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This page contains some brief information about the various games I've worked on. I don't really go into too much detail regarding what these games were about - the included pictures and trailers give enough information on that. Instead, I concentrated on describing my involvement and experiences with these projects, as well as my personal feelings about the finished products. 

Where available, I've embedded  trailers (and, where no trailer was to be found, other videos). Just to be absolutely clear, I do not claim credit for creating these videos - I merely found them on YouTube and embedded them here.

The games are listed in reverse chronological order, with the newest games at the top. So, if you want to take a trip through my entire career, you'll want to scroll down to the bottom. On the other hand, if you just wanna see what I've done recently - it's right here below.

The Games List
 
Unannounced Project

Platform & genre: TBA
Game website:
TBA
My role:
Freelance consultant

I haven't been bored since I left City Interactive. Currently, I'm working as a consultant with Maze Emerging Markets. Most of the consulting work is actually on the business-side, so it's non-game-specific. In one case, however, I'm advising a company specifically with the development of a game. At this stage, I cannot provide any information on this project.

Graphics material: Nothing (yet).

 
Alien Fear (City Interactive, TBA)

Platform & genre: X360/PS3/PC; FPS
Game website:
not available
My role:
Interim producer, design consultant & scriptwriter

While working on Combat Wings, I also spent some time in City Interactive's Bydgoszcz office, playing a support role on the Alien Fear project. Initially, it had been proposed that I would support the Bydgoszcz team a bit, and then after Combat Wings was done, I would continue working at City in the Bydgoszcz office. I wasn't at all certain I would like to stick around after Combat Wings was done (this was the project I came for), but sure, I could work with the Bydgoszcz team and see how things were going, right?

Ultimately, we parted ways before Combat Wings was done (see Dogfight 1942 below). In the meantime, however, I did contribute to Alien Fear, including serving for a few months as a kind of interim producer, while the company was recruiting a studio head for Bydgoszcz. My main contribution, though, was writing the game's script - though don't expect any fireworks, because this is really a very straight-forward arcade FPS :).

Alien Fear is still in development, so I don't know yet how the game will turn out in the end. 

Graphics material: Nothing (yet).

 
Dogfight 1942 (City Interactive, TBA)

Platform & genre: X360/PS3/PC; air combat game
Game website:
http://dogfight1942.com/en
My role:
Creative director

Ah, Combat Wings: The Great Battles of WWII. No, wait, just Combat Wings. No, wait, it's Dogfight 1942. Hopefully, it won't change titles again before it's done :).

I'd already described the Nintendo Wii version of the project (also called Combat Wings: The Great Battles of WWII), down below - I got involved with that as a freelancer, back in 2009. Eventually, in late 2010, City Interactive finally decided to go ahead with... ahem, a port of the Wii game to the X360, PS3 and PC.

Of course, you can't really port a Wii game to these consoles, you have to make virtually everything from scratch, and it has to be at a much higher level of quality. There was concern that the Katowice team, even with me providing them support as a freelance consultant, could not handle the project - they had too little experience with air combat, the Wii version was the only game they'd done in that field. For this reason, I was offered the post of creative director, which I very happily accepted - it was a great opportunity, and as I've described below, I was feeling pretty exhausted working at Vivid Games.

I started on the project in January 2011, and spent most of the next year and a half shuttling back and forth between Bydgoszcz (where City had also set up a studio - by a coincidence, almost at the same time) and Katowice. I rewrote most of the game's design documentation, reworked the mission designs, rewrote the script, and watched over the mission design team as they implemented everything. I also travelled throughout the world to present the game to the press.

Everyone was happy with the direction the project was taking, but the company was also unhappy with the speed of the project. Technically, the game's development was very rapid, as far as building an air combat game from scratch on a third-party game engine not suited to air combat games is concerned. However, the company's management had unrealistic expectations about how much time was needed, and from about May 2011 onwards, they were constantly upset and disappointed with the game's progress. Eventually, this resulted in the two heads of the Katowice studio being fired, and the studio's lead programmer stepping up to the plate.

By this time, things had gotten seriously problematic. 2012 was starting, the total costs the project had run up to this point were already considered excessive - and the absolute last launch window was approaching. The game had to be out in Q1 2012. It goes without saying, this deadline was also missed - unsurprisingly, dismissing the studio heads doesn't actually speed up production, and the game engine's inherent problems that needed to be resolved were still there. When the Q1 deadline came and went, with Konami's Birds of Steel (2012) out on the market, the distributors started pulling out. At this point, the decision was made to turn the game into a digital distribution product, for the Xbox Live Arcade, the PSN, and Steam on the PC. Initially, this was to entail just a few changes (at this point, the title changed to just plain Combat Wings), and this was also the point when the company decided I was no longer needed on the project - after all, converting the game to digital distribution was largely a technical affair (it's true, I didn't have much to do on Combat Wings at this point).

I don't know the rest of the story. What I do know is that a few weeks after I left, the management decided that the game needed more in-depth changes to fit the arcade market. It was rebranded as Dogfight 1942, and while the core of the game, including just about all the missions, remained unchanged, some major gameplay changes were made. For example, where previously I'd tried to keep the visuals as HUD-free as possible, from what I've seen recently, the game now displays just about everything on HUD. You can't really say that my vision was better or worse than the current one - it's simply different. Mine was appropriate for a big, boxed distribution title, while the arcade approach is appropriate for the digitally distributed version now shaping up.

I'm waiting eagerly to see Dogfight 1942 - not just because I'd like to finally see how much of my baby is still in there, but also because I just plain want the Katowice studio to release a great game and have a big success on their hands. If I've written a bit more about this project than usual, and if I've presented some things that normally would be better left hidden behind the curtain, it's not because I want to spoil things for them. I loved working with the whole team in Katowice. If anything, I want to defend them - and myself. I was dismissed from the project before it was completed, and every company I work with in the future will ask me exactly why that happened. The creative director is dismissed, and the game suddenly changes direction? Surely, the creative director must have screwed up, right? No. From all the feedback I had during this time, the company was happy with my vision of the game, as long as the game was going to be released in retail. However, once there was no possibility of a retail release - naturally, the game needed to change.

We parted on good terms, and a lot of people in the company were kinda spooked when, telling them that I'd been dismissed, I would go on to explain that that this was actually a pretty reasonable decision. Yes, I do think so - at that point, I was simply no longer needed for the project. But I do need to keep the record straight, if only for my own good.

Graphics material: 'Adrenaline' trailer (I assume there is going to be another, official game trailer before it's all done). This trailer was originally released with the Combat Wings logo, but I'm showing the Dogfight 1942 version here - you can check out the old Combat Wings version here, if you want, but there isn't much difference.

Additional graphics material: 'Famous planes' game trailer - again, I'm using the current Dogfight 1942 version, but if you want to see how it looked with the Combat Wings title, check it out here.

Additional graphics material: GameReactorTV's interview with me, the creative director. This was at E3 2011, back when the game was still called Combat Wings: The Great Battles of WWII. This was the first day of E3 presentations, the first camera interview I had done for Combat Wings, and I believe the second I'd ever done in my life, so I was a bit flustered. In the days and weeks ahead, I got to the point where I would be able to talk coherently about the game even if someone woke me up at 0200 in the morning, but there haven't been any more published interviews with me.

Additional graphics material: GameReactorTV's interview with Łukasz Hacura - at the time (Gamescom 2011), the lead programmer on Combat Wings: The Great Battles of WWII. Since then, Łukasz's role has changed (after the previous studio heads were removed from the company). He is now the head of City's Katowice studio and the executive producer for Comb... ahem, Dogfight 1942.

Additional graphics material: And finally, some gameplay footage - also recorded at Gamescom 2011.

 
Murder in Venice (City Interactive, 2011)

Platform & genre: DS, puzzle-adventure game
Game website:
not available
My role:
Freelance writer / translator

The final title I worked on for City Interactive in the capacity of a freelancer - the project was actually in its final stages when City made the offer to give me the creative director role on the upcoming Combat Wings for the X360/PS3/PC (which eventually became Dogfight 1942 - see above). So, while I did just about all my work on this project as a freelancer, it was published when I was already back at City and working directly with the Katowice team.

