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 chronological order, with the oldest games at the
top. So, if you want to check out the really interesting stuff, you'll probably
want to scroll right down to the bottom. On the other hand, if you'd like to
take a trip through my games career, start at the top...
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. At City
Interactive, our game manuals were usually limited to about a page or two
:P.
Graphics material: A pair of screenshots. Click on
the images to see a bigger version.
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.
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.
Pax
Galaxia (Dio Games, 2003)
Platform & genre: PC, real-time strategy game
Game website: http://www.diogames.com/PaxGalaxia.html
My role: Game manual writer, level co-designer, QA tester
After TV Manager, one of the programmers we'd worked with at
Niels Bauer Games, Diodor Bitan, decided he wanted to try programming a
new game all by himself. The design he came up with was Pax Solaris
(eventually renamed to Pax Galaxia, for fear of... people confusing
it with Sun's Solaris computer systems :) ) - an incredibly simple,
easy-to-play, and at the same time, amazingly complex real-time strategy
game. The game is played simply using the mouse cursor and one
mouse button, but the tactical possibilities are endless.
This darned game is really quite addictive, and it's thoroughly fun in
multiplayer, too. Even after so many years, Pax Galaxia still has a
small but very hardcore fanbase.
Graphics material: A pair of screenshots. Click on
the images to see a bigger version.
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.
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 :) ) 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.
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: Fan-made video. I believe this video
may be constructed out of movie clips that we'd originally made available
via the game's website, but I'm not sure.
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.
Wings
of Honour: Battles of the Red Baron (City Interactive, 2006)
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 flight action 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.
Combat
Wings: Battle of Britain (City Interactive, 2006)
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. Unfortunately, we neglected one detail - when the
original game concept contains the Battle of Britain, you can't just cut
out that battle merely because you know you can do something else better.
The Battle of Britain is hugely marketable. And so, after a week, somewhat
deflated, we threw out what we'd already done, and went back to the
drawing board...
...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.
Sadly, this was also the final project for our 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
flight action 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 Arcade (City Interactive, 2007)
Platform & genre: PC, flight action game
Game website: not available
My role: Lead game designer
After completing Wings of Honour: Battles of the Red
Baron and Combat Wings: Battle of Britain, it was decided that
special versions of both games would be developed for internet
distribution - the requirement being that they should a) take up 20MB or
less (before installation), and b) have an even more "arcade"
feel. How do you make an arcade game even more arcade? Well, we managed
it.
...Actually, WoH:BotRB benefited a bit from this
update. It lost one of the campaigns and the cockpit mode, but I
experimented a bit with the gameplay. I redesigned the WoH:BotRB missions
to take advantage of the improvements made during CW:BoB (e.g., the
speed booster, and four damage zones per plane). More importantly, I
vastly boosted the enemy gun damage, reducing the bullet speed (to let the
player dodge them a bit). The end result? We were able to make dogfights
more challenging while reducing the incredible swarms of enemy to
manageable numbers. If it wasn't for the lack of cockpits, this would be
my preferred version of WoH:BotRB.
Graphics material: There are no video materials or
screenshots for this game - it looked almost identical to the original.
Combat
Wings: Battle of Britain Arcade Edition (City Interactive, 2007)
Platform & genre: PC, flight action 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.
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 flight action 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.
Battlestrike:
Force of Resistance (City Interactive, 2007)
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 ;).
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.
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).
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 - I suppose it was average by world standards, but it was definitely
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.
A project that ends with countless days of overtime, working weekends
and an all-nighter is bound to leave you exhausted. Well, how about three
of them in a row? My last vacation had been right before Terrorist
Takedown 2. Subsequently, we went straight from Terrorist Takedown
2 to Code of Honor 2, and during that latter project, we took a
sidestep to finish off Operation Thunderstorm, too. Come to think
of it, we also finished the fourth episode of Standoff during this time
period, so make that four "crunch-times" in a row :). In short,
it's been a long year, and I needed a break - but I wasn't getting one.
Not yet. First, there was Royal Marines Commando.
The project was ultimately to be commanded by one of our freshly-hired
project managers - this was at a time when City was expanding at full
pelt. My job was to get the project started, train the project manager,
and basically hold his hand for as long as needed. After a few weeks,
however, the project manager in charge of SAS: Secure Tomorrow was
fired, and the guy I was training was transferred off to lead that project
to completion (which is a nice compliment for me - they didn't want to
entrust SAS to the other new project manager, trained by the guy
they fired).
