Door Kickers 2 - Task Force North
17 JANUARY - VULPE NEBUNA
The sequel to the critic and public-acclaimed Door Kickers moves the action to the Middle East and puts the player in control of military Special Operations Teams fighting an elusive Terrorist Network.
Gone are the SWAT shields and tazers, enter the beltfeds and frag grenades. Door Kickers 2 casts the player as leader of the eponymous Task Force, handling units such as the US Rangers and assets like drones to respond to threats, solve crises and hunt the enemy on his own turf.
Once the Tactics Phase starts, things are meatier and deadlier. Extraction and Insertion now become equally critical, but so does telling the bad guys from bystanders and innocents.
They say that great responsibility should actually come with greater power, so players can now take advantage of nighttime, darkness or even good old sneaking to surprise the enemy. New trooper classes, weapons, tools and gadgets open up the tactical options, but one thing does not change: You’ll live and you’ll die by your tactics.
And then you’ll hit Restart and try again.
To help with the challenge, Door Kickers 2 adds Cooperative Multiplayer to the existing mix of Single Player Missions and Campaign. And since you can never have too much content, the game comes with complete modding support, improved mission editor and partial source code access. Yes, we can; it’s our own custom built 3D engine. We’re cool, crazy, or most likely both.
(Special note for our fans and Doggy: Adversarial Multiplayer is still in the books but will make the subject of a separate announcement later this year)
[inthekillhouse.com]
Key points to Door Kickers 2 - Task Force North:
- Choose which unit to deploy for each mission and adjust your tactics accordingly Surgical Operations or Overwhelming Firepower - anything is possible.
- Use Night Vision, Drone reconnaissance and other realistic gadgets
- True freeform tactics taken to the next level: Turn off the lights and hide in the dark. Break windows and jump over ledges.
- Go fast to the target or slow and methodical. And if you make a mistake, adapt and overcome.
- Face new threats such as suicide bombers, booby traps and RPG launchers.
- Use new Tactical Abilities. Group your troopers for easier movement.Establish Rules of Engagement - you name it and … we’ll talk
- Lots of hush hush stuff we’ll announce along the way. And take that literally
Door Kickers 2 is expected to hit Early Access in Q4 2016 on Win/Mac/Linux, with Full Release on PC and handhelds coming later, aka “when they’re done”. All info and specifications subject to change. For more information keep in touch over at Facebook or Twitter, or drop us an email. We like that.
About Door Kickers: Door Kickers is a game about controlling Special Forces, drawing action plans for them and coordinating them during their tactical intervention. Released in October 2014, it was hailed as “Early Access done right” and currently holds an Overwhelmingly Positive Review Rating on Steam. It has sold over 250.000 units on all platforms combined, offers cross platform save compatibility and was named “Best Tactics Game of 2014” by RockPaperShotgun and “Runner-Up To Strategy Game of The Year 2015” by PocketTactics.
“Charge set”, my Alpha Team leader said.
Not knowing what lay in wait for us behind the door, I commanded, “Burn it” into the radio.
“Burning”, he replied. Sliding his finger into the pull ring of the ignition system, he pushed the pin in, turned it a quarter turn, and pulled.
The night was no longer silent as the sound of shredding timber filled the night. Windows shattered and pieces of glass fell to the ground. The walls around me shook. Where a door once stood, only smoke remained. Like water bursting forth from a dam, men flowed into the unknown. --- from “Violence of Action” by Marty Skovlund
The long awaited sequel to the hit tactics game Door Kickers, Task Force North brings you the best portrayal of modern Close Quarters Combat and Tactics in a video game. Coming at you in Early Access circa Q2 2020.
Door Kickers 2 is a top down strategy and tactics game about using intelligence assets and controlling Special Operation Units in daring raids to neutralize and capture terrorists in the fictional country of Nowheraki, Middle East.
