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Resistance and Liberation

Resistance and Liberation (RnL) is a fantastic mod/game with a long history. It's still around today, 18 years after its first release, albeit with a small, but dedicated community.
At its core, RnL is a WW2 infantry combat simulator. That does not say much though, because that would describe many WW2 shooters out there.

What makes RnL different is the unique mix of:

16 vs 16 matches
Levels that are large enough to allow lots of tactics, manouevring, sneaking, multiple frontlines, but not that large that there is lots of down-time, or confusion about who is where.
Ticket-based lives. Your lives are shared with the rest of the team. If you die a lot, you all suffer the consequences.
Long respawn times (30-50 seconds)
No ability to communicate with your team while you're dead
Asymetrical gameplay that revolves around capturing/defending objectives with an ever-moving frontline
Asymetrical load-outs: German riflemen only get a k98k. No pistol. You need to also base your tactics around your equipment, and the equipment of the rest of your squad.
Slower gameplay than most other games at the time. Every shot, from every weapon, can kill an enemy (or a friend). Camping is powerful, but you need to be active to win the game.

To the best of my knowledge, RnL was also the very first game to introduce several unique, awesome features:

Local voice communication. There is no global chat (kind of). You communicate with your team through 3D voice. If you move too far away, you can no longer hear your friends. Or enemies. Yeah, enemies can hear you too. It's amazing!
Free-aim, in several ways: In the first two, out of three, different stances (hip, loose sights, shouldered sights), you can move your weapon quite freely without moving the camera. Only when you reach a certain threshold will your view also move.


[This is a screenshot of Resistance and Liberation, the source mod. Because just look at it - it's so beautiful..]

Now, before I can say what I worked on, I need to mention the RnL timeline.
RnL was originally developed as a mod based on the Half Life 2: DeathMatch version of the Source engine. Over a period of 5 years, it would receive 10 major patches before development died down for a variety of reasons.
5 years later, a new team emerged, comprised of some veterans from the old team and some new blood, looking to port the game as a stand-alone on Unreal Engine 4.
This is where I joined, after having played the mod for 10 years and loving it deeply.

For a while, I was the only C++ programmer. And while another teammember did objective/spawn logic in Blueprints, I focused on the gun-play and player movement.
I added in the gun mechanics (free-aim, stances, procedural sway and recoil, etc) as well as player movement mechanics (stances, head bobbing, fatigue, supression, etc).

Sadly, after around a year, I had to quit working on the game because of non-compete with my current employer.
Shortly after this, the rest of the RnL dev team merged with Cornered Rat Software (creators of WW2 online), and the game was renamed to "World War II Online: Chokepoint".

I wrote a paper, analyzing the level design of one of my favourite levels in the mod.
And I also wrote a guide on how to get into the mod.

If it wasn't abundantly clear yet: I really like RnL..


[This video was taken around the time I left the RnL dev team. Here, the game already got renamed to WWIIOnline: Chokepoint, but the gameplay and graphics are basically what we had when I left. It shows footage from one of the internal playtests.]