Strategic Mind: Fight for Freedom
War in Ukraine - despatch 10 | Steam NEXT Fest, and other news
Recently we are having even more good news from the frontlines, raising everyone’s morale in Ukraine and across the world.
Despite difficult times for our country, our team keeps growing, surpassing the 20 people mark, which is also very inspiring and allows us to produce even more high quality content for you.
Ukraine War Stories at Steam NEXT Fest
We are really happy that our free charity project - Ukraine War Stories - is presented at Steam NEXT Fest 3-10 October.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1985510/Ukraine_War_Stories/
If you have not done so yet - feel free to check out lots of free demos of the upcoming games at the festival. There are still a few days left.
We already see some first results, and the number of new wishlist additions fills us with hope that the project will be well-received on Steam. That is very important for us - we will not earn any money from it, but we will know that our work of passion was not in vain and that many people across the world indeed played the game and learned the real-time story of the people of Ukraine.
If you are interested in our project - please join us on 18th October for the full release.
We are also learning how to best present our projects at such events and will try do our best with the Strategic Mind: Spirit of Liberty as well at future festivals.
Stay tuned for future despatches.
With Best Regards from Kyiv
Starni Games team
War in Ukraine - despatch 6 | Ukrainian Games Festival
I will start with a bit of company news. Last week we have moved to a new office, just across the street from the old one, where we had been located last 4 years. We are now hiring more people and having 15 people in a 49 sq m room was already not very comfortable. The new office is significantly larger and is overall a better facility. With our team growing to 20+ people that is just what we need.
It also does not have a significant impact on our budget, since after the war started rental and real estate prices in Kyiv dropped dramatically, sometimes as much as 50%. So we found a much better place for a similar cost. It probably would become more expensive in time, but it allows us to hire more people now and reinforce our efforts on all our projects.
Our team is growing now, and we hope that it will speed up our production time and allow us to ensure better quality. It would also enable us to work on larger and more complex projects in the future.
Now to other news.
Ukrainian Games Festival is now live!
24th July is an Independence Day of Ukrainer, and this year it got a dedicated Steam event. Check out over 200 games made by the devs from Ukraine - I bet you would be surprised. More details in our dedicated post here:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1381850/view/3255560404150317279
Ukraine War Stories gets new languages (now 11 languages in the Demo)
We are really happy that several volunteer teams assembled and decided to help us add extra languages
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1985510/Ukraine_War_Stories/
Discounts on all our games end in 2 days
During the Ukrainian Games Festival, we have all our games with nice discounts - so it could be a good time to add something new to your collection.
Stay tuned for future despatches.
With best regards from Kyiv
Starni Games team
Ukrainian Games Festival is now live!
We are extremely excited to announce that all our games participate in Ukrainian Games Festival (August 22-28) - an event featuring over 200 games made by Ukrainian devs, that is timed to happen during the Independence Day of Ukraine (August 24).
All our released games are having nice discounts, while all future projects showcase their page and will hopefully gather some extra audience.
Please check out the event - there are loads of cool games:
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/38747278-Indie-Cup/sale/ukrainiangames2022
We have also gathered a quick overview of our participation in the event:
UPCOMING GAMES
Ukrainian War Stories
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1985510/Ukraine_War_Stories/
Headquarters: World War II
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1840800/Headquarters_World_War_II/
Strategic Mind: Spirit of Liberty
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1474770/Strategic_Mind_Spirit_of_Liberty/
RELEASED GAMES
Strategic Mind: Fight for Freedom
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1381850/Strategic_Mind_Fight_for_Freedom/
Strategic Mind: Spectre of Communism
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1341170/Strategic_Mind_Spectre_of_Communism/
Strategic Mind: Blitzkrieg
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1200330/Strategic_Mind_Blitzkrieg/
Strategic Mind: The Pacific
https://store.steampowered.com/app/991810/Strategic_Mind_The_Pacific/
Panzer Strategy
https://store.steampowered.com/app/769950/Panzer_Strategy/
FREE DEMOS
Ukraine War Stories Demo
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1985510/Ukraine_War_Stories/
Strategic Mind: Blitzkrieg Demo
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1200330/Strategic_Mind_Blitzkrieg/
Strategic Mind: Spectre of Communism Demo
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1341170/Strategic_Mind_Spectre_of_Communism/
Strategic Mind: Fight for Freedom Demo
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1381850/Strategic_Mind_Fight_for_Freedom/
Make sure you check out other Ukrainian games - we bet you would be pleasantly surprised!
Please, let us know in the comments which Ukranian game or games you like the best!
With best regards from Kyiv,
Starni Games team
War in Ukraine - despatch 5 | Company news
The last couple of weeks was relatively quite in Kyiv and we did not see new missile strikes, but the other cities in Ukraine were not so lucky… Some were hit quite badly, with numerous civilian casualties.
