You may remember that a couple of days ago I blogged about a game known as Stalin vs Martians a Real Time Strategy being made by Dreamlore, BWF and N-Game.

The game immediately grabbed my interest for the obvious possibilities of playing as both Stalin and some Martians all set in a fun action packed environment. I decided that I wanted to learn and sent off an e-mail to the information e-mail address on the Stalin vs Martians site. To my surprise I received a reply from Alexander Shcherbakov the head of Dreamlore and Producer/Lead Designer of Stalin vs Martians.

I have been exchanging numerous e-mails with Alexander over the past few days and have been able to glean a lot of information regarding Stalin vs Martians, other Dreamlore projects and his thoughts on digital distribution.

Alexander’s humour is evident in our e-mail conversations and it is clear that it is this which is playing a large role in the development of Stalin vs Martians.

First off some basic information about the game. Alexander tells me that the team working on the game have a lot of fantastic ideas and plans for Stalin vs Martians and he promises me that some really awesome stuff will be revealed further down the line.

In response to comments he has read regarding the graphics in the screenshots currently available for the game that people are complaining that it looks outdated Alexander informs me that the engine is a heavily upgraded Blitzkrieg 2 engine which has been worked on by N-Game.

According to Alexnander the game is fast, bright and absolutely crazy. He goes on to say that therer are plans in place to use Chinese pop music in the sountrack as our tests showed that combination of mandapop/cantopop and Stalin game makes brains explode instantly. And that’s exactly what we want to achive with our project.

The goal the developers have for the game is as Alexander says to make a games which seems impossible to most of the people. Stalin, martians, cartoonish parody aliens, a dose of Pythons, and the atmosphere of a psycho circus. Truly Alexander envisages a game which will pile on the humour in great amounts.

He also has some interesting things to say regarding the way Stalin vs Martians will play, and answers the question ‘Will this have multiplayer?’

We don’t have any plans for multiplayer. At all. We intended to make Stalin a singleplayer-only with missions that differ greatly one from another. The objectives will be different, the units you can use (some missions may be infantry oriented, some – designed for a tank rush), plus lots of additional features like earning money to buy offmap abilities to kill the boss (yes, the boss), special units like Stalin himself (and some other absolutely unexpected “guest stars”).

Alexander went on to reveal that he feels that the game has received better attention from the West than in Russia so far. He says that this is because the idea of absurdist humour as he calls it is better developed here in the West than it is in Russia.

From here we went on to discuss this issue in greater length and it is evident that Alexander feels that initial slow reaction from the Russian media is because the Russian PC market is plagued by totally uninventive games, so sometimes people are shocked when local developers are making something that doesn’t fit into the boring monolith of cliched products.

In an example of how far reaching our conversations have been this leads to Alexander providing me with a glimpse into the Russian PC gaming market right now. He reveals that many small publishers and distributers are acting like small EAs and have become stuck in a rut whereby they see that by making a WWII strategy game they will sell 80K guaranteed domesticaly. He reveals that the PC is the top gaming platform in the former Soviet Union and that many developers and publishers taks about new innovative IPs but are scared to take a chance on them.

This is where some major issues currently surrounding the PC games market in Russia are revealed. Alexander informs me that while piracy is slowly falling year by year, though this has only been achieved by distributers selling games at an average of £5 a pop so as to make piracy seem less worthwhile. This though is a risky strategy according to Alexander.

This scheme has some problems. For example, the audience is almost unaware of what budget titles are, ’cause everything costs almost the same. There are exceptions (there are always exceptions), but basically Tetris clone and Crysis may be sold in retail for the same amount of money. The second problem is that £5 is not enough, it brings almost zero to a developer. There are many other things that come out of this situation.

Alexander has really provided me with a shocking insight into the Russian gaming industry as it is right now. I raised the issue that surely it is digital distribution which offers the chance for developers to reap the rewards they are due. His thoughts regarding this are very interesting.

Alexnader views digital distribution as a great thing for the future, though the problem right now is that too many consumers are unaware of the benefits of it. Alexander see issue with the growing number of digital distribution platforms with Steam leading the way, but behind that many other platforms are failing to get the attention they need. He also reveals that with publishers like EA investing in their own digital distribution platform the consumer is loosing out.

So if you will sum up all the information you see a picture that yes, it’s very interesting, it’s the future. some of the indies may start to use these schemes right now (and obviously large brands like Blizzard too), but basically it’s only a dawn of what may come, it’s hard even to name a well-established e-store that can sell in good quantities (aside from Steam). We need few iTunes-like services and that will be something.

Alexander is a big fan of the possibilities offered by Apple right now, he see the iPhone and iPod as being very viable portable gaming systems. He stresses that a game currently known as Red Cosmos 2, a visual novel mixing Red Star comic, Battlezone, space opera and anime is being targeted for an iPhone and iPod release.

Finally Alexander addresses some questions surrounding the development of Stalin vs Martians. As mentioned early the game is being developed by BWF, N-Game and Dreamlore. How has this combination come about and how does it work? I’ll let Alexander explain.

In short, the idea of a project was born out of the talk I had with Black Wing’s CEO. We decided to make a project together (that gives us two companies) and then added N-Game to the list. N-Game mostly deals with technical aspects (they have a solid base in making RTS titles, especially using Blitzkrieg 2 engine which they’ve partly rewritten – check Frontline: Fields of Thunder or upcoming X-Team), BWF and Dreamlore deal with producing, lead desing, art direction guidance, various business aspects. That leads us to a funny situation when we have three companies. Theoretically we could label N-Game as outsourcers (like many other companies do), but it is not quite true and doesn’t seem proper for us. We have some kind of strategic partnership right now (sometimes you can’t even understand where BWF ends and N-Game begins), but decided not to invent a separate “joint brand”, but to present ourselves like it really is: three different companies.

My chats with Alexander have been extremely interesting and he has opened my eyes to many things which I had never thought about or known about. His insights into the Russian PC Market and Digital Distribution have been very enlightening. It is also obvious that Stalin vs Martians is a very promising game that should be a tremendous blast to play later this year.

Tags: Alexander Shcherbakov, digital distribution, PC Markets, Stalin vs Martians, STALIN! Russia

This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 1:48 am and is filed under Features, General News, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.