- Independence Day of Ukraine 2024 - Ukrainian War Stories - 24 August 2024
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 t…
- Ukrainian Games Festival - share your thoughts! - 22 August 2024
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). https://store.steampowered.com/app/1985510/Ukraine_War_Stories/ 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 n…
- Robot's Fate: Alice - Demo OUT NOW! The Ukrainian Games Festival starts! - 19 August 2024
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. https://store.steampowered.com/app/3091030/Robots_Fate_Alice/ 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 (mo…
- Ukraine War Stories - what the future brings us? - 9 August 2024
Hello 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 tha…
- Ukrainian Games Festival 2023 on Steam! - 18 August 2023
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. Click to visit the Festival page on Steam 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. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2300160/Death_From_Above/ The event will also feature two upcoming games developed by our team: Strategic Mind: Spirit of Liberty tells the story of Finland in WWII which has lots of similarities with the 2022 war in Ukraine: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1474770/Strategic…
- War in Ukraine - despatch 15 | The power of light - 17 February 2023
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 ev…
- Indie Cup Celebration 2023 - 16 February 2023
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. https://store.steampowered.com/curator/38747278-Indie-Cup/sale/indiecup2023 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 - 27 January 2023
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://st…
- Dev Q&A #3 - 17 January 2023
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 - 28 December 2022
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…
- War in Ukraine - despatch 13 | Power generator saves the day - 24 December 2022
Hello 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 the…
- 2 months after the release - 22 December 2022
Hello 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.…
- Dev Q&A #3 – submit your questions - 21 December 2022
Hello 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 - 9 December 2022
Hello guys! 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 w…
- Uncut Gems award at GevGAMM Awards - 9 December 2022
We are happy to share with you yet another token of recognition for Ukraine War Stories at the GevGAMM Awards - the Uncut Gems award. 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 - 10 November 2022
Hello 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…
- Update 1.1 - 27 October 2022
Hello 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 - 25 October 2022
Hello 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. Howeve…
- Developer’s Gameplay - 21 October 2022
Hello! 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! - 18 October 2022
Hello 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…
