Strategic Mind: Spirit of Liberty - Prologue 1939 News

Hello guys!

Last time I promised you photos of the damaged houses on our way from the subway station to the office, but I could not have predicted that Russia would decide to add some extra ones and destroy one more building that we pass on our way from the subway station to the office. They also hit a playground of the kindergarten which the daughter of our Founder Ihor Tymoshenko was attending before the war.

The destruction caused in spring (on our way from the subway to the office)
These photos are taken by me on Monday, June 27th.











The Sunday (June 26th) attack (the building is on our way from the subway to the office)
These photos are from the press. I saw the place from the street as I walked to office on Monday (27th June), but there was a police checkpoint and lots of emergency services hard at work, so I decided not to interfere with their work to take photos and took the Sunday photos from the press.







Here is the photo of a kindergarten Ihor’s 5-year-old daughter was attending until the war started:



Hard at work - no holidays

At Starni Games we usually follow all public holidays in Ukraine. Since the war started all national holidays (except regular Saturdays and Sundays) were suspended and are now regular work days. We follow the same rules to bear with the rest of the country and to catch up on what we have missed in the first month of the war in terms of production. This allowed our team to fully focus on work and catch up a bit on our pre-war plans.

A project dedicated to the War in Ukarine

We are all very excited, as we will soon announce a project dedicated to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It will be fully free and we will not profit from it. It will also not be a strategy game, as you could have expected. It is a smaller scale project and it requires only a few people from our team to actively work on it, so it does not have significant impact on the speed of development of our other projects. It mostly requires our narrative team’s work. So, consider it a truly free to play bonus from our team while you wait for our key titles to release. It is also our story and the story of what the people of Ukraine are going through at the moment.

Stay tuned as we will make a proper announcement in the coming days.

With best regards from Kyiv
Starni Games team

Starni Games receives Epic MegaGrant, which will be used to provide much-needed support during the war in Ukraine.

Since day one of the war, our top priority was to keep paying salaries on time, even if people could not work for some time due to various circumstances. Our team remains in Kyiv and recently we returned to work from the office despite the wartime situation. We have adapted and fully restored our operations.

When we learned that our team was selected as Epic MegaGrants recipients, it was truly inspiring and a rare piece of good news among the endless horrors of the ongoing war.

Our whole team is very grateful to Epic Games for this timely and substantial support in these difficult times!

Starni Games plans to utilize its Epic MegaGrant to:
- ensure the financial stability of the whole team throughout the turbulent times
- develop a free-to-play charity project (Visual novel) aimed at raising awareness about the war in Ukraine. We already have a playable demo and plan to announce this project soon.

We hope that as many people as possible will survive this senseless and horrible war, and call upon the international community to unite its efforts to support all those affected.

Stay safe everyone!

Starni Games team

Hello guys!

[h2]Ukraine keeps on fighting, and Starni Games keeps on working hard. [/h2]

Back to office
We returned to our Kyiv office (from remote work) at the end of May, and are now back to our regular setup. It is great to be back in office as it brings a bit of “normality” amidst the craziness of the ongoing war in Ukraine. In the next despatch, I will post some photos of damaged houses that we see as we walk from the subway station to the office.

Our communication needs reinforcements
Our team is mostly intact, but we had to part ways with our community manager - Kate Globa. She did a great job over the last two years, and we wish her all the best in her future endeavors. Right now she is in Ireland and will probably stay there for the foreseeable future. This is also one of the reasons we are less frequent with our community posts at the moment, but we are already starting to look for a new specialist to fill in the gap and will restore our communication with the community to its former level as soon as we can.

Strategic Mind: The Pacific XBOX release - June 23
We are extremely happy to announce that on June 23 our partners from Klabater successfully released Strategic Mind: The Pacific on XBOX. It is now available in the Microsoft store.
There are plans to gradually bring the whole Strategic Mind series on both PS and XBOX.
So, stay tuned.

Steam Summer Sale
We have cut our promotional activity to an absolute minimum and are now fully focused on the development. Yet, we could not miss the Steam Summer Sale, and we run decent discounts on all Strategic Mind titles, so make sure to check it out, if you miss any of them in your collection.

We will keep you updated on how our work progresses and the situation in Ukraine in the next despatches.

With best regards from Kyiv

Oleksandr and the Starni Games team

Hello guys!

First of all, we have got lots of supportive comments from you to the despatch 1. Thank you very much to everyone for the support! We do appreciate that.

In this despatch I will tell you more about how everything started for our team on February 24.

A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk about how our team coped with all the difficulties on a charity event - Games Gathering: Gamedev under bombs.
https://ggconference.com/en/conference/games-gathering-gamedev-under-bombs/

You can watch the recording following the link below:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We will keep you updated on how our work progresses and the situation in Ukraine in the next despatches.

With best regards from Kyiv

Oleksandr and the Starni Games team

Hello guys!
It has been almost 2 months since we last posted anything here. The reason is that on February 24 Russian Army invaded Ukraine. As some of you may know, our team is located in Kyiv - the capital of Ukraine. Russian troops have been stopped just some 7 km from the city. There has been a number of missile strikes and artillery attacks against the city throughout the last 52 days.

I will tell you more about how the war started for our team and how we coped with it in the next despatches. For now, I would like to briefly summarize the last two months for you.

The team was not able to work for around the first 10 days of the war. Then we started to gradually restore our operations. Paying salaries on time was our number one priority that we managed to do - thankfully the banking system of Ukraine works well enough (even though it has certain wartime restrictions that are annoying but both necessary and understandable).

Since March 7 we are working remotely, even if not at 100% of our usual capacity. We have been gradually restoring our operations to full strength since then. We will have to delay all projects that we are working on but that delay most likely would not be a major one. The key thing is that we keep working and doing our best efforts to finish our projects as soon as possible without diminishing their quality.

I am sorry for the lack of communication with the community, but we were very busy organizing and maintaining our work in difficult wartime conditions. So, now I finally found some free time to reach out to you guys and update you on the situation. We decided that work is our number one priority and communication will be done when we are capable of running production as planned. Right now things have leveled out to some extent, so we will be communicating with you more often.

Key thing is that everyone on the team is alive and safe right now (to the extent one can be safe under daily strategic missile strikes).

I will tell you more in the next despatches.

With best regards from Kyiv

Oleksandr and the Starni Games team