True to the violent and dynamic nature of combat in the region, the game models deadly threats and technologies such as booby traps, suicide bombers, RPGs and concealed insurgents - while handing you new toys such as Light Machine Guns for suppressive fire, drone reconnaissance, night vision goggles and wall breaching charges.
Adding further to the roster of improvements, you can now choose the unit to deploy for any mission. The United States Army Rangers make for the initial deployment option, but soon we will reveal other - distinct but equally cool units. The choice will not be simply one of skins and weapons, but also come with distinct playing style and abilities we will reveal further down development road.
Quick Points:
*almost “any wall”
- Top Down view, optimized for tactical analysis
- Real Time gameplay with pause-at-will to analyse and change plans
- No turns, no hexes, no action points - just freeform planning
- Realistic but action packed
- Non-linear levels, multiple paths and break-any*-wall kinda freedom
- Multiple units to play with, each with their distinct playing style
- Weapon customization
- Destructible environment
- Single Player & Online Cooperative Multiplayer (2 players)
- Custom-built 3D engine, allowing for increased moddability
- Mission editor
Door Kickers 2: Task Force North is planned to release on Steam Early Access (Windows) in Q2 2020, with other OS versions coming later once development stabilizes. Further details to be released as we iron the damn game out.
Also, come to play the game at PAX East in late February 2020
The Flare Path endangers Rangers
Kicking arse, and doors, in Door Kickers 2
If days were centimetres the sequel to this site’s favourite tactics game of 2014 would be about this far away (I’m holding my hands out in front of me like a person illustrating the leg span of the largest giant huntsman spider ever recorded). Poke your spycam under yonder jump and you’ll spot an interview with Door Kickers 2’s designer, Dan Dimitrescu, plus a blow-by-blow account of my second attempt at “Why We Fight”, one of the 40 missions destined for the first Early Access build.
RPS: DK2 was announced back in 2016. Is the game’s protracted gestation a consequence of unforeseen problems, perfectionism, or feature creep?
Dan: The short answer is … a bit of everything … perfectionism indeed and feature creep in the design stage. In general, I’d advise any studio not to do a sequel to their own games, or not to do it immediately after the first game. You might be burned out on the theme and game style; and you’ll be too tempted to do it “the right way” this time.
With DK2, we’ve had that! In retrospect I think Door Kickers was “the perfect” balance of what we wanted to do, solutions we could actually implement and compromises that we needed to make as a startup. With the sequel, we wanted everything to be tops, and started designing that way, breaking things that were good enough and should have been maybe left alone. It’s no wonder easy solutions were not found to everything we wanted to do better. And we’re small and dynamic and can plan on the fly and on the short term … so the long term suffered. This in turn lead to lack of focus and made the team stall here and there along the way.
In conclusion, blame me. But, are we getting there now? Yes, and the game is great.
RPS: Has the pandemic had any impact on KillHouse and DK2?
Dan: Sure, it stopped us right in our tracks – and we were on a roll after pushing hard for the demo version at PAX EAST early this year, and showcasing it there!
We had a pretty solid national lockdown in place for the first wave of Covid, so we all went home and tried to make do. As gamers turned game developers, we had pretty capable home offices, so that was not an issue, but both the lead coder and myself also have kids running around the house. Kids that suffer because schools, daycare and parks are closed (and in the early days we didn’t go out much either, because we didn’t have any idea on how bad this thing is). Couple of months later we were able to take refuge in the office, but the rest of the team is still in WFH mode which is NOT optimal, but we’ve adapted better and right now we’re rolling pretty hard, home run style.
Also, we tend to work weird hours anyway, so, combining that with WFH, this leads to never being truly out of the office and the job, right?
As for actual Covid infections in the team, we’re quite small and we’ve had just one confirmed Covid case – a mild one; but had a number of scares with contacts that got it. We’ve been lucky about it, I think, though we also got suspiciously ill on the way back from the US back in March, and they didn’t test for this back then.
RPS: Why did you decide to abandon the sprites that acquitted themselves so well in the original DK?
