This is how the office of Snowbird Games looks today. Just the same as yesterday. It has been looking pretty abandoned for the last week.
There is an irony that we have created our first games, for example, Combat Mission: Afghanistan or Mount & Blade: With Fire and Sword - as a distributed team, so this current quarantine mode is not as stressful for us as for many other teams. There is only one member of the team who suffers from frustration - our cat Girya (is diminutive of Snegirya, literally ‘a little snowbird’ in Russian).
This kitty had a bit of a rough start, we found her and adopted her in 2014. Once she’s spent 2 weeks in a locked basement, and that is why she doesn't like it at all if there are less than three or four people around. Of course, we don’t abandon our kitty, and our level designer Stanislav became her personal curator, but Girya still doesn’t understand where everyone has gone and is it already possible to bring everyone back. Oh my dear cat, we’d be happy to know the answer.
This is not to say that when everyone works from home, they have plenty of time. There is no time at all now - instead of one finger you could point to the monitor and three words (what the hell? ), you have to assemble a Skype congregation. Some of us have children, and this is a special hell of having a remote school in your living room. All your family members also have constant calls, there is little space, there is a lot of noise, you can’t go for a walk, so you’re going bananas. Still, you can’t say that this is SO BAD. The blockade of Leningrad anyone? That was terrible, and the current quarantine routine is just moderately annoying.
Why are we writing about this? We think it’s just about time to do something for others. For some reasons, our games are designed for long gaming sessions, we are doing projects that can be played for a long time. So we were thinking: let us try to make a game balance patch.
We’ll immediately answer the question why we decided to fix the balance and not the problems of the engine - because the engine requires huge investments of programmers time, and the result could still be “It's easier to break everything and build this on a new engine”. In fact, we think about it. Before the plague and mass bankruptcy season began, we’ve even managed to put together a prototype on Unreal. If the world does not collapse, if the Internet is not disconnected, if everyone is not taken to a digital plague barrack, we will return to this. In the meantime, let's talk about balance.
There is a guy called Sentinel, what do you think about him? Rumours say that in the “sandbox” mode he comes on the 5th shard map and kills everyone. Should we nerf a Dwarven Tank? Do legionnaires make old swordsmen useless?
It might be strange that we ask players these questions, but if you think about it, you can realize this is the only way to fix the balance. Blizzard could not make out DotA under their nose. Players know games much better than developers. Therefore, let's talk about the balance.
