The “spy tune”. We play this when players are doing sneaky stuff. It's a pretty slow tension/thriller tune.
As you can see we try to cover new themes and theaters for each song so the game will not just play differently but also sound different with the new expansion :)
Art
Hi! We are artists on Hearts of Iron team, Irene and Albina and we want to tell you a bit about the production of 2D assets..
Since we are focusing on France, Spain and Portugal in this expansion, we have added portraits of generals, admirals and political leaders from these countries. These portraits were created by a number of different artists including us, Celine and Ahmed. Here is some picked favorites:
Two of them are illustrations of Military Junta and The Anarchist Commune, two committees that represented opponent parties in the Spanish civil war. It was challenging and interesting to work with leader portraits that are a bit unusual!
Our new feature - spies. We have made a lot of portraits of them. Male and female operatives of different nationalities, ages (and attitudes :p). You can see that the operatives share some outfit details, like glasses, suits and so on. In order to create the amount of portraits needed for this expansion we tried a new system of 2D modular portraits. As the system was new we took a bit of a risk but we feel it paid off in the end. Some of the biggest challenges were to create elements in the same camera angle and lighting conditions so they could be switched easily. In the end it turned out to be really fun to play with this character creator!
When it comes to unit models we already showed off both our armored cars and scout planes, so click those links if you wanna see more than the below sample:
For spain we also have a new light tank model as well as a plane model (the nationalists had their own licensed version of the German Bf109)
Historical Operatives
As part of La Resistance, we wanted to highlight some of the most famous agents that were active during the period. There are quite a few of them, but here is a list of personal favorites:
Otto Skorzeny:
Perhaps the most famous German small-unit leader of the war, Skorzeny was involved most famously in the German raid to liberate Mussolini (also available as a historical operation under the right circumstances!). Beyond that, he was involved in a number of other operations.
Jeannie Rousseau:
A French woman who gathered intelligence on the German V-weapon program through work in a French company supplying war material to Germany. Her reports led to the Allies becoming aware of the V-2 development taking place in Peenemünde and the allied air effort to destroy the site. She was later captured, but survived the war.
Dusko Popov:
A triple agent working for MI6, the Abwehr, as well as the Yugoslavian government-in-exile, he fed misinformation about D-Day to his German handlers, who were completely convinced that he was working for them. In between, he apparently chased a lot of tail and his lifestyle served as inspiration for Fleming’s James Bond (not to be confused with James Boned, who is inspired by Daniel).
Josephine Baker:
An American-born Frenchwoman, she would use her considerable fame as an entertainer to gain access to high-ranking diplomats and relayed secret information she overheard at parties to the French intelligence service. She smuggled notes about German troop movements written in invisible ink on her notation or pinned in her underwear.
Nancy Wake:
A native of New Zealand, the Fall of France found her, unfortunately, in France. She quickly began organizing an escape network for shot-down allied pilots before the Gestapo closed in on her and her husband. While she narrowly managed to escape to Spain, her husband was not so lucky. She later returned to France to organize the resistance, taking part in an unsuccessful uprising of the Marquis.
Upcoming diaries
As release approaches the dev diary content is getting pretty locked in so I figured I might as well show you the schedule so you know when topics will pop up (and so you can stop asking me for when we talk about AI and bugfixing… seriously guys it's pretty much always the last 2 diaries ;D). Here goes:
4/2 - Achievements
5/2 - Spymaster AAR
12/2 - AI & Feature changes
19/2 - Full Patchlog, Balance & Bugfixes
25/2 - Release!!!
That's it for today, don’t miss our stream at 16:00CET where yet again the anarchists will take over and continue showing Spain.