Like Vampire Moon (see below), Murder in Venice was essentially a hidden object game, but it tried to be more than that, with a few mini-games to make things more interesting. So, in a way, it was a puzzle-adventure game - the last, in fact, of its kind developed at City. The DS team had already been cut down to a minimum - the rest had gone through a significant reduction (in plain English: almost ten people, roughly a quarter of the team, were fired) and transferred to Combat Wings. The market for Nintendo DS titles was getting smaller, and there were no plans yet for any 3DS titles. So this, along with a couple of non-story-based puzzle games (which I did not work on), was the end of the line for DS development at City.

My role on Murder in Venice was just like on Vampire Moon - I proofread the Polish texts, then translated them into English and polished them until they shone.

Murder in Venice did fairly poorly in reviews, but it's an interesting kind of failure. The game is praised for its story, dialogues and presentation, but criticised for insufficient variety in gameplay (ultimately, it is mainly a hidden object game). In other words, had there been a bigger budget for this title, so that it could have as much variety in mini-games as Tree of Life, City's final DS adventure game would probably have also been the best one. As things were, it just couldn't reach that level.

Graphics material: Original game trailer.

 
Chronicles of Mystery: The Secret Tree of Life (City Interactive, 2011)

Platform & genre: DS, puzzle-adventure game
Game website:
not available
My role:
Freelance writer / translator

Yes, City Interactive does a lousy job with titles. For me, it's that "secret" bit that really does it. I mean, Chronicles of Mystery is not a good series title. It's totally generic and non-descriptive. But you get used to it. As for the game's title, The Tree of Life would be perfectly fine - that had been the title of the original PC game that we were adapting to the DS. I don't know what caused the change. Did they just want to avoid confusion with the PC version? Or maybe some marketing guy found that puzzle games with the word "secret" in the title sell better? Whatever the case may be, we ended up with the ridiculous The Secret Tree of Life.

Don't let the title fool you, though. Tree of Life was actually a really nice game - one of the best done by the Katowice team. It was the third (or fourth, if you count Vampire Moon - see below) puzzle/adventure game they had done for the Nintendo DS, and the team had really gotten good at them. The first of these games (and the only one I did not work on) had been Chronicles of Mystery: Curse of the Ancient Temple (2009). Working on a sequel, the team not only had a lot of the groundwork already laid down, but also could look back to the reviews of the first game to see how they could improve the sequel. And of course, since both Chronicles of Mystery games had been adaptations of full-scale PC adventure titles, graphical assets were plentiful and in good quality.

There had been several issues with Curse of the Ancient Temple that needed fixing. More logical puzzles. More diverse mini-games. A plot that actually ends. And finally - this is where I came in - natural-sounding dialogues. I helped with the Polish drafts, reviewing the plot and pointing out where things didn't make sense, and then I took care of the translation. I don't remember if I actually translated the entire script - I think we may have gotten an external service to do the first draft, which I then proceeded to tear apart and rebuild into something good. In any case, at the end of the day, the game did well in reviews, and was actually praised for good dialogues - mission accomplished!

Chronicles of Mystery: The Secret Tree of Life has the distinction of having (so far) the highest Metacritic score of any City Interactive titles - 78%. I've never been convinced that Metacritic is especially representative, as a lot depends on how many reviews a given game got (and who wrote them - whether it was a site that actually counts for anything or not), but it's still a nice distiction.

Graphics material: Original game trailer.

 
Vampire Moon: The Mystery of the Hidden Sun (City Interactive, 2010)

Platform & genre: DS, hidden object game
Game website:
not available
My role:
Freelance writer / translator

Vampire Moon was another DS title I worked on with City Interactive's Katowice team as a freelancer, while employed full-time at Vivid Games. The game's development actually started a little later than Tree of Life (see above), but it was a somewhat simpler concept, so the game was finished and published sooner.

Where Tree of Life featured occasional hidden object puzzles, Vampire Moon was at its heart purely a hidden object game, with only one or two other kinds of mini-games. At the same time, its plot was rich enough that it still deserved to be called an adventure game.

In this case, we did not bother with any external translations, and I was responsible for basically every word written in English - I'd be given Polish drafts, where I would provide feedback on any plot issues as well, and then I would translate them into English.

Graphics material: Original game trailer.

 
Jewels of Tropical Lost Island (City Interactive, 2010)

Platform & genre: DS, puzzle game
Game website:
not available
My role:
Freelance writer / translator

While working at Vivid Games, I also continued to freelance as a writer/translator for City Interactive. Of course, the idea was never to exclusively work for City, but having a full-time already, I didn't put much effort into looking for other clients. You may find yourself wondering, how could I combine the pressures of full-time work as a producer (a job that hardly ever limits itself to eight hours a day) with the work of an outsourcer?

In truth, very badly. There were days when I would get up at 0600, work for a couple of hours on City stuff, eat breakfast, get to the Vivid office about 1000, go home around 1900, and depending on how much there was to do - I would sometimes also spend part of the evening working on more City stuff. For a couple of months, this was more frequently the rule rather than the exception. I don't think I would have done this if I didn't have to - unfortunately, what I found was that even a relatively well-paid (by our industry's standards) job as a producer does not pay well enough that you can cope with all the expenses of daily life. Things kept piling up - the move to Bydgoszcz, which came with an increase in apartment rental feels, various home expenses (is it me, or is there always furniture and appliances that urgently need to be bought?), then my wife's illness along with an endless list of medications to buy, and finally, with our daughter came the need to buy infinite amounts of diapers and very expensive hypoallergic formula milk. All in all, I would have needed to earn about 1/5th more to break even every month. So, yeah, I needed the outsource work.

Getting back to the project. With Jewels of Tropical Lost Island (yes, an awful name - it's as if someone checked what words show up most frequently in puzzle game titles and combined them all), I continued my cooperation with City's Katowice team. This time, I took care of all the translations from Polish into English. This was a rinse-lather-repeat process - the Katowice team for the most part felt too uncomfortable with English to make changes directly into the translated texts, so any time they wanted to change something, they would edit the Polish script and send it to me for translation.

Jewels didn't have much of a script, of course - it was a puzzle game, and the story was just there to provide a backdrop. As I said, I needed the money - so I was almost disappointed with this one :).

Graphics material: Original game trailer.

 
Word Explorer (Vivid Games, TBA)

Platform & genre: iPhone/iPad; word game
Game website:
not available
My role:
Producer

My work at Vivid Games started with two projects - one was Speedball 2 (see below), and the other was Word Explorer. While Speedball 2 was a port of an existing title, Word Explorer is something else entirely: a completely new game, and there really aren't any similar games. Either it's a new game genre, or it's simply a non-generic game. And we at Vivid Games weren't responsible for the design - that was, once again, all up to Jon Hare.

So, I worked on Word Explorer from March 2010 all the way until the end of the year. Did I feel guilty about leaving the project mid-stride? In this case, no. Because no one could realistically tell when the project would be finished. It was a small project, one programmer, one graphics artist, a quarter of a producer (since I was working on other projects at the same time), and one tester who doubled as a designer. It wasn't, therefore, burning a lot of money, and Jon could take the time to tweak the game, experiment, and indeed - make sudden and complete changes of direction in various aspects of the game. As of July 2012, there is still no set release date for the game.

I can't say just about anything about what Word Explorer actually is - from what I can see, there was one hands-on in the press back around the time when I had just left, and nothing else since. As far as I know, the game may be completely different now. In all likelihood, when the game finally does come out, I won't be listed in the credits (and rightly so - I spent ten months with Word Explorer, while the producer who took over would be working with it for at least a year and a half). The game that was shaping up while I was still at Vivid Games was very promising - and knowing Jon, the end result is going to be even more fun. But I don't regret leaving in the middle of the project: working two and a half years on an iPhone game would have been a tad too much for me...

Graphics material: None (yet).

 
Speedball 2 Evolution (Vivid Games, 2011)

Platform & genre: iPhone/iPad; sports game
Game website:
not available
My role:
Producer

Ah, Speedball 2. Definitely one of the best titles I worked on in my career so far, and especially enjoyable because I had many fond memories of playing the original Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe (1990) on the Amiga, back in the early 1990s.

Speedball was one of the two projects I was given immediately upon starting work at Vivid Games - that's March 2010. The company got the project thanks to Jon Hare, who knew the guys from The Bitmap Brothers, and had been looking for a company that could port their games to the iPhone. It was a fascinating experience working with him, but ultimately, it has to be said - we just weren't prepared for it. I think we went into the project with completely the wrong mindset, without realising what this would actually entail.

