Ukraine War Stories
War in Ukraine - despatch 13 | Power generator saves the day
Last two months have been rough for our team, same as for just about everyone else in Ukraine, due to the constant missile and kamikaze drone attacks on the power supply system across entire country. As I explained in previous despatches this led to working from home with a very unsteady working hours (often at night) and communication delays as different people would be available at different times.
To be able to participate in Headquarters: World War II live presentation I had to go to coworking space with my laptop, as there was Stralink internet access unaffected by unpredictable power cuts. This was necessary to make sure I would not drop out in the middle of the livestream.
Now, all these problems are tackled, as we finally got ourselves a decent power generator installed near our office. It allows us to run all PCs and a couple other devices while there is no power, and then switch back to main supply when its back up, There is still problem with the cold though, as the temperature outside could go as low as -10 *C, while the centralized heating in the office building does not work this winter. When the centralized power is up, we can use various heaters to make it nice and warm, but when the power is off and we run the generator - we cannot use much more than our PCs alone. So, to counter that we installed a powerful gas heater as well. The first few days it was cold, while we were still working out everything with the heating, but now the situation should improve.
The best thing though, is that we are together again and can work out any issues and discuss things very fast and efficient as before. That means we should be back to our normal production speed after the holidays period, despite the ongoing war. We often lack the power at home, which is uncomfortable, but at least now our work is secured and we can continue uninterrupted.
Starni Games news
Sign ups for Headquarters: World War II Beta now open
Make sure to watch the recent Headquarters: World War II presenation during the Slitherine Next event and if you want to help us make the game better before the official trelease - make sure you sign up for the beta here.
The Headquarters section of the event had the following structure:
- Intro video
- Strani team presentation
- Single-player operation gameplay video with dev commentary
- 4-players multiplayer match highlights with dev commentary
So, there is really a lot of juicy content there and a quite in-depth discussion of the game. I think that is the first time our team prepared a footage of a multiplayer match by 4 Devs recorded by each person to create the shortened “highlights” version and present the multiplayer to the audience.
Please, let us know what you think about the project and its presentation. Your feedback is really important for our team
Submit your questions for Dev Q&A #3
We will soon hold end of the year Q&A, so if you have questions about any of our projects (Strategic Mind series, Headuarters: World War II, or Ukraine War Stories) or about our team – please send them to us through this form.
Ukraine War Storiers 2 months after release review
Check out how our fully free charity project covering the war in Ukarine from civilians point of view is faring here.
Scenario overview #2: The Battle of Tolvajarvi
If you have missed our recent Strategic Mind: Spirit of Liberty scenario review, you can found it here.
Steam Winter Sale has begun!
Last but not least, Steam Winter Sale is ongoing with all Strategic Mind titles at there all-time biggesrt discounts up and running until January 5th. We know that Strategic Mind could be a very tricky Chirsmas present to figure out, but if you know some hardcore wargamers (including yourselves) who are up to the task, consider making their holidays even more exciting.
See all discounts
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/
Support us by adding Strategic Mind: Spirit of Liberty to your wishlist
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1474770/Strategic_Mind_Spirit_of_Liberty/
Merry Christmas!
Our whole team wishes you, your family and friends Merry Chistmas and hopes you will have great time during the holidays.
With Best Regards from Kyiv
Starni Games team
2 months after the release
It is time to have a look at how the release of Ukraine War Stories went and how the situation changed since our previous update over a month ago.
It has been tough two months for our team, because Russia started actively terrorizing Ukraine’s civilian population by making regular missile strikes against the power supply system of Ukraine, trying to undermine power, water, heating, and internet supply across the entire country. We usually tell more about that in our War in Ukraine despatches, here on the Steam community hub.
We are really happy that many people from all across the world have played the game and left mostly positive reviews - as of the time we are writing this post Ukraine War Stories has 88% positive reviews(all-time), and 94% in recent reviews. For such a sensitive topic, we think this is an outstanding result and you - the players' community - made it possible.
In terms of regional distribution, the situation changed a bit due to the influx of lots of new players. Right now the top 25 countries by downloads according to Steam statistics are:
Country Total downloads share
Ukraine 19.1%
China 17.0%
Japan 15.7%
Poland 6.8%
United States 5.8%
Germany 4.6%
Taiwan 3.3%
Korea, Republic of 1.9%
United Kingdom 1.8%
Brazil 1.6%
France 1.3%
Canada 1.1%
Czech Republic 1.1%
Hong Kong 1.1%
Russian Federation 0.9%*
Belarus 0.8%
Kazakhstan 0.8%
Turkey 0.7%
Romania 0.7%
Netherlands 0.6%
Australia 0.5%
Italy 0.5%
Spain 0.5%
Finland 0.5%
Sweden 0.5%
*Store page is unavailable in Steam region Russia, due to Ukraine War Stories supposedly violating Russian law.
