Panzer Strategy News

Today, we would like to share with you the exclusive content that no other WW2 wargame has - an alien technology implemented in the dark laboratories of the Third Reich. It is a fully functional Battle Mech robot armed with plasma cannons. Just look at it annihilating the Allied forces, like it is a piece of cake:



We do not know how exactly did the Nazis get their hands on this piece of alien technology, but some historians argue that they have located a hidden portal in The North Pole, that allowed Nazi UFOs to travel to the other side of the moon and find an abandoned reptiloid base there. They quickly turned it into the secret Third Reich base, which continued to function even after the war, and it is likely a place where the escaped Adolf Hitler took refuge. Another plausible theory is the Nazis were assisted by Masons.



It is only a matter of time until this hidden threat reveals itself and the Earth is thrown into the Third World War by an army of bloodthirsty machines headed by non-other than the Fuhrer of the Fourth Reich. Some scientists estimate the possible attack date as 1 September 2039.



The Battle Mech army will use the special drop pods to launch their most swift Blitzkrieg to date.





These events will be featured in the brand new Strategic Mind DLC - Strategic Mind: Fuhrer Strikes Back. So, stay tuned for more updates on the development progress.





P.S. This is the 1 April joke post. Wiki: “April Fool's Day is an annual custom on April 1 consisting of practical jokes and hoaxes. Jokesters often expose their actions by shouting "April Fools!" at the recipient. Mass media can be involved in these pranks, which may be revealed as such the following day. The day is not a public holiday in any country except Odessa in Ukraine, where the first of April is an official city holiday. The custom of setting aside a day for playing harmless pranks upon one's neighbor has been relatively common in the world historically.”

In our previous Developer’s Diaries, we told you about all the difficulties our team faces in the Voice Over production for the Strategic Mind series of games. Today, we will let you know more about the current progress in Voice Over production.

[h2]Meet the cast - Bob Skinner (UK) doing the part of Bernard Montgomery[/h2]

While it was especially tricky to assemble the cast for the Strategic Mind: Fight for Freedom, since we needed a lot of actors from the US, and especially from the UK. Previously, we had only one person from the UK doing VO work for us, so it is quite tricky to find good fits for all roles, taking accent, age, pitch, and everything else into consideration.



Here is one of the voice actors working with us, who turned out to be a really good fit for Montgomery and even looks a lot like him ;).



Of course, it is not easy to fit a perfect fit for every character, but we are doing the best we can considering our budget limitations.

[h2]Current progress around 50% recorded - 70 hours (14 days) at the studio[/h2]

We are right in the middle of recording all the characters, and despite the really tight schedule things are looking quite good so far. Although, even at this point, it is apparent that this is shaping up to be the biggest project of the series in terms of VO volume and complexity.



Kyiv city being in the “red zone” due to the pandemics, meaning partial lockdown, with the full closure of all public transport being highly possible, does not help. Still, we are doing all possible efforts to keep everything on track. Trust me, that is not easy: some actors have to leave the country soon, some have just come to Kyiv for a couple of weeks, others cannot record during the workdays, and so on and so forth. Still, we hope everything will go more or less smoothly.

P.S. While we were preparing this very post, we got the news that public transport will only be available to people with special credentials - the workers of key facilities, like power plants or food stores. So, it seems the majority of the team will have to work remotely once again. We were working remotely through the last 6 weeks of Blitzkrieg production last year, so that not something new for us, but we remained in the office for the most part throughout last year. So, here we go again.

👉 Support us by adding Strategic Mind: Fight for Freedom to your wishlist:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1381850/Strategic_Mind_Fight_for_Freedom/

[h2]Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery[/h2]



It is a fact of life that sometimes, great things aren’t done by being nice about it. Sir Bernard Law Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, had many mottos and creeds, but he seemed to downright exemplify this one.