Let me put it this way - initially, what was proposed by Vivid Games was almost a straight conversion of the original game. There would be some additional contents (new arenas, new teams), but everything else would be the same. We'd take the original graphics and simply upscale them, retouch here and there. We'd use the original user interface, simply changing it from joystick-driven to touch control. And we measured the length of the project by how long we expected such a straight port to take - three, four months maximum.

We did just that, but as we got deeper and deeper into the project, it became evident that Jon was expecting much more than that - thankfully! I mean, only after having ported the original user interface, we came to realise how awful it was. Seriously, even back when Speedball 2 originally came out on the Amiga, it was an awful interface. Why not use a mouse on the Amiga? Why force the player to cycle through buttons? Never mind that - more to the point, even though the iPhone (not to mention the iPad) had a higher resolution than the Amiga, the screen was several times smaller. Things had to be upscaled to be readable and selectable (you can't select 2x2 pixels with your finger!), and when you started upscaling, things got crowded very quickly.

We ended up making more and more changes to the menus, and eventually ended up with something completely new and different. It drove everyone insane, because while making these changes, we still kept on trying to finish the game quickly. The team (and the company management) was used to working on games for external parties who demanded that a schedule be kept. So, we'd extend the schedule by a month or two at a time... and what do programmers do when working to a tight deadline? They make hacks. Somewhere around October, we finally were getting pretty happy about the menus, but each subsequent change was taking more time. Even small tweaks like centering a bit of writing on-screen was going wrong. One of the programmers finally got so fed up that she quit - a good programmer, who simply got too frustrated.

In the meantime, of course, the same thing was happening (but more successfully) with the gameplay. And then there was the multiplayer - it took two separate attempts, and months of work to get it working smoothly.

All in all, Speedball 2 was a nightmarish project, but one which I look back upon very fondly. There was a lot of difficulties. A lot of exhausting weekends at work - sticking to the classic division of labour, I didn't come into the office for the entire weekend. I'd usually just come in around 14-15, bringing in a home-cooked meal for the team, which I found was much more appreciated than my presence for the entire day :).

If we were to approach this project again with the experience we'd gathered, I think we could easily get the project done in about half a year, nine months at the most, and with very little frustration. But sometimes, you just don't know what you're getting into.

Speedball 2 is also the subject of a particular regret of mine: because I was urgently needed on Combat Wings at City Interactive, I left Vivid Games in a bit of a hurry. Consequently, while Speedball 2 was essentially finished as I was leaving, it wasn't completely done, and I never got to celebrate with the team when we finally got the game onto the Appstore.

Graphics material: Original game trailer.

Additional graphics material: Original game teaser - released a couple of months before the game.

 
iRudolph (Freenet Group, 2010)

Platform & genre: iPhone/iPad, casual action game
Game website:
not available
My role:
Producer

Don't let that 'Freenet Group' bit fool you. iRudolph was a project we did at Vivid Games - it's just that the project was developed for Freenet Group. Or actually, Freenet Group outsourced the project to a German game developer who in turn outsourced the project to us.

iRudolph was actually the very last project I developed at Vivid Games as a producer, but it was the second of the titles I produced to be published, because it was so darned short.

iRudolph holds a numer of questionable achievements and records in my career:

  • The shortest project I'd ever worked on - six weeks (which was still two weeks over schedule!).
  • Percentage-wise, the most crunch I'd ever done on one project. Late evenings, very late evenings, and a couple of all-night sessions.
  • The most convoluted workflow. Freenet supplies the graphics and the design doc; they pass them on in German to their contractor, who in turn passes them to us - sometimes translated, sometimes we needed to get them translated ourselves. We pass the game to the German contractor for review, who passes the game to Freenet for review. They pass the feedback back to the German contractor, he passes it on to us.
  • The least understanding publisher. I assume this was partially caused by the fact that we had that German contractor on the communication line between us, but the general result is that they kept demanding that we stick to our deadlines, while continually failing to supply promised materials on promised dates. It was a nightmare.

I hated iRudolph with a passion I'd never had for any other project. At the end, I hated the very idea of reindeers. A nearby store was running a Christmas promotion, selling Christmas-themed toilet paper - yes, decorated with reindeers. To be brutally frank, I took great pleasure in wiping my, hmm, lower back with a reindeer.

Also... final crunch. It's early, early morning - we'd sat all night in the office finishing up. By the way, the Vivid Games office overlooks one of the most representative streets in Bydgoszcz. So, I look outside the window at around 0600, and I start swearing. During the time that we had worked away, city services had somehow managed to decorate the lamp posts all along the street with Christmas lights. I don't think they included reindeers (they're not really a popular Christmas decoration in Poland) - but just Santa's sled was enough for me...

Incidentally, at the end of the project, I looked at the original timeline, compared it to the end result, and found that, according to the original timeline, we got the last of the design docs several days after the original beta, and the last of the graphics a day after the original completion date. Since the last design doc we got was incomplete, technically we never actually received a complete design doc.

It was this project that made me decide that enough is enough: everyone at Vivid Games was a ton of fun to work with, the studio atmosphere was great, but I was done. I had to find an alternative, or I would reach a mental breakdown in a couple of months. When you were juggling three or four iPhone projects at once, it only takes one iRudolph to drive you over the edge.

Graphics material: A pair of screenshots (there was no trailer).

 
Alien Puzzle Adventure (Vivid Games, 2011)

Platform & genre: DSi, arcade puzzle game
Game website:
not available
My role:
Producer

The fourth title I was given at Vivid Games, the third to be published - already after I had left the company. This was the second of a couple of 'almost-finished' titles (the other being Shoot To Kill, described below) that I was given to bring to completion together with Jon Hare. The title had quite a lengthy history - originally conceived as an iPhone game, it had already been published as Electro Hunter (2009). Then work begun on a port for the Nintendo DS, under the name of Alien Blobs. This port was never published, because... well, because it couldn't be - finding a publisher for a DS title was getting pretty hard by this point in time. Finally, with Jon Hare working to improve the game, Mastertronic agreed to publish the game, but as a DSi title.

When I started on the project, still in my first month at Vivid, the game was already fully functioning on the DS. It needed a lot of polishing, and it needed to be modified to fit the requirements for the DSi. Shouldn't take more than a month or two, right? As it turned out, the game wasn't completed until half a year later (and it didn't get published until early 2011). The polishing turned into a major rework of some of the game's concepts, mechanics, and so on. On the other hand, thanks to some hardcore, dedicated testers (the lead tester for the project was one of the finest I'd met in the industry), we were able to clear all the technical hurdles and pass Nintendo's certification on first attempt. Go ahead, ask around - see how often that happens :).

One of the fun things we did with this game was twist its story around. Originally, the story was pretty typical - strange alien creatures attack Earth, the heroine's father is kidnapped by the aliens, so she battles through the world and eventually travels to the alien homeworld to rescue him. Touching... not really. Boring. After we were finished, the story went like this: strange alien creatures attack the Earth. A scientist equips the heroine with the weapons needed to defeat them. She battles across the world, travels to the alien homeworld, beats them. So far, same as before. At the end of the story, however, it is revealed (something that's hinted all along) that in fact, it was that noble scientist that actually brought the aliens down on Earth. It's a fun, humorous twist that takes the story from cliché to at least 'mildly amusing'.

There's one other interesting bit to add about this one. When submitting a game to Nintendo, naturally you must submit a design doc. Guess what? The only design doc written for this game was back when it was starting out as Electro Hunter on the iPhone. Totally different mechanics, diferent UI, different everything. Since then, the project evolved gradually, through feedback, implementation, and more feedback. So, right before initial submission, I had two days to essentially manufacture a brand new design doc that would fit the current game :). 

Graphics material: Original game trailer.

 
Shoot To Kill (Vivid Games, 2010)

Platform & genre: iPhone/iPad, arcade shooter
Game website:
not available
My role:
Producer

Chronologically, this was actually the third project I was given at Vivid Games, after Word Explorer and Speedball - but it's the first to be completed and published. In truth, the game seemed pretty close to finished already when I was given the project (previously, it had been worked on by another producer). However, the company asked Jon Hare (of Cannon Fodder fame) - at the time, we were working with him on Word Explorer and Speedball, so it was an obvious move to let him provide some creative direction for a couple of other projects we were working on. Jon Hare provided a lot of feedback on how to improve the game, and it wasn't a one-sided process - there were several brainstorming sessions where the entire project team came up with more ideas, to be vetted by Jon.