We have also received offers from volunteers to help with adding even more languages. We are happy to do so, although I must apologize for the delays in our communication caused by the power cuts. We will renew our efforts to add more languages and see what we can achieve next year. We will keep you updated on our and the volunteers’ joint efforts.
Also, we were happy to receive the Uncut gems award at the recent DevGAMM conference as a token of recognition and support. We hope Ukraine War Stories will be featured in more events next year.
We wish all of you Merry Christmas and happy holidays!
We hope that next year will bring an end to this criminal war against Ukraine allowing our country and people to live in peace. You all help to make that happen a little bit sooner by having a look at Ukraine War Stories and helping us spread the information about the project. Our whole team is extremely grateful to every one of you.
If you would like to know more details about our team and see some extra media coverage of the project (including photos of our colleague’s basement under the garage where he and his family were hiding in Bucha) or learn more about its development - make sure you subscribe to our newsletter, as we will send you some exclusive materials soon via email.
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With Best Regards from Kyiv
Starni Games team
Dev Q&A #3 – submit your questions
We will soon hold end of the year Q&A, so if you have questions about any of our projects (Strategic Mind series, Headuarters: World War II, or Ukraine War Stories) or about our team – please send them to us through the form below:
https://forms.gle/sSXz2uxpzazifJZa9
We will also have more news and end of the year news updates for you in the coming days.
With Best Regards from Kyiv
Starni Games team
War in Ukraine - despatch 12 | Power cuts will not stop us
This post was supposed to happen much earlier, but it is really hard to keep up in terms of workload and communication due to the following events:
Starting in October Russia started targeting the power supply infrastructure across the entire Ukraine, conducting hundreds of missile strikes (as much as 70-100 missiles a day on some days). This led to the deterioration of the power supply in Ukraine, which did not have been the case in Kyiv during the first 7 months of the war. Even when the Russian army was 3 km from the city, and their artillery could target the outskirts, I had both a power and internet connection in my apartment. Now, I often do not.
First, the power supply was offered at one schedule, and we adjusted our office hours to fit that. Then the schedule became even worse, and we had to switch to working from home to try and catch the hours with a power supply whenever we can. So, throughout November we were struggling to catch our rhythm and keep our work and communication efficient despite all the problems with power and the internet. We keep working on all our projects, but our team was obviously affected. I would say that November was the most difficult month after March when the war just started, no one knew what to expect and enemy troops were near Kyiv.
There is still hope though. We are working to install the power generator and all the necessary equipment to make our office self-sufficient. We expect that we will be able to return to office work soon. We do hope that it would help us bring the work back up to speed. So we are really looking forward to that, while still doing everything we could under the difficult circumstances.
Now let us move on to other news.
Join Headquarters: World War II Discord server
We invite you to join the dedicated Headquarters: World War II Discord server where you can talk with other players and ask the devs whatever you like. We hope that you will also be able to find players for multiplayer matches there once the game is available.
Click to join
Watch Slitherine NEXT on 13th December
A good opportunity to learn more about Headquarters: World War II. More information is here.
Ukraine War Stories wins Uncut Gems award
We are happy to share with you yet another token of recognition for Ukraine War Stories at the GevGAMM Awards - the Uncut Gems award.
News updates recap:
Units In Spirit of Liberty #2 | Landsverk L-182 Armored Car
Scenario overview #1: The Battle of Taipale
Units In Spirit of Liberty #3 | Jaeger
Screenshot Saturday #19
The day the Winter War began 83 years ago
Units In Spirit of Liberty #4 | Karjalan pelastaja (“The Saviour of Karelia”)
Starni Winter sale ends soon
Do not forget to grab the missing Strategic Mind titles for your collection - the discount will end soon.
https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/16499/Strategic_Mind_Complete_Collection/
More news coming up.
The whole team is really thankful for your support - that helps us keep our spirits high and continue working hard on the upcoming games.
With Best Regards from Kyiv
Starni Games team
Uncut Gems award at GevGAMM Awards
Thanks to the DevGAMM jury for showing interest in Ukraine War Stories.
With Best Regards from Kyiv
Starni Games team
Three weeks after the release
In these few weeks, which already feel like a long time, we have gotten lots of positive feedback with the overall user rating staying between 85 and 86 percent and the number of user reviews approaching the 400 mark.
Our team is very happy that our work was not in vain and that many players found our project important and worth their time.
The overall players' composition did not change a lot since the previous update, so we will give you more data on that after 1 month has passed.