Born to a minister’s family, Bernard Law Montgomery, was slated to become a clergyman, but opted instead for a soldiering life. It was, perhaps, for the best - while a man of many virtues, it’s hard to imagine humility among them. As his good friend Sir Winston Churchill put it: “In defeat, unbeatable. In victory, unbearable”.



Montgomery was known for his lack of social awareness and insensitivity: he was a self-assured leader, and bruised many egos in the Grand Alliance. But the soldiers loved Montgomery. With his gray sweater and tanker’s black beret, he had the image of a rebel, and chafed under unnecessary restrictions - at the same time, his asceticism and strict discipline earned him the moniker “the Spartan General”. Having been through the meatgrinder of the First World War, he took its lessons to heart, and cared about the troop morale, and preferred a systemic, low-risk strategy. When it came to beating the enemy, Montgomery liked to be “mathematically certain”, and waste no lives needlessly.



His exploits were numerous, beginning with the battle of El Alamein, and the eventual defeat of General Rommel. But his finest hour came in 1944, when he was made Field Marshal and put in charge of the land troops in Operation Overlord, directing the Normandy landings.



After the war, Field Marshal Montgomery played an instrumental role in the establishment and development of NATO. He served as the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe until 1958, when he ended his illustrious military career and peacefully retired.

[h2]Montgomery’s character model creation[/h2]



We will also tell you a bit about the model creation process. Here is some footage from the editor, that allows you to see the character through the eyes of our 3D artists.

In this picture you can see the process of fixing the character’s facial animations after motion capture:



In this picture you can see the some minor model polishing in progress:



Meet the hero:



👉 Support us by adding Strategic Mind: Fight for Freedom to your wishlist:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1381850/Strategic_Mind_Fight_for_Freedom/

In 1930, the French Maginot Line was the strongest defensive line in the entire world. Its well-designed, well-stocked and hideously expensive forts seemed impregnable. They had to be either bypassed through the dangerous, near-unpassable Ardennes, or destroyed from afar.

Modern problems require modern solutions, the Germans must have thought, and prepared for both possibilities.





Krupp K5 was a 283mm railway cannon with an effective firing range of 64 kilometers - not the most outlandish weapon in the German arsenal, but definitely one of the reasons for the persisting image of “Nazi superscience”. It could only be moved over the rail, and couldn’t rotate by itself, only facing in one direction - a glaring issue, some would think, if another modern solution didn’t counter it. A special railway “turntable” would be built on-site before firing, allowing the Krupp to rotate and change directions - for this reason, setting the cannon up took approximately 2 hours. At 15 shots per hour, this wasn’t a very time-efficient weapon, but whenever it made the shot, the enemy felt it.

Some accounts claim that the Allied soldiers facing such cannons at the Italian town of Anzio nicknamed Krupp K5 the “Anzio Express”, for the train-like sound its 7-ton shells made as they barrelled through the air.

[h2]In Fight for Freedom[/h2]



The Krupp K5 unit has a large Gun range, but it is vulnerable to enemy attacks, so it should be kept at a safe distance and well protected. One of the secondary objectives allows you to capture the Krupp K5 unit and use it against its creators.



👉 Support us by adding Strategic Mind: Fight for Freedom to your wishlist:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1381850/Strategic_Mind_Fight_for_Freedom/

It is no big secret that the Voice Over in our games is far from Hollywood production quality. This is of course unfortunate and pisses off many players who go as far as to suggest that the developers did the voice acting themselves :). Today, the Lead game designer of the Strategic Mind series Oleksandr will tell you the story of our Voice Over efforts from the Developer’s point of view, and will ask your opinion on the subject, all things considered.





We do all the VO at a local studio not far from our office, which offers us a very nice bulk discount as we record A LOT. By “a lot” I mean:

• Around 150 hours for Strategic Mind: The Pacific
  
• Around 120 hours for Strategic Mind: Blitzkrieg
  
• Around 105 hours for Strategic Mind: Spectre of Communism.

[h3]Inhouse production's upsides:[/h3]

• We get to record at a top-notch studio with good acoustics, a soundproof room, and top-notch professional equipment.
  