About a month into the project, my boss told me I should revise the credits to list myself as the producer. I hadn't wanted to do this of my own initiative, because it didn't feel right - as I said, I thought originally we'd just polish the title a little. Still, I obeyed. A few months later, I could see that this was well justified - the changes we'd introduced were so major that yes, I could justifiably call myself the producer. We had reworked a lot of the game mechanics, overhauled the interface, and added a fair amount of extra content, including a semblance of a story (just a little, to provide a backdrop; the game didn't need much, after all).

One thing you may wonder, how did a hardcore Catholic feel about working on a game where the lead character is standing in the middle of a pentagram, fighting hordes of demons? Usually, this kind of thing is highly questionable to Christians of all denominations. For example, even today, after almost twenty years, if you hear anyone in the Christian press talking about Doom (1993), they'll be saying that this game promoted demon worship. The same charge would presumably be laid on Shoot To Kill, right?

Nonsense. Killing demons is not the same as worshipping them. Could that possibly be more obvious? Yes, Shoot To Kill contains a lot of hellish imagery (needless to say, Doom had even more). Then again, so did Fra Angelico's Day of Judgement - and Fra Angelico (literally, the Angelic Brother - it wasn't his name, it was what people called him) is considered to this day to be one of the greatest, deepest and most pious of religious painters. I cannot possibly compare an iPhone game to Fra Angelico's marvellous paintings and murals, but the point is - there's nothing inherently wrong with portraying hell, the devil and other demons. It all depends on the context, and in this case, the context is clear - we don't like them.

Graphics material: Original game trailer.

 
Ski Jumping 2011, Championship Racing 2010, Speedway 2010 (Vivid Games, 2010)

Platform & genre: iPhone & mobile, sports
Game website:
not available
My role:
Translation & proofreading

Having joined Vivid Games in March 2010, I mainly worked as a producer, leading development teams for a number of titles, described above. However, during my time at Vivid, I occasionally also did bits of writing-related work on other small titles. Specifically, Ski Jumping 2011, Championship Racing 2010, and Speedway 2010.

For each of these three projects, I basically had a look at the localisation kit, I proofread the texts that had already been translated into English (a lot of the text came straight from the previous year's edition in each case, or in the case of Championship Racing 2010, from Speedway 2010), and I translated the additional texts. I don't think any of these took more than about a day's work: they're simple sports titles, with no story, relatively few modes, and... well, all of these games were designed to be played on ordinary mobile phones, with iPhone ports being done afterwards. So, there just wasn't that much text to speak of.

Graphics material: Original game trailers.

 
Combat Wings: The Great Battles of WWII (City Interactive, TBA?)

Platform & genre: Nintendo Wii, air combat game
Game website:
not available
My role:
Freelance writer and design consultant

This project is a little hard to place chronologically. On the one hand, my involvement started in 2009, and the overwhelming bulk of my work was done before March 2010. For the rest of the game's development, which ended in mid-2010, I only provided additional feedback to the team. But... the game was not published in 2010, or in 2011. It may be finally published in 2012 - or it may never be. Having a complete Wii version, the company found that there was no longer a market for it - and the only way they could publish it would be if there was a simultaneous release for other platforms, the X360, PS3 and PC.

My involvement with the other versions of the game was much bigger, and is described above, under Dogfight 1942. What is relevant here is that as late as 2011, during work on what eventually became Dogfight 1942, we revisited the Wii version, and implemented some pretty extensive improvements.

So what did I actually do on Combat Wings Wii? Working as an external contractor, I wrote the dialogue script, planned out in detail all the missions, and even spent a little time actually implementing them in the game. I was working with some basic outlines as a starting point, so the overall shape of each mission, not to mention the overall scope of the game, was not my responsibility: I filled out the details, turned placeholder dialogues into the real thing, and added more dialogues where there was none. As a consultant, I also provided extensive feedback regarding the gameplay.

Graphics material: Original game trailer.

Additional graphics material: 2010 Gamescom presentation recorded by the Polish gaming news website www.gram.pl (Polish language only).

 
Crime Lab: Body of Evidence (City Interactive, 2010)

Platform & genre: DS, puzzle-adventure
Game website:
not available
My role:
Freelance writer / translator

Another project where I worked as an outsourcer for City Interactive - this time however, not with their Warsaw-based HQ, but instead with the subsidiary studio in Katowice. The Katowice studio worked on Nintendo DS titles - so, this was to be my first console project since the cancelled The Roots back in 2005. We got along well, and we'd work together on many projects afterwards.

My role on the project wasn't a big one - essentially, I was fixing the script. The work process was such that the script was first written in Polish, then translated into English by an external company. So, rather than translating, my role was to help polish the Polish script, and then take a look at the English script once it had been translated.

I didn't particularly want to translate the whole thing. However, when the translation came back, it was horrible. Stiff, stilted dialogues, inappropriate words, everything. In short, it suffered from all the problems that City's previous PC-based adventure games had (and Crime Lab was in fact a port of one such title - Art of Murder: Cards of Destiny). I happened to be down in Katowice at this time, looking at the new Combat Wings (see above). Deadlines were coming up very fast, so I offered to take the translation back to the hotel and fix it overnight. As it turned out, it was actually all done by 3AM - not bad!

When the game was released (which took an infernally long time - it was done in February, and wasn't published until November; blame Nintendo's approval process...), there wasn't much praise for the writing. And that was ok, we weren't really expecting it. But what was extremely gratifying was that, for the first time, the reviews didn't complain about bad writing.

Graphics material: Original game trailer.

 
Terrorist Takedown 3 (City Interactive, 2010)

Platform & genre: PC, first-person shooter
Game website:
not available
My role:
Freelance writer

While working on my own projects, I continued to maintain a tenuous relationship with City Interactive, earning a living as a writer. On most such outsourcing efforts, I'd be polishing a script, but in the case of Terrorist Takedown 3, I wrote the entire thing. This was one of the very last 'value' shooters City Interactive would make, the company was already transitioning to big budget console productions.

I wrote the script literally in a couple of days, and then had another couple of days to polish it. This is one of the rare cases where I have never actually seen the game that resulted from my work. I assume that even my 'modest' script ultimately had to be cut down to size by the team working on the project, but I just don't know. You can't really tell from the trailer, in any case.

Graphics material: Original game trailer.

 
Race-Train and Knights over the Atlantic (unfinished personal projects; 2008-2009)

Having left City Interactive, I begun working on a pair of projects of my own. Neither of these came to fruition at the time, though I still hope to return to them at some point in the future. There are no visual materials for these, since they never got beyond the stage of concepts. Business-wise, things never came together - back in 2008, I hadn't the faintest idea of how one would go about getting venture capital, so the idea was to find a publisher who would be interested. As it were, to find a publisher, you need to be able to show something. To show something, you need to produce something. To produce something, you need money. To get money, you need a publisher...

It was a doomed effort. Great learning experience, though.

Race-Train was a light-hearted, casual-oriented train-racing game with RPG elements. Train-racing? Seriously? Yeah - racing big, steam-powered train engines on rails. Actually, there was more to it than racing, the game was intended to consist of a couple of different mini-games. The RPG aspect stemmed from the fact that your train would be upgraded over time, and you would choose in which direction you want to steer the upgrade process.

Knights over the Atlantic, meanwhile, was an attempt to get back to what I enjoy best - arcade flying. This time, I wanted to combine the story-telling experiences of Standoff with the gameplay of Combat Wings. So, a story-centric game in the spirit of Wing Commander, set on British aircraft carriers in the Atlantic.

Looking back after a couple of years time, I think both projects still have potential, but both share the same basic flaw: they aren't really targetted at an audience. They're both quirky concepts that could potentially be big successes (especially Race-Train)... but they don't exactly scream to a potential publisher "yes, this is gold!". Self-publishing could have worked, but that would require venture capital - and that would require an actual business plan as opposed to just wanting to make games.

So, after a while, it was time to get back to a day job - especially since I'd just gotten married (August 2009).

