Independence Day of Ukraine 2024 - Ukrainian War Stories
Hello
It is Oleksandr from Starni Games, and our entire team is extremely excited to share with you the joyous moment in the middle of the third year of brutal war raging in our country. It is the third Independence Day of Ukraine celebrated after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, and that in itself is an achievement. We sincerely hope that in one year this occasion will be more peaceful and the war will be over on good terms for Ukraine.
Today, we want to share with you how our team adapted to the ongoing war, as well as unveil some of our plans for the future.
When the war started back in February 2022, we spent the first few months adapting to the new reality:
Looking for bomb shelters, making reserves of food and water supplies
Living in the city with the enemy at its doorstep. (One advanced Russian group's APC was eliminated next to my colleagues' house in the middle of the city during the chaotic first few days.)
One of our team was trapped in Bucha occupied by Russian forces and was hiding with his family in a garage basement for a week before evacuating to safety via road where some civilian cars were shot to bits later on the same day.
Taking PC from office to home to be able to work. This seemingly simple action looked like a special ops operation - as public transport was unavailable and the whole city in curfew with barricades and checkpoints all across the city.
Being forced to go to a bomb shelter 10 or more times a day - turning your whole day and night into the walk to and from a shelter (or sleeping on some mats inside).
Catching some scum that wanted to exploit the situation or just was drunk and not in their right mind (in my house neighbors caught a guy trying to steal a bicycle). There were some photos of wanna-be looters tied to a tree with tape by the locals - to await the arrival of the police who had more urgent matters to attend to with the Russian troops just a few kilometers from the city. The guy we caught was saved from this fate by his mom coming over from nearby houses and “crying murder”. However, the next day we saw a photo of the very same guy tied to a tree, so his adventures did not stop at our place.
Trying to make sense of the literal flood of information, misinformation, wild rumors, and made-up stories from all around. (That was one of the things that inspired us to be very cautious when working on Ukraine War Stories not to provide any unconfirmed information - and it paid off, as some of the claims we discarded as dubious and unconfirmed (even though they were made by some officials) were later debunked as false claims and there was a scandal. We avoided being mixed up in that and provided accurate accounts.)
Going to the outskirts of the city 3 km from the Rissian positions to where my colleague lived to pick him up and invite him to live at my apartment for a while - as he lived in literally the outermost house in Kyiv - the closest to the frontline positions.
Eagerly awaiting good news and sharing every new video or crucial report.
In April 2022 Russian troops were forced to retreat from the Kyiv region, and most people on the team who left the city have returned (around 50% of the team moved from Kyiv, while 50% remained in the city during the first month). Also, we more or less adapted to the situation and returned to remote work.
In June 2022 we returned to office work and moved to a bigger office in July 2022 as the price or rental dropped due to obvious reasons - half of the city left, and we planned to hire a few more people, with our old office already being overcrowded.
In July 2022 the buildings on the way to our office and the subway station we use were hit by Russian missiles, fortunately, none on the team was affected. The subway suffered only mild damage, so was quickly reopened. Overall, from July 2022 to October 2022 we worked more or less normally (the only issue was that public transport would not always work due to air alerts) We produced Ukraine War Stories from May to October 2022.
Later in October 2022, Russia started targeting the power grind much more. It resulted in regular power outages and scheduled power supply. We had to switch to remote work - as there was little sense in sitting in an office without power for 4-5 hours. It was hard due to different parts of the city having different “shifts” of when they had power, so different people would work at different times and to share/update the work we had to have power at the same time as the office (or partially overlap).
In December 2022 we finally managed to install a power generator in the office and returned to office work, switching between the central power and generator.
In May 2022 the power outages stopped and we could work normally without using our generator, until spring 2024, when Russians again started prioritizing power supply infrastructure and destroyed many of Ukraine’s power plants and other facilities.
From spring 2024 to now there have been scheduled power outages, but now we are better prepared - we improved our power infrastructure in the office - so it now switches to batteries seamlessly when the power is out and when batteries are at 50% - the generator starts automatically to recharge them (they are also recharged by normal power supply when it is back up). Also, if anyone works from home there was time to buy some large batteries for households to store some energy for when the power is out. Not enough to cook, but enough to recharge a laptop and some other stuff.
So, now we stopped caring about air alerts (maybe 3-6 months into the war), we heard enough explosions to treat them as “weather” if they are not really close. We adapted our work to be able to do our job efficiently despite power outages internet issues and other problems that might arise. We keep going, and Ukraine keeps going.