Despite the turmoil of teh war, there is a lot of things going on for our team right now. First of all new have got a number of new talanets on board and are looking for more. That also means that our current office is becoming too small for the growing team, and we are looking for a new one nearby. We will see how that goes, and I will be back with more details as soon as things will settle down a bit.
Ukraine War Stories - a fully free visual novel about the war in Ukarine
Last week we have announced our new charity project - Ukraine War Stories. It is fully free and we are doing it to spread the accurate information about what is going on in Ukraine right now.
More information here
Please, support our undertaking by playing the Demo and wishlisting the full game. The more wishlists the game gets - the more people on Steam will see it.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1985510/Ukraine_War_Stories/
Discounts for all Strategic Mind series this weekend, ending July 24
If you have not played all Strategic Mind titles yet - it is your chance to grab the remaining ones at a bargain:
Strategic Mind: The Pacific - 40%
https://store.steampowered.com/app/991810/Strategic_Mind_The_Pacific/
Strategic Mind: Blitzkrieg - 40%
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1200330/Strategic_Mind_Blitzkrieg/
Strategic Mind: Spectre of Communism - 35%
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1341170/Strategic_Mind_Spectre_of_Communism/
Strategic Mind: Fight for Freedom - 30%
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1381850/Strategic_Mind_Fight_for_Freedom/
Save up an additional 20% on top of the discounts above if you get Strategic Mind Complete Collection bundle:
https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/16499/Strategic_Mind_Complete_Collection/
With best regards from Kyiv
Starni Games team
Ukraine War Stories — our new game announcement
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1985510/Ukraine_War_Stories/
The full game will have 3 stories, one of them — Hostomel — is available right now in the Demo. The second story is about Bucha — the town next to Hostomel (another suburb of Kyiv), where Oleksandr Androshchuk from Starni Games team hid in the garage basement for a whole week under the Russian occupation. Luckily, his family managed to evacuate safely, but before they did, they've seen what Russian occupation was really like. Some of what Oleksandr had told us was also incorporated into the story.
As a Ukraine-based company (that still works from our Kyiv office) we could not sit idly by when the Russian Army stood some 3 km from Kyiv. Our main goal now is to spread the word about what is happening in Ukraine and present a correct and truthful account of the events.
Please support the project by adding it to your Wishlist, and spread the word about it among your friends. We do not gain any money from it, but we do hope that a lot of people across the world will see it on Steam and give it a try. The more people wishlist the game, the more will see it during the release time.
With best regards from Kyiv
Starni Games team
War in Ukraine - despatch 4 | Destruction near the office
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
War in Ukraine - despatch 2
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:
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
War in Ukraine - despatch 1
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
Listen to the Säkkijarven Polkka tack from the Strategic Mind: Spirit of Liberty
Today, we reveal Säkkijärven polkka - the second historical track from the Strategic Mind: Spirit of Liberty soundtrack, recorded by Daraba studio. Säkkijärven polkka is a well-known Finnish folk tune that got new life and meaning during the dramatic events of World War II. It got the lyrics sometimes sung with the tune, which stated that while Säkkijärvi itself might have been lost (ceded to the Soviet Union in 1940), the Finns at least still had the polka.
Listen to the "Säkkijärven polkka" track on our YouTube channel:
[previewyoutube="qa8BnE0QBU4;full"]
During the Continuation War, the Finnish Army discovered that the retreating Soviets had scattered radio-controlled mines throughout the re-captured city of Viipuri. These mines were set off when a three-note chord was played on the frequency the radio was tuned to. In order to thwart the enemy's goal, Fins started transmitting the Säkkijärvi polka, so that the frequency of the triads used by the enemy was interfered with to the point that the mines were completely unusable.
The Polka surely bolstered the troops' morale during the hardships of the protracted war.
Thus, this boisterous folk tune became the war-time song and is highly regarded to this day.
If you want to get access to the whole Strategic Mind series soundtrack with all the high-quality recordings - feel free to check out our Franchise soundtrack on Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1358280/Strategic_Mind_Franchise_Soundtrack/
Have a good day!
Starni Games team
One Day Left! Save Up to 85% on All Our Games on 2022 Lunar New Year Sale!
Save up to 85% on all our games until February 3rd:
• Save 85% on Panzer Strategy
https://store.steampowered.com/app/769950/Panzer_Strategy/
• Save 40% on Strategic Mind: The Pacific:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/991810/Strategic_Mind_The_Pacific/
• Save 35% on Strategic Mind: Blitzkrieg
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1200330/Strategic_Mind_Blitzkrieg/
• Save 30% on Strategic Mind: Spectre of Communism
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1341170/Strategic_Mind_Spectre_of_Communism/
• Save 25% on Strategic Mind: Fight for Freedom
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1381850/Strategic_Mind_Fight_for_Freedom/
You can also get an additional 20% discount on top of those above if you purchase the bundle:
Strategic Mind Complete Collection
https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/16499/Strategic_Mind_Complete_Collection/