 
Wing Commander: Standoff (independent mod, 2004-2009)

Platform & genre: PC, space combat sim
Game website:
http://standoff.solsector.net/
My role:
Co-producer, co-director, scenario writer, mission designer, cutscene designer...

Completed in 2009, when my career in games development had already spanned nearly a decade, Wing Commander: Standoff is actually one of the very first projects I was involved with. We had already started talking about it during Wing Commander: Unknown Enemy, so my involvement might possibly date back to 2001 - or 2002, at the very latest. The project is purely non-commercial - our second mod for the game Wing Commander: Secret Ops (1998). However, where Unknown Enemy was limited to a fairly small project because we were afraid we couldn't handle anything more ambitious, this time we went all-out. Even compared to all the commercial projects I've since been involved with, this is by far the single biggest production I ever worked on.

The game was divided into five episodes, released irregularly over several years (Episode 1 - 2004, Episode 2 - 2005, Episode 3 - 2006, Episode 4 - 2007, Episode 5 - 2009). Usually, each subsequent episode also functioned as a patch to the previous episodes, making various improvements. This was especially noticeable with Episodes 4 and 5 - having hacked a new OpenGL renderer into the game, we were able to make all kinds of improvements to the graphics, including specular maps, high-dynamic range lighting, and various post-processing effects. We also used far more sophisticated methods to tell the story this time - we had dozens of cutscenes throughout the game, both external scenes with space ships (rendered directly in the game engine) and internal scenes with talking characters (saved as pre-rendered video, and unfortunately limited to a 320x160 resolution). The game also featured more ships and missions than any official Wing Commander game released to date. 

Thanks to this project, for most of the decade I had virtually no life - apart from work and Standoff, about all I had time for was to read a book every once in a while, or see a movie. I've been working in games development, and yet I had little time to play new games. It was only in the last two years, when first Standoff sputtered to a temporary halt, and then I left City Interactive, that I started actually spending time on other stuff (...and in particular, dating and subsequently marrying Karolina - our first date took place just days before I left City). Standoff was also one of the factors that kept me from looking for new work after City - I was determined to get it done and out of the way once and for all.

The project met with a very enthusiastic reception from the Wing Commander fan community. So, apart from being my most ambitious project to date, I believe it may also be the most successful, and the best (in terms of quality of the final product - in terms of organisation, not so much). Ironic, that after working on commercial games for a decade, it's still a fan-made mod that remains my greatest achievement... 

Graphics material: Original game trailer - after releasing the last episode, I eventually got around to putting together this trailer.

Additional graphics material: Fan-made gameplay video.

 
SWAT (City Interactive, 2009)

Platform & genre: PC, first-person shooter
Game website:
not available
My role:
Freelance writer (proofreading & translation into English).

This project, developed under the working title SWAT (I don't believe there was ever any official title - the game was never announced to the public), was the story of a police SWAT unit fighting to put an end to an out-of-control gang war in New York. I was involved only at the end of the project - once again, the game's dialogues had been all written in Polish, and I was asked to translate them into English.

...This game was then cancelled. This happened very late in the production cycle - as I understand it, the project was nearly complete, approaching the final deadline. I do not know the exact reasons for this decision. Subsequently, portions of the game's levels were re-made into Code of Honor 3: Desperate Measures (2009). However, since the dialogues I'd worked on were completely reworked, I only claim credit to the unpublished SWAT, and not to Code of Honor 3.

Graphics material: No video or screenshots are available. 

 
Battlestrike: Force of Resistance 2 (City Interactive, 2009)

Platform & genre: PC, first-person shooter
Game website:
no longer available
My role:
Freelance consultant, freelance writer (proofreading & translation into English).

My involvement with Battlestrike: Force of Resistance 2 (note: in some markets, the game appears to have been published as Battlestrike: Shadow of Stalingrad, while in Poland, it's Rajd na Berlin: Cień Stalingradu) was fairly brief. I spent my two weeks' notice period at City working every day with the new project manager - I was marginally involved in planning the story and working out the player's weapon arsenal in the game, but mostly my efforts went into explaining what needs to be done in the various stages of the project. Then, during the two months when I was employed as a freelance consultant, I came in a few times to discuss particular issue. Finally, towards the end of the project, I was asked to translate the game's dialogues into English.

This is one of four titles that I've been involved with, but never played - the others being Armed Forces Corp. (see below), the never-published 'SWAT' (see above), and Terrorist Takedown 3 (see above).

Graphics material: Fan-made gameplay video.

 
Armed Forces Corp. (City Interactive, 2009)

Platform & genre: PC, first-person shooter
Game website:
no longer available
My role:
Project manager, freelance writer (proofreading & translation into English).

Coming back from my vacation, I was assigned to my least-favourite project at City. Armed Forces Corp. was not my kind of story. Contrived, unoriginal, and completely not on time. Corporations fighting it out? In the age of terrorism, extraordinary rendition and special forces? It felt like a throwback to 1980s cyberpunk... my attempts to turn the story towards a more government-based story (while keeping the core concept of the player being a paid mercenary) failed dismally. Our newly-hired producer claimed that corporate espionage was the trendy thing. I suppose that's why the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series is famous for its storyline dealing with Coca Cola commandos raiding Pepsi. No, wait...

At the same time, I was negotiating with my boss about a pay rise. During my vacation, I had made up my mind to leave the company by the end of the year, but I would stay longer if the pay rise was good enough - otherwise, I'd leave with the end of the project.

I had also decided that, in the meantime, I would work - you know, normally. I didn't come in early (ok, ok, I never came in early during my entire City career - when you leave two hours late in the evening, you figure you've got an excuse to arrive ten minutes late in the morning), and I left the moment the clock hit 17:00.

This "drop in performance" was noted, and combined with some disagreements over staff management (as a loyal employee, I'd always been willing to point out when I felt the company was making a mistake...), finally resulted in my boss deciding not to give me any pay rise at all. More than that - he told me that since I was bound to leave under these circumstances, they had decided to dismiss me right there and then. My performance, apparently, was so dismal, that they also decided to insist on giving me a two month contract as a consultant, to continue training all those new project managers :). And so, I handed Armed Forces Corp. to one project manager, and set out to train yet another (my third!) fresh project manager working on Battlestrike: Force of Resistance 2...

My involvement with Armed Forces Corp. does have a small post-scriptum. A few months after I'd left City, the project manager hired me as a freelancer to translate the game's dialogues into English.

Graphics material: Original game trailer.

 
Royal Marines Commando (City Interactive, 2008)

Platform & genre: PC, first-person shooter
Game website:
no longer available
My role:
Project manager, scenario writer

A project that ends with countless days of overtime, working weekends and an all-nighter is bound to leave you exhausted. Well, how about three of them in a row? My last vacation had been right before Terrorist Takedown 2. Subsequently, we went straight from Terrorist Takedown 2 to Code of Honor 2, and during that latter project, we took a sidestep to finish off Operation Thunderstorm, too. Come to think of it, we also finished the fourth episode of Standoff during this time period, so make that four "crunch-times" in a row :). In short, it's been a long year, and I needed a break - but I wasn't getting one. Not yet. First, there was Royal Marines Commando.

The project was ultimately to be commanded by one of our freshly-hired project managers - this was at a time when City was expanding at full pelt. My job was to get the project started, train the project manager, and basically hold his hand for as long as needed. After a few weeks, however, the project manager in charge of SAS: Secure Tomorrow was fired, and the guy I was training was transferred off to lead that project to completion (which is a nice compliment for me - they didn't want to entrust SAS to the other new project manager, trained by the guy they fired).

So, I started training another new project manager. Meanwhile, on the horizon, that horrid event known as the Leipzig game show loomed yet again, and naturally, there had to be a demo. All this meant that instead of merely kicking off the project, I ended up designing most of it before I finally got my vacation.

I must say, I actually deeply regret leaving this project. I don't know if I could have survived to the end of this project without a vacation, but I definitely regret not being able to lead it to completion. The project went on for a few months after I got back, but I would no longer be leading it, instead moving on to a different project (...and then finally leaving the company).

I rather liked the game's story (...with caveats - remember, we're still talking about a budget production here!), and the intro is probably my favouritest bit of cinematics from any of the City titles I'd worked on, especially the moment when the City logo turns into a submarine periscope. And the game had Churchill in it - how fun is that? Regrettably, after planning out the overall story and writing some of the dialogues, my vacation started, so I didn't get to polish the final script. A pity...