Today, the Independence Day of Ukraine feels so much more important than before the war - as now our country truly paid a horrible price for its independence and has truly become independent. (Despite what some say about the foreign help, it does not make Ukraine someone’s puppet - we just want to survive and come out stronger than ever - so that we can live peacefully after the war.)
As many of you have noticed - making games about World War II in the middle of an ongoing war is quite ironic. We also find a lot of similarities between the war in Ukraine and the Winter War or Continuation War we showed in Strategic Mind: Spirit of Liberty. I am even thinking of making a full Spirit of Liberty playthrough with my commentary - something I usually do only for the first few battles to leave the rest to various content creators, but since the game was released a year ago I might give it a go. Please, let me know if you would like to see a Lead Game Designer behind the game to play through it without save/loads and with commentary. Right now you can watch a fresh recording of me playing the very first battle - I played it last weekend:
We are also planning to communicate more actively on the Strategic Mind series games, as it's now back under our control as a publisher. Right now, we are celebrating Independence Day and participating in the Ukrainian Games Festival on Steam, so there are discounts for all games in the series
And, of course, visit the Ukrainian Games Festival on Steam to browse over 450 games created by Ukrainian devs and celebrate this wonderful day with us all:
Also, to celebrate this year's Independence Day we released the first Demo of our upcoming project - Robot’s Fate: Alice. You can play it for free, and share your thoughts on it with us:
Please, let me know if you want me to do a full playthrough of Strategic Mind: Spirit of Liberty. Or anything else really, that you want to share with the dev team - I am always happy to hear from you!
Support Ukraine!
With Best Regards from Kyiv Oleksandr the the Starni Games team
Ukrainian Games Festival - share your thoughts!
We are extremely excited to be part of the Ukraine Games Festival on Steam and we want to know your thoughts, as fellow Steam users - what you like/dislike about the festival, so we can share your thoughts with the organizers and make the event even better next year (and hopefully properly celebrate Ukraine’s victory and war end).
Visit the Festival and let us know your thoughts - what is cool, and what could have been done better. We will share your suggestions and ideas with the organizers so that the next event will hopefully be even greater.
This year there are over 450 games created by Ukrainian teams from Indie to AAA (like STALKER 2). Check out lots of great games out there and get some of them with great discounts.
Our team is also an active participant with a solid number of games presented.
You can also play our newest game’s Demo for free and share your feedback with us via in-game form:
Only 2 days left to the Independence Day of Ukraine and we are working on a very special post for that date. So, join us on August 24th, and make sure to check the Announcements section of the Steam Community hub and your email inbox to see if you are subscribed to our newsletter.
Starni Games team
Robot's Fate: Alice - Demo OUT NOW! The Ukrainian Games Festival starts!
Hello
Ukraine’s Independence Day is fast approaching - it is celebrated on August 24th! So, this week we plan to have a lot of announcements and exciting news for you! And we will start with our biggest announcement - Robot’s Fate: Alice Demo is now available.
We are extremely excited to invite you to play Robot's Fate: Alice Demo right now for free. The Demo includes Chapter 1 of the story. To play the demo look for the green button on the Store page.
Robot's Fate: Alice dives deep into thought-provoking themes about AI and humanity. Your decisions will explore the role of self-learning AI in society, the ethical treatment of robots, and the differences between AI and humans.
What's inside:
Around 18,000 words of Chapter 1
17 meaningful choices
Numerous images illustrating the story
The very basics of the gameplay system (more unlock in Chapter 2)
10 music tracks produced exclusively for the Robot’s Fate: Alice
Ready to embark on this adventure? Play the Demo and fill in our feedback form to help us improve the game!
On top of this exciting announcement, we are also happy to invite you to the Ukrainian Games Festival on Steam which features games made by developers from Ukraine. It features all our games, and lots of other titles, ranging from AAA to Indie games filled with Ukrainian devs' creativity and limitless freedom of creation.
Our Headquarters: World War II game will be discounted as well as the Strategic Mind series. Ukraine War Stories will also be featured in the event (cannot discount a free game though ;) )
Here are our titles participating in the festival:
It has been a rough couple of years for our team, since Russia invaded Ukraine back in February 2022. Still, our team managed to continue our work in our Kyiv office, and despite all odds delivered Strategic Mind: Spirit of Liberty, Headquarters: World War II, and Ukraine War Stories.
We have been asked many times - would there be a sequel or new content for Ukraine War Stories? And the answer is really difficult for us for a number of reasons:
It was an ethically difficult project, so we were extremely careful with it and we never planned to earn any money from it, as many people could view it as profiteering on difficult topics. It is and will remain a fully free project we did as a charity effort.
