Originally posted by Kaminsky (Community Manager):

Attention Officers!

We are proud to finally be able to show off our collaboration with our friends over at Level80!

It's an in-depth interview with VOID talking about its history, the game, and much, much more.

You can read it here: https://80.lv/articles/ready-or-not-devs-on-the-game-s-mechanics-npc-ai-early-access-experience/

Below are snippets from the article. You can view the full interview using the link above. A “key takeaway” will also be available at the bottom of each section to provide a cliff note of important information.


Stirling, one of the co-founders of VOID Interactive, came up with the original idea for Ready or Not after being inspired by the Sydney Siege, a hostage crisis that occurred in Australia in 2014. As a fan of tactical first-person shooters, he wanted to create a game that would allow players to experience what it's like to be a SWAT officer responding to similar high-pressure situations.

Together, Stirling, Ryan, and another friend worked on a prototype for the game, which they initially called CODE 10. However, after a year of tinkering, they decided to scrap the project and start over. It was during this restart period that Ryan had the chance to encounter Julio, an executive at a food company where Ryan was providing IT Support.

Stirling, the young Australian, now serves as our COO, while Ryan, the young Kiwi, is our CTO. The executive who believed in the vision and supported the team is Julio, who is our CEO.

Julio was immediately intrigued by the vision for Ready or Not, as he had a personal connection to a mass shooting that occurred in San Ysidro, California in 1984. One of Julio's family members was working at a McDonald's restaurant during the shooting and was fortunate enough to survive by hiding in a small room at the back of the restaurant, and it was a SWAT sniper that ultimately took out the deranged gunman.
Over the years, Julio had become frustrated with the way that the media covered such tragic events and saw Ready or Not as an opportunity to create a digital experience that would allow players to actively participate in similar scenarios as SWAT officers.

-Key Takeaways-
- Void Interactive and Ready or Not were founded on the basis of providing accurate and realistic portrayals of SWAT law enforcement work.
- Voids founders foresaw Ready or Not being a passion project to show the hard work of law enforcement work, based on their experiences as well as real world tragedies.


The concept behind Utility AI is to mathematically model human behavior in a computer program using numbers, formulas, and response curves. The "human" we want to model is called an agent or simply an AI. Each agent in a world environment has a list of decisions (or what we call actions) they want to make. For every frame, we run through the list of actions and decide which one to pick and execute. That’s the core AI loop.

So how does the AI make those decisions? The same way we do! For example, when we go online to shop for something, we don’t just consider the price; we may also value things like brand loyalty, shipping rates, shipping times, review scores, whether they have customer support, and whether we can return or refund our purchase.

This score is then used to pick the highest-scoring action to execute (using another system called the Activity System), with a commitment time set so that the AI does not oscillate in its decision-making, acting indecisive from frame to frame. There is also a thing called Commit Interrupts, which is a list of names of actions that can interrupt the current action if it is being committed to, and they get evaluated every frame too. This gives us more control.

With a library of hundreds of considerations, using them and tweaking response curves is how we can get different "personality types" or behaviors out of our suspects and civilians. Some are more resistant to surrender than others, some are more eager to take cover, and some can be more suicidal if you don't de-escalate the situation quickly.

-Key Takeaways-
- Ready or Nots AI uses a complex system interpreting data from the environment to use when deciding the best course of action. This enables the devs to tweak the AI to simulate different behaviors across maps, as well as behaviors across individual AI based on type and environment stress factors.


Over the years, our research approach has evolved, and even today we have a dedicated channel on our private Discord server for a SWAT commander who provides valuable insights into the world of SWAT. In addition, we have consulted with members of different police and military services, and many members of our team have experience with firearms and tactical gear. We also conduct extensive online research, which involves studying firsthand and secondhand accounts from police and tactical units, using them as inspiration for our mechanics.

Our lead game designer believes that tactics are an art and not a science. While tactics, procedures, and movements can be scripted into well-planned procedures that should work 100% of the time, he acknowledges that even the best-laid plans can sometimes fail without a bit of luck. In a video game environment, a failed plan can be catastrophic to the player's sense of immersion. As a result, our job is to interpret real-life procedures into a format that works for a virtual game, breaking them down into smaller parts that can be assembled into an enjoyable experience for players. This is still a work in progress and may not be fully reflected in the current state of the game, but it is our goal for the full release.

-Key Takeaways-
- Ready or Not works with police advisors/consultants to help portray the scenarios the game offers in accurate/realistic detail.
- The game focuses on the art of tactics, how no plan survives first contact, and portray an experience where players will enjoy responding to the chaos and new factors that occur on entry.
- While current progress might not be as accurate as intended, it is the goal of the team to show what they have learned by full release to create a better product.