Graphics material: Fan-made gameplay video.

 

 
Code of Honor 2 (City Interactive, 2008)

Platform & genre: PC, first-person shooter
Game website:
no longer available
My role:
Project manager, scenario writer

When did we start off Code of Honor 2? I don't remember the date. In fact, I barely remember this day at all - it's pretty much a blur. What I do remember is the circumstances. It was on the morning when Terrorist Takedown 2 was to be finished. Having worked all night to get the game done, at 10 AM I went into a meeting about Code of Honor 2. The company boss congratulated me on getting my first game done - to which I replied that it's not done yet (...and indeed it wasn't done that day - see above). That's one of the few details I remember from that day.

...So, off we went, tearing into Code of Honor 2 - no rest for the weary and all that. As expected, this turned out to be a far, far more impressive game than Terrorist Takedown 2, and it was a bit easier, too. Yes, we worked late on many evenings, and yes, we worked on more weekends than I care to remember. But compared to Terrorist Takedown 2, this one was really a breeze. And the end result was really a pretty fun game, with well-balanced weapons and a pretty fun multiplayer mode. That having been said, it got terrible reviews, and I suppose it deserved them - it was still a budget title, after all. I guess it says more about the Polish games industry circa 2008 than about the game, then, if I say that in my opinion, this was one of the best FPSes produced in Poland up to that point.

We didn't get away without the obligatory all-night session, though - on the 21st of May. There was a mysterious crash issue, some kind of memory leak (as it turned out, we'd simply overloaded the game with huge textures). I don't remember if we fixed the issue or if we only managed to identify it. What I do remember is that the next day, the 22nd, was Corpus Christi. Luckily, Corpus Christi is a public holiday in Poland - so, at the end of the night, we all went home. An hour or two later, I went to church. This was by far the most surreal Mass I'd ever attended - my eyes kept closing, and even while standing, I would lose bits of time here and there. Well, working all night is hardly an excuse to miss church. But I sure was relieved that this particular Mass did not include a procession (as most Corpus Christi Masses do) - I can just imagine myself kneeling during one of the procession stops and drifting off...

Graphics material: Original game trailer.

Additional graphics material: "Making of" video. Developed in the heady days of early 2008, when City was making waves, spending big, and the global economic crisis remained just a very distant blot on the horizon, Code of Honor 2 even had a "making of" video - unfortunately, Polish-language only.

 

 
Operation Thunderstorm (City Interactive, 2008)

Platform & genre: PC, first-person shooter
Game website:
no longer available
My role:
Fifth wheel, additional writer (proofreading, some dialogue rewrites).

This was an odd project. It was developed by City's Katowice branch. The project was actually started about a month or two before we started Terrorist Takedown 2 - they were working with a much smaller team, though, so we ultimately finished first. It didn't help them that our project was considered more "high priority", and consequently, they spent several weeks away from their own project, working on the multiplayer levels (and one of the single player levels, too) for Terrorist Takedown 2.

Anyway, the game looked really great at the highest graphical settings... but it could barely run on most computers, and at lower settings, it looked significantly worse. Hardly surprising - none of us had much experience optimising games to perform under JupiterEX. The gameplay was also severely under-designed - the Katowice team consisted mostly of graphics artists, so they needed level designers from Warsaw to improve the game.

Gradually, more and more work on Operation Thunderstorm was being done in Warsaw, and as Terrorist Takedown 2 finally reached its finale, the decision was made to virtually cut off the original team from the project, and finish it off in Warsaw. The company was desperate to get the game finished and into stores, so I suppose the decision made sense - in retrospect, though, it had disastrous effects. Team morale at the Katowice branch sunk through the floor, and then descended even further when, as a "punishment" for their "failure", they were never again allowed to run their own project, instead developing levels for Warsaw, in particular for SAS: Secure Tomorrow (2008). Resentment grew, and eventually most of the team was fired. And to think, had they been allowed to complete Operation Thunderstorm, or at least allowed to develop another game on their own, they would probably have become one of the best (and most cost-effective!) teams at City...

Anyway, I was already working on Code of Honor 2 at the time, so officially, I had nothing to do with the project. I don't think I even appear in the credits. However, the project was now under the control of someone who had never run a project before - so I stepped in, at first only to provide advice, and then taking complete control during the final week of bugfixing. The final days involved another all-night session at City, when I worked through the night with the testers and one or two designers in a last-ditch attempt to meet the deadline... and failing, because the game still needed final approval from GameSpy (who provided the multiplayer component in all our JupiterEX engine games). This final approval did not arrive during the night, delaying the project by another day or two. Oh, well...

Graphics material: Original game trailer. Polish-language only (note the different game title - in Poland, the game was published as Mortyr: Operacja Sztorm).

 

Terrorist Takedown 2 (City Interactive, 2007)

Platform & genre: PC, first-person shooter
Game website:
no longer available
My role:
Project manager (my first commercial project as a PM!), scenario writer

In Wing Commander: Prophecy (1997), there's a great scene where one of Wing Commander's recurring characters, Maniac, is finally given command of his own squadron. "After all those years", he mutters, stunned.
"To be in command?" Asks another character.
"Yeah." He replies.
"To be in control?"
"Yeah!"
"To be the one they string up when your squadron screws the pooch on a mission?"
"Ye... hey, wait a minute!"

...For the next few months, I had that scene running through my head pretty much all the time. I'd been promoted - great - but here we had our first project on a new, unfamiliar game engine, and the same dramatic deadlines as usual. Christmas was coming up, and the game had to be in stores. Oh, and there was the Leipzig game show coming up in August, so we had to get a demo done - well, we'd only just gotten started in June.

By any standards, Terrorist Takedown 2 is a pretty weak game - the cutscenes don't look too great, the levels don't look too great, the gameplay isn't too great, and the framerate is frequently below-par. And it's one of the projects in my career that I'm most proud of. For a few months, I almost lived at the office, leaving around 20-21, and coming in on weekends, too. At the time, the accounting department was also pulling heavy overtime, preparing the company for its stock exchange debut. Sometimes, I left office before they did, other times they left first. On a few occasions, much to my irritation, my work was disrupted by the security alarm - accounting didn't notice I was there, so they switched it on before leaving, and the motion detectors picked me up when I started pacing around the room.

The project involved not one, but two all-nighter sessions. One was the standard "we gotta get the master done by tomorrow, so let's do what we can" session. We didn't get it done, by the way - the next day was spent trying to catch a critical bug that QA refused to pass. It took another day, and in the end, we still had to disable multiplayer, promising to enable it in a post-release patch. That's the most terrible project finish imaginable, by the way - you run ragged to meet a deadline, and immediately get into a rush to produce a patch (...as well as a bunch of language versions).

The other all-nighter, earlier in the project, was much worse. It was in October. At this point, I was pretty much certain the project couldn't possibly meet the deadline, and I'd been told repeatedly that there's no way this deadline can be moved (...sigh). I suppose I should have just shrugged and focused on doing the possible instead of worrying about the impossible, but this was my first project, and I was determined to make it a successful one. Anyway, coming home, as late as usual, I went to sleep still thinking about the project. I kept on thinking about it, and thinking, and thinking... and I simply failed to fall asleep at all.

Well, under those circumstances, how can you not be proud of getting the job done - even if the review scores average around 4/10?

Graphics material: Original game trailer. Polish-language only. This trailer was actually broadcast on TV - at the time, City Interactive was about the debut on the stock exchange, so it needed the publicity.

Battlestrike: Force of Resistance (City Interactive, 2007)

Platform & genre: PC, first-person shooter
Game website:
no longer available
My role:
Level designer, additional writer (proofread and rewrote most of the dialogues).

After The Hell in Vietnam, I went straight on to the next Chrome project. This time, while once again I would be responsible for fixing up the dialogues, I also got to work on one of the levels all by myself. It wasn't an especially enjoyable experience - Chrome never is. But I got a lot of reading done, thanks to the painfully long loading times...

Halfway through the project, I was told I would be taking command - as the project manager - of City's first FPS project on JupiterEX. At this point, my level was playable from start to end, but still needed a lot of polishing - boy, it felt great to be able to hand it over to someone else and dive into JupiterEX.

