Gaming company’s first title was the well received Project Warlock – an fps retro shooter created by a 19-year old Pole Jakub Cislo.

Pixelated Milk’s first title was the well received Regalia: of Men and Monarchs – a jrpg created by a team of close friends from Poland.

Despite these two companies’ earlier efforts were good – we couldn't be sure that our unannounced project will actually get people talking. Or even - that the story will be picked up just on the merit of a press release alone. We needed the attention.

Last year Steam saw the launch of some 8 000 games. Getting even a modicum of coverage fighting all the tripe A, triple I, sequels and next efforts from established devs is a challenge. You literally have to fight for attention among the 20 other games that show up daily. And in getting the media attention you also have to continuously combat the giants – games that continuously get coverage as they are what these websites’ audience and viewers continuously want to read and watch.

In short: it’s hard. (whatshesaid).

We felt that our announcement package was solid. A moving trailer. Non-fake, promising in-game screenshots. A less than obvious genre for a WWII game. An unknown chapter of a well known conflict. And a talented team attached. One that actually delivered a good game before.

But for the effect we hoped for we needed the attention from the biggest players out there. We wanted to show up on the radar by presenting the game through a largest possible gaming outlet.

Thanks to the intro by two great guys – Michal and Radek – we managed to get in touch with the editorial team at GameSpot, reached out and then waited. All of 24 hours when we were given the go ahead.

For one months we were going back and forth to deliver additional information, assets, work out the details of the timing and the announcement. Given the implied relationship of the trailer’s characters we were considering the announcement on 14th of February, but decided this might prove to be too much on the nose. And also diverting the attention from the actual story and setting of the game. We then pushed the release by further 12 days.

On the 25th of February, GameSpot shared a teaser Tweet, that currently (and appropriately) sits at 44,4k views.



The teaser consists of the sound of Karl's huge mortat shell hitting the Prudential building, but doesn't show too much. Or anything actually. The only visual clue was the background color that was to evoke more or less contemporary warfare setting. We were quite paranoid and felt that even one tiny detail might have everyone go - "oh. i knew it. It's obviously a Warsaw Rising game". So the sound and the color were the only hints we gave.

Oh. apart from the game's title that was prominently visible: in the Twitter handle's location. We actually alluded to that. But no-one guessed that until the next day.

And then the reveal happened.

In general you can approach making the trailer in two ways.

Either build it around the music or work the music into it. I guess the fact that we started with the visual part kind of betrays how we went about it.

Well, scratch that. We had some ideas for a song that we wanted to accompany the trailer and those were thrown around for quite a while. Some of more exotic ones were a hardcore punk, an old school rap, a pure piano and violin number, a 70s Polish song and contemporary rock hits. But nothing worked.

We listened to hundreds of songs. Proposed them, argued why they did or did not work, and moved in another direction. Quite a few at some point seemingly perfect stopped feeling so perfect for this or that reason. We felt we should go with a Polish song, but couldn’t find the right one. At some point we bounced in another direction and went for huge, anthemic hits. A long running one was David Bowie’s “Heroes” (no, not the more obvious but way less fitting “Warsaw”). Talking of obvious choices Muse’s “Uprising” also was considered for a while. There was the ambiguous “Wish you were here” by Pink Floyd that felt both right and wrong at the same time. But there was always something not working.

Enter Mariusz. The composer on WARSAW. Artist in a true meaning of the word. A musician. Game developer. And a close friend. It took him the better part of five minutes to come out with “Varsovie”.

Why was this the right choice you ask?

A Polish singer. A song about Warsaw. With contemporary sound. And an accordion.

It. Was. Perfect.

It took us around one month to get everyone on board for the project. The management of Monika Brodka and the two other co-credited authors: Bartosz Dziedzic and Quentin Carenzo went along. Mariusz remastered the track bringing out some of the instruments and our favourite - that purposefully out of tune accordion that you can hear at the beginning and the end of the announcement trailer.

That it required an extra pair of ears to introduce us to one of the largest contemporary Polish hits with Varsovie in the title is so painfully obvious it doesn't even require pointing out.

So, we locked down the deal. Had the terms negotiated. All we needed was the final green light. Which was due sometime over the next seven days.

All good right? Yes, only we had our exclusive reveal spot of WARSAW the following day. On the largest gaming website in the world. No biggie.

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...