So, I started training another new project manager. Meanwhile, on the
horizon, that horrid event known as the Leipzig game show loomed yet
again, and naturally, there had to be a demo. All this meant that instead
of merely kicking off the project, I ended up designing most of it before
I finally got my vacation.
I must say, I actually deeply regret leaving this project. I don't know
if I could have survived to the end of this project without a vacation,
but I definitely regret not being able to lead it to completion. The
project went on for a few months after I got back, but I would no longer
be leading it, instead moving on to a different project (...and then
finally leaving the company).
I rather liked the game's story (...with caveats - remember, we're
still talking about a budget production here!), and the intro is probably
my favouritest bit of cinematics from any of the City titles I'd worked
on, especially the moment when the City logo turns into a submarine
periscope. And the game had Churchill in it - how fun is that?
Regrettably, after planning out the overall story and writing some of the
dialogues, my vacation started, so I didn't get to polish the final
script. A pity...
Graphics material: Fan-made gameplay video. Be sure to also
check out the original game trailer on the game's website, above - it's
not on YouTube, so I can't embed it here.
Coming back from my vacation, I was assigned to my least-favourite
project at City. Armed Forces Corp. was not my kind of story - I
felt the story was contrived and unoriginal. Corporations fighting it out?
Hooray for cyberpunk... my attempts to turn the story towards a more
government-based story (while keeping the core concept of the player being
a paid mercenary) failed dismally. Our newly-hired producer claimed that
corporate espionage was the trendy thing. I suppose that's why the Call
of Duty: Modern Warfare series is famous for its storyline dealing
with Coca Cola commandos raiding Pepsi. No, wait...
At the same time, I was negotiating with my boss about a pay rise.
During my vacation, I had made up my mind to leave the company by the end
of the year, but I would stay longer if the pay rise was good enough -
otherwise, I'd leave with the end of the project.
I had also decided that, in the meantime, I would work - you know,
normally. I didn't come in early (ok, ok, I never came in early
during my entire City career - when you leave two hours late in the
evening, you figure you've got an excuse to arrive ten minutes late in the
morning), and I left the moment the clock hit 17:00.
This "drop in performance" was noted, and combined with some
disagreements over staff management (as a loyal employee, I'd always been
willing to point out when I felt the company was making a mistake...),
finally resulted in my boss deciding not to give me any pay rise at all.
More than that - he told me that since I was bound to leave under these
circumstances, they had decided to dismiss me right there and then. My
performance, apparently, was so dismal, that they also decided to insist
on giving me a two month contract as a consultant, to continue training
all those new project managers :). And so, I handed Armed Forces Corp.
to one project manager, and set out to train yet another (my third!) fresh
project manager working on Battlestrike: Force of Resistance 2...
My involvement with Armed Forces Corp. does have a small post-scriptum.
A few months after I'd left City, the project manager hired me as a
freelancer to translate the game's dialogues into English.
Graphics material: Original game trailer.
Battlestrike:
Force of Resistance 2 (City Interactive, 2009)
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 three titles that I've been involved with, but never
played - the others being Armed Forces Corp. (see above) and the
never-published 'SWAT' (see below).
Graphics material: Original game trailer.
'SWAT'
(working title; City Interactive, 2009)
Platform & genre: PC, first-person shooter
Game website: not available
My role: Freelance writer (proofreading & translation into
English).
This project, developed under the working title 'SWAT' (I don't believe
there was ever any official title - the game was never announced to the
public), was the story of a police SWAT unit fighting to put an end to an
out-of-control gang war in New York. I was involved only at the end of the
project - once again, the game's dialogues had been all written in Polish,
and I was asked to translate them into English.
...This game was then cancelled. This happened very late in the
production cycle - as I understand it, the project was nearly complete,
approaching the final deadline. I do not know the exact reasons for this
decision. Subsequently, portions of the game's levels were re-made into Code
of Honor 3: Desperate Measures (2009). However, since the dialogues
I'd translated were not in any way recycled, I don't claim any credit for
that latter title.
Graphics material: No video or screenshots are available.
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 most of
the decade, it's still a fan-made mod that remains my greatest
achievement...
Graphics material: Fan-made gameplay video. I am actually
working on a trailer for Standoff. In the meantime, there are
a few fan-made videos floating about online, so here's one of them.
Subsequent
projects (2008 and onwards)
Since leaving City Interactive, I have worked on two or three projects
of my own, as well as working as an external writer on multiple projects,
mainly for City Interactive.
For the time being, I will not be providing any information here about
any of these projects. Some of them are still in development, and some of
them I hope to eventually return to - as such, it would be premature to
reveal too much about them.