Battlestrike: Force of Resistance, incidentally, turned out to be by far the best of City's Chrome FPSes. The project was extended by a month or two, and with the extra time spent polishing the level scripting, even the AI didn't seem quite as awful as usual. In Poland, the game took advantage of a once-famous brand: Mortyr: 2093-1944 (1999) was one of the first Polish FPSes that could claim to reach global standards of quality. City had recently acquired the rights to this brand, and so in Poland, the game was published as Mortyr 3: Operacje Dywersyjne. However, the game was virtually unaltered from the English version - only the main character's name was changed.

Graphics material: Original game trailer. Polish-language only.

Additional graphics material: "Making of" video. Polish-language only. City was eager to build up publicity for the Mortyr brand, so the Polish edition of the game included this video as a bonus. Note that the video on YouTube has a messed up aspect ratio, and a cute little "subtitle" appears at one point early in the video - apparently, the guy who posted it wasn't too impressed ;).

The Hell in Vietnam (City Interactive, 2007)

Platform & genre: PC, first-person shooter
Game website:
no longer available
My role:
Design consultant, additional writer (proofread and rewrote most of the dialogues).

Following the last of the "Arcade Editions", our team kept on getting smaller, with people getting transferred into other tasks. Although we did spend a fair amount of time developing a design doc for a new title, we knew now that another air combat game was more than unlikely. I spent the end of 2006 playing UFO: Enemy Unknown (1993), and messing around with the WorldEdit tools for the Jupiter game engine. City had just acquired the license for this engine. It looked pretty nifty - the AI was fantastic! However, the engine - used in games like No One Lives Forever II (2003) - was already badly dated. After a few months, the company decided to license JupiterEX instead - a much newer version of the same engine. F.E.A.R. (2005), which used this engine, had only come out two years earlier, and was still used in most graphics card comparisons as a benchmark - this was top-notch technology.

At this time, there were two designers at City who weren't attached to any projects. I was to join a small team set up to get the hang of the engine in preparation for a new project, while the other guy would join the team developing first-person shooters on the old, horrid and outdated Chrome engine, licensed from Techland. Well, that other guy threatened to quit, and so the roles got swapped - he went to JupiterEX, and I went into Chrome.

Getting thrown into a half-finished project with no real work was bad enough, but on Chrome! I'd already encountered the Chrome engine during my brief stint at Techland, and I felt it was awful. Graphically impressive, but the AI was simply non-existent. Small wonder every FPS developed by City on this engine was pummeled in reviews for the idiocy of the enemy characters. The slow loading times and incredibly unstable dev tools didn't help either. All things considered, it seemed pretty appropriate that the game we were working on was called The Hell in Vietnam.

...But that's not fair. There was a lot to praise in the game. The environment team had done wonders, re-creating some very characteristic locations in Vietnam, based on various movies. The AI was horrid, but our level designers did as much as they could with it, and the end results were really pretty impressive (...for Chrome).

In the meantime, after a week or two of near-unemployment ("sit there and play the game, give us feedback"), I finally got me some real work - improving and rewriting the game dialogues. All in all, an assignment that had initially made me seriously consider quitting proved to be a great opportunity.

Graphics material: Original game trailer.

 
Combat Wings: Battle of Britain Arcade Edition (City Interactive, 2007)

Platform & genre: PC, air combat game
Game website:
not available
My role:
Lead game designer

This was the second of the "Arcade Editions". Again, the task was make the game simpler and reduce the install package to 20MB. Note that although this game was published at the same time or even a little later than the arcade edition of WoH:BotRB, it was actually developed first. What this means is that unlike WoH:BotRB, this one was being developed immediately after the original game - as a consequence, we made virtually no significant changes to the gameplay, still thinking the gameplay was just fine. Too bad - a little more hindsight would have helped, as it did with WoH:BotRB.

Graphics material: There are no video materials or screenshots for this game - it looked almost identical to the original.

 
Wings of Honour: Battles of the Red Baron Arcade (City Interactive, 2007)

Platform & genre: PC, air combat game
Game website:
not available
My role:
Lead game designer

After completing Wings of Honour: Battles of the Red Baron and Combat Wings: Battle of Britain, it was decided that special versions of both games would be developed for internet distribution - the requirement being that they should a) take up 20MB or less (before installation), and b) have an even more "arcade" feel. How do you make an arcade game even more arcade? Well, we managed it. 

...Actually, WoH:BotRB benefited a bit from this update. It lost one of the campaigns and the cockpit mode, but I experimented a bit with the gameplay. I redesigned the WoH:BotRB missions to take advantage of the improvements made during CW:BoB (e.g., the speed booster, and four damage zones per plane). More importantly, I vastly boosted the enemy gun damage, reducing the bullet speed (to let the player dodge them a bit). The end result? We were able to make dogfights more challenging while reducing the incredible swarms of enemy to manageable numbers. If it wasn't for the lack of cockpits, this would be my preferred version of WoH:BotRB.

Graphics material: There are no video materials or screenshots for this game - it looked almost identical to the original.

 
Combat Wings: Battle of Britain (City Interactive, 2006)

Platform & genre: PC, air combat game
Game website:
no longer available
My role:
Lead game designer, lead scenario writer

The first thing we did, when we started on the sequel to Combat Wings was to post-mortemise Wings of Honour: Battles of the Red Baron. We then set out to redesign the game (since a very basic design doc for Combat Wings II had already existed), taking into account the lessons learned. The first and most obvious lesson - you need to have variety in missions. So, we threw out the emphasis on the Battle of Britain, to allow that diversity. Being young and foolish, we did not realise that the upper management actually considered the Battle of Britain to be they key concept, what with being hugely marketable and all. So it was that after a week of designing, we presented our concept... and threw it out, going back to the Battle of Britain. Not a great start.

...In the end, Combat Wings: Battle of Britain turned out to be a pretty fun project, and it went surprisingly smoothly. We finished up in August, and though we did come in to work Saturdays on one or two occasions, we never even had to stay up all night. However, the initial lack of enthusiasm for the Battle of Britain shows through in the final product - this one could have been better. Don't get me wrong - it's a fine game, and it's miles ahead of its predecessors. But the missions are a bit too realistic in scope. Most of the time, you do what a British pilot in the Battle of Britain could expect to be doing: go up in the air, intercept German bombers, land. Rinse, lather, repeat. Each fight is different and unique in some ways, but the game is generally a bit too repetitive.

Sadly, this was also the final project for our air combat team. As a team, we worked fantastically together by now - but the company strategy had changed. First-person shooters were proving much more profitable than air combat games. Most of the team was transferred into the FPS team, leaving just five of us.

Graphics material: Original game trailer.

 
Wings of Honour: Battles of the Red Baron (City Interactive, 2006)

Platform & genre: PC, air combat game
Game website:
no longer available
My role:
Lead level designer

At this point, I already had plenty of experience with air (well, space) combat under my belt - Unknown Enemy, and two episodes of Standoff (the second having been released shortly after Tannhauser Gate was shut down). So, when I went to my final interview at City Interactive, I was told the first game we'd be working on would be a WWII air combat game, Combat Wings II. Two weeks later, when I actually started working, another project had suddenly emerged out of nowhere - the sequel to Wings of Honour (2003). Not that I'm complaining - it's just a pretty fascinating example of how rapidly things can change at City. Wings of Honour: Battles of the Red Baron was conceived in early January, and finished before the end of April - that is fast. And it was developed, for the most part, by novices - for many of our graphics artists, this was the very first time they worked on a computer game. We were all pretty excited, though, and the team very quickly gelled. The final result, although definitely rough around the edges, was a commendable first effort for our team.

Looking back now, there's a lot we could have done better, even with the limited time we had - but it's easy to look back and see such things from a distance. Back then, we did the best we could. The end of the project was pretty terse, after all - on one occasion, we sat through most of the night, finally going home around 5 AM. Ahhhh - that was fun. Really, that's not sarcasm - back then, working at City was just great fun, and I seriously resented Fridays. I wanted it to be Monday all the time.

Graphics material: Fan-made gameplay video - a montage of various missions.

 
The Roots (Tannhauser Gate, cancelled)

Platform & genre: PC, Xbox, role-playing game
Game website:
no longer available, but accessible using The Wayback Machine archive
My role:
Junior game designer

As The Roots: Gates of Chaos gradually ran towards the finish-line, I was finally given some tasks on The Roots - which is what I had been supposed to work on in the first place. The game was now progressing quickly - it had been in development since 2002, and there was increasing pressure from the publisher to complete it.