• The price per hour is as low as it could possibly be
  
• All VO is recorded at the same location using the same tech and the same sound technician oversees it. That means that the technical quality is consistent.
  
• The local actors often offer us very reasonable pricing - otherwise, we would just be unable to fit that much VO into the production budget.
  

[h3]Inhouse production's downsides:[/h3]

• We have to work with a very limited pool of actors that we can find in our city. That is why it is often hard to find a good fit for a character, but trust me, we are doing all reasonable efforts to find the best match we can.

So, we rent a studio, invite the actors from our contact list that we constantly increase, and do the voice-over supervision ourselves. Should there be any issues with the script/lines we can decide right there whether it is possible to adjust it or not.

We can record up to 5 hours a day at the studio - afterward, the actors and sound technicians are just too exhausted. It may sound strange, but the VO is quite an exhaustive process, and it is better to give everyone some rest and continue on the next day to not impair the production quality. Even 5 hours is long by the industry standards.

So, you can easily calculate that 150 hours in the Pacific is at least 30 working days, and that is not considering there could be some 2-3 hour days. All of that takes lots of time, effort, and managerial efforts to make it work.





Many of you would ask, why not just ask some sound recording studio in the US/EU to take care of all the casting, recording, supervision? They could just take our script and record everything for us with the best actors possible. Well, that could work if we had some really big budget for it. Recently, I have talked to one such studio and asked whether they could do it and what would be their price estimate. As I expected it turned out to be 50%-100% of our game’s overall production budget. So, basically, we could do only VO and nothing else.

[h3]The upsides:[/h3]

• Bigger actors pool and higher overall production quality.
  

[h3]The downsides:[/h3]

• 10+ times more expensive.
  
• Still requires some supervision to make sure everything proceeds as designed.

We get offers from voice actors across the world to send us the recording but then all voices would be recorded in various places, and without the proper studio the sound quality and acoustics would ruin the recording. While if we rent 10 studios all over the world to allow the actors across the world to record and try to supervise it by let us say Skype, it would be a total mess and quite an expansive mess at that.



Some players say that we should scrap the VO altogether and that it is not worth the effort. Firstly, if the VO is really that bad in your opinion, there is always an in-game option to turn it down. At least we give all the players the choice whether to listen to it or not. While we did not have the VO at all - there would have been no choice. Secondly, we think that it is much more enjoyable to listen to all the story than to read it yourself. We cannot afford the VO in all languages, of course, but if you have at least some English knowledge you could enjoy both listening to it and reading occasionally if you did not get something. Thirdly, we think it is a much more immersive experience if you can watch and hear all the characters both in cinematics and in the in-operation communications. Most of the time we test the game without the speech, as it is not ready yet, so when it is finally added, closer to release, playing the game instantly becomes a totally different experience. That is why I think it is very important that the plot-driven game has VO and allows the players to listen to the story rather than read through it.



Here are the main difficulties that we face when it comes to VO production:

• Many characters and all of them are historical figures (hard to find perfect fit)
  
• Huge amount of work overall
  
• A lot of lipsync for the cinematics adds an additional challenge.
  

We are really passionate about the project and we try our best to improve the VO quality step-by-step in every project: we select the actors better and know how to work with them, we try to create the best conditions possible for the recording etc.

What I want to tell you by this post is not that we do not want to make a better VO, but that we make all efforts possible within the limited budget we have and we will keep steadily improving VO quality, but there is no “magic wand” to make it perfect in an instant. Still, the budget limitations do not allow us to make a big leap forward. At the same time, we want to keep delivering the fully voiced game, rather than just the “interactive books”. So, it is important for us to know your thoughts on the subject:

What is better: no VO, or current quality VO?

Please, share your ideas in the comment below, and if you have any further questions on the subject - let us know and I will do my best to answer them next week.

We plan to tell you more about the VO process for Fight for Freedom in the next Dev Diaries episode.