We have also got more volunteers to do new languages, so the language count is likely to further grow over time. Although, I must say we were a bit slowed down in our communications recently because of problems with the power supply in Kyiv.
The last few weeks were also very tricky for our team, as there are daily scheduled power outages in Kyiv and other regions of Ukraine. We had to switch to remote work and adjust our working hours to a different schedule every day, plus many decided to work at night when there are usually no problems with the power supply and internet connection. Still, our problems look minor when compared to what people in occupied territories have suffered… We are sure that Ukraine would pull through the hard times eventually.
Also, there is some good news coming from the Kherson area. So, looking forward to the only regional center city occupied after 24 Feb 2022 being soon liberated by the UAF.
Will release a more detailed outlook of the first month's results next week.
With Best Regards from Kyiv
Strani Games team
Update 1.1
Here is the changelog for the 1.1 update:
Gameplay changes:
Removed choice requirement for “Tell them what they want to hear” during the interrogation in Bucha. Now you can select that choice.
Localization changes:
Various fixes in Japanese localization
Various fixes in Ukrainian localization
Various fixes in Russian localization
Most fixes are based on players' feedback, so if you see any issues - let us know and we will try to fix everything asap.
With Best Regards from Kyiv
Starni Games team
1 week after the release
Today is exactly 1 week after the Ukraine War Stories release and we want to share some first results and information about how it went.
First of all, many thanks to everyone who downloaded and played the game. All our efforts would have been nothing without you.
Secondly, thanks again to all the absolutely awesome volunteers who translated the game into more languages than we initially planned.
Thirdly, thank you very much to everyone who put their time and effort into writing constructive feedback on the game, reviewing it on Steam, and reporting all issues that should be fixed to the Devs on Steam or Discord.
The release went well, more or less as we expected, up until the Japanese Twitter exploded with discussions of the game. After that, the release went even better. We are really happy that many Japanese and Asian media have covered the release - that helped us a lot. However, the key thing was that the people of Japan supported the project very actively by sharing information about it - and thus reaching the top 1 by the number of players - which is unusual on Steam. Thank you very much to all the Japanese players who supported us!
Here are the top 10 countries by the number of players during the first week:
Japan 30.7%
China 14.7%
Ukraine 14.4%
United States 5.0%
Poland 4.7%
Taiwan 4.2%
Germany 3.5%
United Kingdom 1.8%
Republic of Korea 1.4%
Hong Kong 1.2%
In our previous games China and US were always the top two countries by the number of players. This time Japan (Arigato gozaimasu!) and Ukraine (for obvious reasons) became contenders for the top positions as well. Despite being Ukrainian devs, we always had a very low percentage of players from Ukraine in our games - as they are a small percentage of the Steam audience. That is why we are also really happy that a lot of people in Ukraine learned about the project and supported our initiative.
We also have much more players from Poland and Taiwan than usual - thank you very much for the support!
If you do not see your country on the list - do not worry, there are plenty of people playing from virtually all countries across the world. We will do one more report in two weeks with more countries and a more detailed breakdown.
Now back to the project development. One day after release we made a quick fix with some typos in different languages. We plan to do one more update tomorrow with the rest of the reported issues being fixed. If you see any problem in the game - feel free to reach out to us and let us know.
Will be back with more news soon
With Best Regards from Kyiv
Starni Games team
Developer’s Gameplay
We invite you a watch broadcast with one of the devs playing or rather reading through the Demo with commentary about his personal experience during this war and how it could be related to what is told in the novel.
Let us know what you think in the comments.
If you have missed the beginning you can find the full recording on our YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkguopRJv9Y&t=2s
With best regards from Kyiv
Starni Games team
OUT NOW!
It is Oleksandr from Starni Games. Ukraine War Stories' full version is finally available on Steam, and our whole team is very excited to hear your feedback on the full version of the game.
Right now there are constant missile and kamikaze drone attacks on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities. Many districts of Kyiv, located on the left riverbank of Dnieper, are out of power supply today (October 18th) - as these strikes are aimed mainly at power plants and infrastructure. So, to avoid being unable to release the game on time due to the power supply being cut off, I am working from home today, and part of the team from the office, so that doubles our chances of releasing the game - we hope my home and our office would not be out of power at the same time and the release would go smoothly. (Steam dev tools require the manual push of the button - we cannot schedule the “auto” release) As I write this there are 24 minutes left until release, and I still have the power supply, so I think my chances are high. :)
Thank you for showing interest in the project and we hope you would let us know what you think about it.
If you want to know more about the team and the project - check out these videos:
Dev Q&A #1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCZMaJzIgQM
A talk at Games Gathering Gamedev Under Bombs event in spring 2022:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nd8nPxRD_vA
With Best Regards from Kyiv
Oleksandr and the Starni Games team