Our weapons are divided into types, including pistols, submachine guns, rifles, shotguns, and less lethal options. All of the weapons within these categories are quite similar in nature. We designed them this way to keep the game's focus on the player's tactics and teamwork, rather than how effective they are with their individual weapons. Therefore, the wide selection is left up to the player's preference and experience.
Although some criticized our weapons in the past for their similar appearance, we are now exploring a wider range of more unique and modern weapons for upcoming updates. The experience for the player is set by the sounds, animations, and gunplay, and they can choose the coolest-looking or best-feeling weapon for them to use.

-Key Takeaways-
- Weapons are designed with player enjoyment and tactics in mind. Unlike other games, RoN weapons are more or less similar intentionally, to reward focus on the squad level tactics rather than individual performance.
- More unique and modern weapons will be explored in future updates, as well as new sounds, animations, and gunplay.


By December 2021, we had already been working on Ready or Not for over 5 years. We were self-funded for a few years, but as we gained more clarity about the requirements for building such an ambitious game, we realized we needed to grow the team, and to do so we needed cash. We had a first round of additional cash infusion when we began to pre-sell a Supporter package of Ready or Not around mid-2019 through our own website.
As the pre-sales funds began to dry up, we had a short stint with a publisher in 2021 which was ended through a mutual agreement later in that same year. We had always resisted going into the Steam early access program too early, as we were afraid that bad reviews for a very rough and buggy game would hurt our chances of success in the future.

As such, we are incredibly grateful to Steam for giving us enough runway and development keys even though the game was not yet available for sale on Steam.
So, while the game was still not ready, we felt it was in a good enough state to finally launch it into early access on Steam on December 17, 2021. Being on Early Access has helped us generate the necessary additional funding to continue to grow the team and invest in our game without the need for a publisher. Our game launch on Steam Early Access was so successful that it has guaranteed that we have the resources to get to 1.0 full release on PC and even to eventually take it to other platforms.

We have received a lot of valuable feedback through Early Access (some more scathing than others), which has allowed us to identify and address issues with our AI system that we wouldn’t normally pick up on in our internal QA sessions. For example, players have pointed out instances where the AI was too aggressive, or unreasonably resisting surrender after repeated stun effects (flashbangs, tasers, pepper spray, etc.), which helped us fix and fine-tune their behavior. There are many instances like this, but I would be here all day if I talk about them all.

Community feedback is something that is always going to be part of our development as we continue to refine the game. It's not simply Reddit or Steam discussions – the exposure of the game is rather wide, so we may come across clips of people playing our game on Facebook, Twitch, and YouTube, and there we are able to see what people are saying about the game and what they're dissatisfied with the most.

We collect the most common complaints and make solving them one of the priorities for our upcoming updates. A common example would be how our suspect characters moved way too quickly during combat, which had become a huge issue that people weren't satisfied with, so we put some focus on crafting a new movement system for suspects to slow them down and keep their movements readable, as well as adding "surprise" animations to ensure that there's a grace period for players to understand what situation they're currently in.

Ready or Not has recently surpassed 3,200,000 lifetime unique users and we still maintain a 92% rating. To us, having more eyeballs means having more pressure to continue to deliver, but that is not necessarily linked to early access.

-Key Takeaways-

- Void is thankful for the support the community has given them, and are happy that the community has enabled them the funding to complete Ready or Not, as well as explore future releases on other platforms or consoles to better spread RoNs themes.
- Feedback is valuable for the process, whether it be concerns over the AI, environments, scenarios, etc., all feedback is appreciated and encouraged on multiple platforms, not just the Discords.
- One such example being future tweaks to suspect movement and reactions for betters to better engage and understand the AI thought process in scenarios.


The most important thing we have in front of us now is completing all the levels, content, and upgrades we have in store for 1.0. We continue to focus on gameplay, performance, and on creating immersive environments. While we will continue to maintain and improve Ready or Not beyond 1.0, we also plan to create additional features and levels to be offered as DLC.

We also are in the early stages of planning the Ready or Not expansion, which will take the same SWAT concept to another country, using their Special Response Teams and scenarios that are reflective of that locale. We are also now invested in other games through a few other teams in different game genres (more on that later).
We have also been seeing incredible demand to take RON to consoles and other platforms and hope to make announcements about that soon.

-Key Takeaways-
- The current focus for the team is to complete Ready or Not by the end of 2023. The devs plan to continue to overhaul existing mechanics, such as the SWAT AI, while also completing planned content (like new maps, weapons, etc.)
- Void is hoping to release Ready or Not to 1.0 by end of 2023, with plans to continue to support the game post full release with new content for the base game and future DLCs.