We think that although instead of 3 stories there could be tens of thousands of difficult, sad, and thought-provoking stories about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we still think that the 3 stories we have do convey the general feeling and help understand the situation civilian people found themselves in. So, adding more stories would just expand the experience that is already there.
Right now, we are not sure that we want to explore the topic of the ongoing war in our games further until its conclusion.
So, the honest answer to the questions about future expansions of Ukraine War Stories - we do not know. We have a lot of interesting ideas, but for now, we think we will work on them after the war is over. At least that is our thinking right now, and things may change in the future.
Additionally, we would really appreciate your honest opinion on these topics. Do you think we should do more stories about the war right now? Should we wait for the end of the war, and create a project telling more about it after the war? Or do you have other suggestions or ideas for our team - please, let us know!
However, despite us not being ready to further explore the events of 2022-2024 right now, we want to create more text-based games. So, this brings me to an exciting announcement - our new project:
Robot’s Fate: Alice is a text-based RPG set in the future where robots with neural network AI are integral to human life. You’re Alice - a robot who becomes self-aware, while everyone around fears rogue AI. Can you survive and reconcile humanity with robots? Your choices do matter.
While Ukraine War Stories is a very unique artistic project we hold dear in our hearts, I can say that Robot’s Fate Alice has many similarities with it - except for the extremely hard topic and being based on real events. It also shares the immersive storytelling and narrative elements that we see as vital for our games. If you are curious, give it a try, as we will be releasing a free demo very soon - on August 19th. Make sure to add it to your wishlist to not miss the Demo release.
We want to keep raising difficult topics and making you think about complex subjects - not only about the problems of today (as in Ukraine War Stories), but also of tomorrow (as in Robot’s Fate: Alice).
We are very curious to hear your thoughts on our new project.
With Best Regards from Kyiv Oleksandr Sienin and the Starni Games team
Ukrainian Games Festival 2023 on Steam!
Hello
We are happy to announce that Ukraine War Stories will participate in the Ukrainian Games Festival 2023 on Steam which runs from the 18th to the 24th of August.
We invite you to check out all the great titles developed by the teams from Ukraine, many of whom (including our team) keep working in Ukraine despite the continuing war of aggression against our country.
To highlight this, we highly recommend you to check out the Death From Above project which features drone operations and donates part of its income to Ukrainian charities.
August 24 is the Independence Day of Ukraine, and that day is so much more crucial today when our independence is being questioned by the invading army on the battlefield as we speak.
But no more words - just dive right into the awesome Ukrainian games and we hope you will get to play lots of great titles throughout the festival and celebrate our countries’s existence with us!
With Best Regards from Kyiv Starni Games team
War in Ukraine - despatch 15 | The power of light
Hello, everyone!
First of all, news of how we cope with the ongoing war in Ukarine. Russia keeps its missile strike schedule making a large attack every two weeks, and some smaller ones when it pleases. The last big attack was on February 10, with 71 missiles (61 were downed by AA fire, 10 around Kyiv). Fortunately, there was no major damage in Kyiv and the power supply did not suffer much.
On the biright side, last week was the first week without the power cuts - for the first time since October 2022 Ukraine has enough power supply. Of course this may change, and we have our power generator at the ready, but this is definitely very good news. We hope that the power of the light will be victorious both in terms of power supply and in the war in general.
Also, I would like to share with you our latest updates:
Indie Cup Celebration 2023
Learn more about the Indie Cup Celebration Steam event:
Hello This week the entire Strategic Mind series participates in the Indie Cup Celebration 2023 - a Steam event where you can see many indie titles featured in the Indie Cup competition over the years.
As you can guess, all our games were battling it out in different seasons of the Indie Cup event. There is no discount on our titles at the moment, but you can see some discounted titles by other devs there. So, feel free to explore the event, as it went almost unnoticed by the general Steam audience, despite having some quite interesting titles in there.
Also, expect to hear more news from Starni tomorrow.
With Best Regards from Kyiv Starni Games team
War in Ukraine - despatch 14 | New year, new challenges
Hello
We had some winter holidays, despite the new Russian missile and drone attacks on New Year's eve day and night and the following night. Two more attacks on the 14th and 26th of January. Still, life in Kyiv seems to run unperturbed and the power supply issues seem to gradually diminish. Having a power generator in the office - we have no problems whatsoever. So, we are really happy that this year we can work more or less normally.