...Well, it didn't get completed. The pieces were gradually falling into place - the last aspects of design were getting settled, I was having the time of my life writing game scripts in Lua, editing the game world and the game database... and then, the publisher, Cenega, was purchased by the Russian company 1C. Under new ownership, Cenega gave us an impossible deadline to reach beta status - we actually got close, but ultimately failed. Cenega then abandoned the project. Unable to find a new publisher, Tannhauser Gate folded - and a few months later, after a rather unenjoyable three-week stint at Techland, I found myself employed at City Interactive...

Graphics material: Trailer made for E3 in 2004. Note that I joined the company at the end of 2004, so this trailer predates my involvement with the game.

 
The Roots: Gates of Chaos (Tannhauser Gate, 2005)

Platform & genre: Nokia N-Gage (handheld), action role-playing game
Game website:
no longer available, but accessible using The Wayback Machine archive
My role:
Junior game designer

I joined Tannhauser Gate at the end of December 2004, having just released the first episode of Standoff.

At Tannhauser, I was to start immediately working on The Roots. However, at the time, The Roots was organisationally in a state of shambles, and nobody really knew what I should be doing - and in the meantime, Tannhauser Gate's other project, The Roots: Gates of Chaos had just a few months left and was behind schedule. So, I was assigned to this project instead. And thus it was that a fresh, junior designer, ended up placing all the opponents and treasures on about forty game maps :).

The Roots: Gates of Chaos was released in 2005, and it was quite a success with the critics. Unfortunately, the Nokia N-Gage had a pathetically small user base. Consequently, the game's sales just weren't good enough for Nokia to commission a sequel.

Graphics material: Recorded gameplay from IGN Entertainment.

Additional graphics material: Fan-recorded footage (unfortunately, with non-game soundtrack).

 
The Omega Syndrome (Australian Games Developers, 2004)

Platform & genre: PC, management game
Game website:
no longer available, but accessible using The Wayback Machine archive
My role:
Design consultant

Back in 2004, David Moffat (a one-man indie team called Australian Games Developers - so no, I didn't work with all of Australia's game developers :) ) contacted Niels about publishing his game, The Omega Syndrome, through Niels Bauer Games. He was having trouble with the game - although it was advanced enough in development to be sellable, it just plain wasn't selling. Niels asked me to take a look at David's game. I worked  for a few months with David to help him improve the game... ultimately, this came to an end when I started working full-time at Tannhauser Gate. The game was never published through Niels Bauer Games, but David continued trying to sell it for a few more years, before ultimately giving up around 2008. Well, nobody said it was easy to earn a living as an indie...

I'll be honest - I don't even remember what exactly I contributed to this game in order to get that "design consultant" credit. Must've been something, but I just don't remember...

Graphics material: A pair of screenshots. Click on the images to see a bigger version.

 
Smugglers 3 (Niels Bauer Games, 2003)

Platform & genre: PC, management game
Game website:
http://www.nielsbauergames.com/smugglers3.html
My role:
Design consultant

This was the final game that I worked on for Niels Bauer Games. At the time, I was pretty busy - first with Unknown Enemy, then with my master's degree, and then with Wing Commander: Standoff (yes, Standoff, which was finally completed in 2009, was already in development as early as 2002. Earlier, actually, but this was the point when I really got to work...). I believe I also made some attempts at writing a design doc for a project of my own at this time, though I didn't get too far with it.

As a consequence to all that, my contribution to Smugglers 3 was pretty small - really, about all I did was provide Niels with a whole lot of feedback during the game's development. Since there didn't seem to be any indication that I would be able to offer a more significant contribution in the predictable future, we didn't work together on Niels' subsequent projects. Niels Bauer Games, incidentally, continues to do well, and Niels' games have hugely increased in quality with every iteration.

Graphics material: A pair of screenshots. Click on the images to see a bigger version.

 
Pax Galaxia (Dio Games, 2003)

Platform & genre: PC, real-time strategy game
Game website:
http://www.diogames.com/PaxGalaxia.html
My role:
Game manual writer, level co-designer, QA tester

After TV Manager, one of the programmers we'd worked with at Niels Bauer Games, Diodor Bitan, decided he wanted to try programming a new game all by himself. The design he came up with was Pax Solaris (eventually renamed to Pax Galaxia, for fear of... people confusing it with Sun's Solaris computer systems :) ) - an incredibly simple, easy-to-play, and at the same time, amazingly complex real-time strategy game. The game is played simply using the mouse cursor and one mouse button, but the tactical possibilities are endless.

This darned game is really quite addictive, and it's thoroughly fun in multiplayer, too. Even after so many years, Pax Galaxia still has a small but very hardcore fanbase.

Graphics material: A pair of screenshots. Click on the images to see a bigger version.

 
Wing Commander: Unknown Enemy (independent mod, 2002)

Platform & genre: PC, space combat sim
Game website:
http://unknownenemy.solsector.net/
My role:
Co-producer, co-director, scenario & fiction writer, mission designer, cutscene designer...

Unknown Enemy is a mod for the game Wing Commander: Secret Ops (1998), and the first project in which I had the opportunity to actually tell a story (sadly, mostly using actual text fiction - cutscenes were few and far between). Started in 2000, the mod was finally released after three years, in 2002 - pretty darned long for a project involving a mere ten missions! During that time, I'd managed to finish up my bachelor's degree, start my master's degree - and get my first two indie games (Smugglers 2 and TV Manager) done, working with Niels Bauer Games. And boy, did we learn a lot during this project...

Graphics material: There are no videos available for the game, and the screenshots posted on the game website are old junk from various phases of production, not worth showing. Eventually, I'll get around to adding some new stuff, but it's a low priority - it's one of my oldest projects, after all.

 
TV Manager (Niels Bauer Games, 2002)

Platform & genre: PC, management game
Game website:
http://www.nielsbauergames.com/TVManager.html
My role:
Game manual writer, co-designer

Hot on the heels of Smugglers 2, Niels started up a new project - TV Manager. The idea was to create a fairly simple game in a shorter space of time (Smugglers 2 had taken more than a year, TV Manager was done in a few months). The end result was a game that was just a little bit lacking in complexity, and never really became as popular as the Smugglers series. But then again, can running a TV station ever compare to playing a space trader or pirate?

One thing I loved about the game was the black & white user interface. The whole game was done in black & white, and it worked really great - although the interface on the whole wasn't significantly improved compared to Smugglers 2, it felt a lot more stylish and polished. But... but... shouldn't the player have been able to eventually upgrade to colour, just like in the real world of television? :)

Graphics material: A pair of screenshots. Click on the images to see a bigger version.

 
Smugglers 2 (Niels Bauer Games, 2001)

Platform & genre: PC, space trading game
Game website:
http://www.nielsbauergames.com/smugglers2.html
My role:
Game manual writer, co-designer

The very first published game I ever worked on. By the time I joined this project, I was already involved in Wing Commander: Unknown Enemy (see below), but this project would ultimately be finished first. Plus, unlike Unknown Enemy, this was a commercial project. It was developed by an indie team called Niels Bauer Games, with Niels Bauer doing virtually everything, and the rest of us helping out in various ways in exchange for a small percentage of the sales profits - the game was sold online, with no publishers involved.

...And to think that it all started by me posting a few comments at Niels' forum dedicated to Smugglers 1. Niels finally gave me a copy of Smugglers 1 (not having a credit card at the time, I could only play the demo version!), and asked me to contribute on Smugglers 2

I remember, back in the day, being stupidly embarrassed about the graphics in this game - it was written in Delphi, after all, and most of the windows were pretty basic. How stupid of me - the game was just a huge lot of fun, and that's what counted. Can't disagree with the huge income it generated, after all :).

I do love the game manual, which I put together all by myself - looking at it now, the formatting is pretty basic and unprofessional, but... well, the truth is, I've never had the opportunity to do a better manual since. All the game manuals I worked on at City Interactive, were limited to about a page or two at the most, and at Vivid Games - well, there simply are no manuals for iPhone games, just in-game help. And there is something wonderful about preparing a printed manual (even if this one was distributed as a PDF).

Graphics material: A pair of screenshots. Click on the images to see a bigger version.

 

Copyright 2012 Jakub Majewski