Dan: Switching to a 3D engine was pretty natural after our experience with Door Kickers 1. We’ve always wanted to offer more – enemies, levels, playable units, weapons and so on – but the sprite engine meant every new ability (and associated animation) needs to re-rendered for all characters. Every new character meant a new sprite sheet and so on. Nothing was expanded easily and it was pretty bureaucratic and we hate that, in fact we want to be at the opposite end of that. Give maximum options and power to our ideas and to our users. A 3D engine allows that.
Also, we noticed some other indie developers like Epic Games being quite successful with their homebrew engines, so why not do that ourselves – while making something that suited our purposes better.
RPS: Has the switch to 3D brought any unexpected benefits?
Dan: Since we’ve started this so long ago, it’s hard for me to remember what came first – the engine, or the advances we designed the engine for? Thus, it’s hard to judge what was expected and what not.
Did we plan for wall breaching at project start? That’s one of the coolest things we have in the game. See that wall? Any wall (almost)! Blow it up – and blow the door behind it too. Windows? Blow them! Smash them with the buttstock and climb right in. Dodge that RPG and use the mousehole it spawns. It’s a whole new game because of this!
Its also a whole new game because it will allow us to easily create night-time scenarios, allow tricks like “cutting the lights out before going in” and in general do away with limitations and more with “valid ideas that the player might have”. We always thought Door Kickers should be about figuring out a plan, an idea, in your head, and easily making it real. We can now do that.
RPS: On the Steam page, there’s mention of unit types such as Rangers having distinct “playing styles and abilities” in addition to specific skins and equipment. How will this work exactly?
Dan: The Rangers are tuned towards fire and maneuver, suppression, explosions and basically going in guns blazing, with relatively large numbers of troops. Other units will lean more towards surgical firepower, precision and getting intel. You will also see a bit of cloak and dagger style action – and the thing is, we aim to let the player choose how he approaches the mission. For a “terrorist hideout” raid that starts at the door, firepower is probably the answer. But need to snatch a target in a populated area, with uncertain threats and concealed enemies? Decisions are tricky, maybe a smaller number of units would work better.
RPS: How much of DK’s AI code were you able to reuse in DK2?
Dan: We restarted from scratch, and with a new coder. Fresh start, fresh ideas, new engine too – and new challenges like using explosives (RPGs, grenades), dealing with suppressive fire (mostly not yet in the game) and dealing with wall breaching by the player. You still can’t see many of the features we have planned in the game, but the basis is already there and I hope you’ll agree the game AI is shaping to be challenging AND interesting to fight against.
RPS: Am I right in thinking that although most walls can be mouseholed with explosives, they can’t be penetrated by weapons like HMGs and large-calibre sniper rifles?
Dan: You are correct. We are looking mostly to model breaching as a player option – use the right tool and open a new avenue of approach, with pros and cons to it. We also model 40mm grenade launchers, we don’t factor their potential wall breaching capabilities that would come with specialist rounds. And its not just walls – you can also blow much of the scenery up, like fences – and in the future we plan to have tools like thermal torches for cutting out metal sheets and gaining entry, or maybe even deployable ladders to jump over.
Back to the original question – we do model a bit of potential overpenetration for (external) sniper support, so you might even see 50 cal sniper fire going through walls at some point. Similarly, we might model HMG destruction of cover objects in the future, though even now cover is not entirely perfect due to the prevalence of hand grenades, rocket launchers and the dynamic nature of the game. You need to move not stay hidden in cover, if you are to succeed.
RPS: In the press build my men always seem to prevail in melee situations. Have I just been lucky?
Dan: Hey, that is no press build, that’s just a limited demo we used for closed beta and hardware compatibility testing. Regarding melee, in the current implementation it is indeed just a technique your troopers use to gain an upper hand and a bit of separation when they get too close to a target. They just smack/shove people away if they encounter them in the forward quarter. They always get that upper hand but when they shove they don’t shoot, so they’re vulnerable in multi-threat environments.
