WARSAW News

The fake script for the fake trailer that Human Ark built their non-fake winning presentation around featured three unnamed hero characters, non descript enemies and a vague urban environment.

It had some impact. But it lacked WARSAW’s setting and heroes. And it was for a fake script.

A couple of days after we decided to invite Human Ark to the project we requested a proper script, based around WARSAW. Set in World War II. With three characters that we felt encompassed both the spirit of Warsaw the city and WARSAW the game. The brave paramedic Jadwiga, the hotheaded rifleman Krzysztof and the shady smuggler Kazimierz.

The fake script chronicled the death of one of the characters almost from the start, showed another fighting the overwhelming odds and falling, and the third’s fate was not sealed on screen, although most likely not a happy one. That much remained. As well as the opening and closing shot of Prudential building hit with Karl’s mortar shell.



The rest was a work of the talented Human Ark team, who, after having taken part in a gameplay demo came up with their story. One that included the menacing dog and the whole concept that you can see in the animated feature.

The amount of work, meeting, back and forth on character designs and near mental breakdowns after delayed approvals were all a part of the package.

So was the Human Ark’s guys and girls’ talent and nearly non-exhaustible amount of patience for the unending number of revisions, re-revisions and re-re-revisions of nearly all character models and scenes.

But the absolute amazement as some of the scenes came together from the initial black and white storyboards to complete and locked scenes was something

The visual style we wanted to go for was somewhere between that of the Bungie's first Myth intro and the GITS Innocence anime: the sophisticated backgrounds with simpler, more easily animated characters.

And the end result delivered that and much much more. The only thing missing was the music. And this could make or break the whole big announcement. But… That’s something we will want to talk about tomorrow.

We wanted to introduce WARSAW with a trailer. Just like only a couple hundred thousand games before did. And we knew from the start the trailer will be almost devoid of gameplay, but rather set the mood for what was about to come afterwards. The effect we were hoping for was that of the first Dead Island’s reverse chronology piece or Halo 3’s Believe diorama wonder. Grim, lacking hope and definitely missing the happy ending.

The mood was easy to nail, but the technique to get there wasn’t. Full blown CGI affair wasn’t an option, as it did not fit with the stylized visuals of WARSAW the game, so we looked into two different approaches. Either a hand drawn cinematic or a figurine/diorama based one.

The first had obvious advantage of being more in line with the visual style in the game, and the second allowed us to use dioramas to nail that tangible urban setting.

Both of these choices had their disadvantages though. Both would be time consuming. The first would also require a studio with experience in style that isn’t really very popular for commercial projects in Poland. The second – was even less predictable and still required a painstakingly long process before we would know if it would even work.

For a better part of two months we were exploring both the options, when in July’18 a trailer for Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics dropped. And that was it for the figurine/diorama based approach.

With the initial work put in the months before in September’18 we reached out to four animation studios. The email was short. “Need a video for an unannounced game. 45 secs, hand painted animation, evoking images of European comics mixed with GITS Innocence stylized visuals. Come back with a budget and a timeline”.

One studio came back very swiftly mentioning that hand painted animation isn’t their thing. Two others came back with request for further details. One is yet to respond.

For the two studios that wanted to get in on the details we created a short and dramatic script that for the reasons of total secrecy on our part (the game wasn’t yet announced) was named Uncivil War (a codename that almost became the actual name as per yesterday's story) and set in near future.

Of the two companies left one came back with the budget and timeline. And the other invited us and treated to an animated feature consisting of storyboards + music combo that sold us immediately.

That’s how we got to work with Human Ark Studio on WARSAW’s announcement trailer. Which took three very long months to complete. But that’s a story for tomorrow.

78. The total number of titles that “the game currently known as WARSAW” tried on and dismissed before we decided to go with WARSAW itself.

When we set out with an idea to create a game based on the Warsaw Rising we knew there was one major obstacle to overcome. Not a lot of people outside of Poland – and not everyone in the country for that matter – knows or knows intimately what Warsaw Rising was.

This isn’t an accusation. Rather – stating the fact. And we don’t feel there is something wrong with it. We don’t come at anyone expecting them to know what Warsaw Rising was. Quite the opposite. The less you know – the better. Once you will play the game, that will change though.

But not because we will drown you with facts, thrust down encyclopaedia worth of trivia down your throat and expose you to multitude of stats. But rather by sewing the fabric of the Warsaw Rising into the game mechanics themselves. Don’t know how long the Rising lasted? You will, as this is how long you need to make sure your characters live. Not sure what “błyskawica” is? You will by picking it up on one of the missions and equipping one of your heroes with it. Not sure where Długa is? You will, by traversing it during your patrols. Wonder what or who the Silent Unseen is? Ok, you get the point.

Now. Making a game based on historical fact is one thing. Making sure anyone actually wants to play it is another. Main reason: not a lot of people care for the history of other countries. Not many care for their own. Lots of other things to do it turns out.

In order to interest people in the game about Warsaw Rising, we would have to not speak of the Warsaw Rising. At least not first. We wanted everyone to soak up the ambience. The visuals. The setting. The genre. And then, once we had the attention – there was no way to talk about the game without bringing up Warsaw Rising. At least as long as we had the right title. The one that would, without a doubt, indicate what the game was about. Easy.

There was no guarantee that this would work, but it did. Well the exclusive reveal with GameSpot and the amazing trailer by Human Ark with Brodka’s moving rendition of Varsovie certainly did help. But... we’ll get to that part in a couple of days.

Now back to the titles. We evaluated each of the candidates on a very subjective, 10 criteria scale. “Sequelability”, “Translationability”, "Freshness", “Memorability” were some of those. Our current title excelled in most of these. The only one where WARSAW actually underperformed is the one you can probably guess immediately. Yup. “Searchability”.

You probably want to know what some of the other names we considered were. “Heroes” (will get into that this Thursday), “63” (spoiler) and “Occupied” (uhh).

To make sure no stone was left unturned we went after some famous musical numbers (“No tears to cry”), movies (“The edge of oppression”, “Doomed Squad”), and everything "Streets": (“(…) of blood”, “(…) of sorrow”, “(…) of hope”, “(…) of fire”, “(…) of red”).

The longest running champion was the “Uncivil War”. At one point just a codename for the game it then morphed into a strongest candidate. “Collateral City” also scored high.

The search started on 12th of November, and almost to the day, two months later on 11th of January two victors emerged. Uncivil War and Warsaw. Warsaw itself a result of taking the saw and pliers to Warsaw War and truncating it a little.

Since we knew we wanted the game to be easily recognized both outside of Poland and in Poland, Uncivil war had to go. It just did not work in Polish.

And so, Warsaw, and subsequently WARSAW was born. Which was probably the last call as we felt we wanted to announce the game in February and wanted to go about it in the grandest way we could imagine.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves, as this takes us into tomorrow’s tale about the inspirations behind how we wanted everyone to find out our super secret game no-one knew existed was coming out later this year...