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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :).
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...
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).
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
:).
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
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...
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.
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).
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.
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 ;).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.