I hate to make promises at this stage but the plan is to have different capabilities for other enemies or entities you encounter; This could get your troops locked in melee with an enemy and requiring outside help and presenting a challenge – do you send another trooper to help? Do you take a risky shot? Do you trust your luck and wait it out? Can you afford it?
The rule is that your troops are better than most and can handle everything 1v1 and 1v2 in gunfights, and 1v1 in melee contest, but you have to point them the right way. Force a trooper to look right and he might get jumped from the left, and then you have a problem. So, coming back to the current build, you only see one particular situation – what happens when your troopers get a bad guy close but on their own terms – they win! But the game will have more.
RPS: Did you consult any Subject Matter Experts during development?
Dan: We gleaned as much as possible from books and the internet. A couple of books come to mind. Task Force Black by Mark Urban helped us lay out the basic aims and setting of the game, even though the game world is a fictional Iraq-like Middle Eastern Country. Violence of Action by Marty Skovlund Jr. helped us flesh out what the Rangers experience should be. But we always apply our own view on what a cool / realistic / interesting game should be – as does any sane game developer. And we never stop reading. I’ve just finished Thank You for My Service by Mat Best, which is more Rangers stuff and very interesting as a personal memoir too. And I’ve jumped straight into Sid Meier’s book, which is as awesome as can be for a child of the 80’s turned game dev.
As for SMEs, we have and are in contact with a number of them since before DK1 times, and ask for advice and opinion when things happen. Now this may be about how a certain piece of weaponry, gear or tactic is used, or it may be advice on how to make the editor more usable for their training purposes
We’re lucky that Door Kickers has gathered a pool of Mil/LEO veterans that enjoy it and are happy to offer their thoughts and advice. Wish we had the time and ability to put all of that into the game, but we think we’ll deliver a pretty accurate representation of what small scale infantry combat is.
RPS: Do you think DK2 is sufficiently realistic to serve as a police/military training tool?
Dan: I’m not sure how realistic it could or should be given the top down perspective, and what level of realism would be expected from a training tool. We know it’s realistic enough for our needs as a game. But we’ve gauged interest with Door Kickers 1 as a “serious game”, and we’ve received countless reports and pictures from friends and customers that have used the game in some form to supplement training. Whether it was just used to capture footage or screenshots that would go in a presentation or briefing, or was used to ‘game’ live in front of a class / group of officers and discuss solutions to tactical challenges – it seemed to work. As a friend told us “Students don’t ask for a break anymore, they ask for another level”.
Now, where does Door Kickers 2 sit on the spectrum? We think its better than Door Kickers 1, but what concerns me is not whether it would be realistic enough or “more realistic”, but rather if we can make it more usable as a tool. Did we make map building simple enough for officers in a hurry? Can we provide debrief / AAR tools on top of the replay system, to help the teacher-student duo to work together?
We’ll see. We certainly have a solid basis for that kind of stuff.
RPS: Does the new engine mean camera mods are possible? Could we, for example, see first-person perspective replays at some point?
Dan: It is possible – we do have debug tools like that – but the assets are not optimized for that and it would look subpar, and sometimes we may use camera and geometry tricks to make the world more readable from the top down perspective, tricks that would seem weird from FP view.
Our philosophy is to pick our development battles carefully and try to win them decisively. DK2 aims to be the best game in its class, so whatever features we put in, they should look stellar.
RPS: If a studio interested in developing a WW2 Stalingrad title based on the DK2 engine approached you, would they be wasting their time?
Dan: We’d certainly welcome it as well as any mods that people want to do. My instinct is that Stalingrad should be a more visceral thing rather than the cerebral planning in Door Kickers, but we do play WW2 TBS-es, right? So DK2 engine should work too!
RPS: Are you still confident DK2 will be in the hands of Early Accessers by the end of the year?
Dan: Come hell or high water, we’ll release this November. We’re rolling very fast towards it now, so there’s just small question marks remaining for that version.
RPS: Thank you for your time.