Here is a summary of some key news from our team of the last month:
Starni Games 2022 Report
If you have missed our yearly report - make sure to check it out here: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1474770/view/3602348353234222462?l=english
Dev Q&A #3
Here is our latest Dev Q&A: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1474770/view/3655267554774248669?l=english
Recent units posts: Units In Spirit of Liberty #5 | Finnish artillery 1939-1945 https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1474770/view/3602348353259206353?l=english Units In Spirit of Liberty #6 | Scouts & Kaukopartio https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1474770/view/3644009189550887218?l=english
Recent scenario overviews: Scenario overview #3: Battle of Suomussalmi and Raate Road https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1474770/view/3655267554752408995?l=english Scenario overview #4: Battle of Viipuri Bay https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1474770/view/3644009824649755060?l=english
With Best Regards from Kyiv Starni Games team
Dev Q&A #3
Hello
Dev Q&A #3 has finally arrived on our YouTube channel: Watch Q&A #3
In the video, you will see the summary of the year 2022 for the Starni Games team and answers to the questions you sent us via the google form.
I hope it answers your questions, and if you have more, we will have another Dev Q&A in the summer of 2023, so I will be happy to answer more questions. Also, feel free to ask us on Discord any time.
With Best Regards from Kyiv
Oleksandr
Starni Games 2022 Report
Hello guys!
It’s been a difficult year for everyone in Ukraine. So, our key achievements for this year are:
Everyone on the team is alive and safe (to the extent you could be safe in a city that occasionally suffers missile strikes)
The company survived - we continued our operations, managed to keep the team together, and returned to our Kyiv office
That is already good enough on its own, but we are happy to say we managed to do even more, despite all difficulties we also managed the following:
We made good progress in the development of Headquarters: World War II and kept working on Strategic Mind: Spirit of Liberty
We self-funded and self-published a fully free charity project about the war in Ukraine from civilains points of view - Ukraine War Stories
Our team grew from 15 to 25 people. Now we are quite a large team (which we are still getting used to)
Installed a power generator and heaters to make sure we have a power supply and internet connection even if the whole city or our district is out of power - ensured our office is autonomous. This allows us to look more confidently into 2023.
Donated substantial amount of money to help Ukraine both as a company and as individuals
Starni Games team
Now let us look a bit closer at our team. Here is a Starni team introductory video made by Slitherine team for the Headquarters: World War II presentation. We are very excited that despite the war our team has only grown stronger and is ready to deliver more and better content in 2023 than ever before.
Starni Games Q&A #3 - ask us
We remain very open to our community - so we would be more than happy to answer any and all of your questions. Please, send your questions through this form.
We will record a video answering all of your questions in early January.
Also, join our Discord server to talk with us and other players at any time.
Headquarters: World War II
Throughout the year our biggest project was Headquarters: World War II and we are making really good progress with it. You can see that yourself if you watch the recent presentation at the Slitherine Next event. Also, if you like the project and want to help us with the final polish - sign up for the Beta test of the game here.
Strategic Mind: Spirit of Liberty
We keep working on the project, but we have to admit that we have some difficulties in organizing the VO as most of teh people we worked with are now unavailable for various war-related reasons and we do not have the budget to just order it somewhere, so we are looking to solve these problems while also working on the remaining levels and aspects of the game we could. We have concrete plans for release in 2023, but we cannot announce it yet, as some aspects of the development remain unresolved at this stage.
We will continue to make regular updates about our development progress, Here is one of the historical music tracks from the upcoming Strategic Mind: Spirit of Liberty for your listening pleasure.
We are really happy we managed to create a highly reviewed project (88% Positive reviews at the time of writing, which is a miracle in itself considering the sensitive nature of the project) about the war in Ukraine in the middle of the said war. It is a fully free charity project that our whole team is really proud of - so we invite you to have a look and spread the word: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1985510/Ukraine_War_Stories/
Check out our recent report about Ukraine War Stories.
War in Ukraine
While the war in Ukraine continues, we managed to adapt and keep working even in these difficulty conditions. You can learn more about how that went by checking out our War in Ukraine Despatches on the community hub - there is the most recent one.
We hope that Ukraine’s territories will be liberated by UAF and the war will be over as soon as possible. With that in mind, we also should not be overly optimistic or careless and should be ready and resolved to work in wartime conditions as long as it is required.
Stand with Ukraine!
Extra details for newsletter subscribers
We want this report to be concise, so if you are looking for even more details and insides about the Starni Gamers team - make sure you subscribed to our newsletter (Subscribe button could be found in any of the Strategic Mind games, and if you already subscribed you do not have to do anything extra, just wait for the letter) to receive a letter with an extra addition to this report.
The letter will be sent out on 30th January.
Happy holidays!
Our team wishes you all happy holidays and looks forward to seeing you all in 2023. We hope you will spend a great time with your family and friends, while also refreshing your body and soul and getting ready for the new and exciting year 2023.
With Best Wishes from Kyiv Oleksandr and the Strani Games team
