“It’s difficult to write violent quests when there’s a war going on outside your window,” claimed a member of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 development team.
GSC Game World, formerly located in Kyiv, has relocated some of its personnel to new offices in Prague, although the majority of its employees remain in Ukraine.
The corporation revealed in a new video diary that its employees are living and working in very cramped conditions.
Some of them claim to have slept in the hallways for months, while others say their workplace area is a square meter crammed between bathtubs and washing machines.
All of them are positioned well away from windows that could be shattered by Russian artillery.
The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of video games is a first-person shooter set in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, where supernatural happenings occur.
• A senior US defense source told Foreign Policy magazine that Russia’s options are constrained because Vladimir Putin refuses to declare war on Ukraine formally. The Russian president continues to refer to the invasion as a “special military operation,” which prohibits him from recruiting soldiers from the ordinary populace.
• The grain harvest has begun in Odesa, but Russia’s invasion will cause a global wheat shortage for at least three seasons, according to Ukraine’s agriculture minister. • There are reports of overnight shelling in the Kharkiv region, where, for the first time in many weeks, Russian forces appear to have made small gains, according to the UK Ministry of Defence.
The game was inspired by the novel Roadside Picnic and the legendary film Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky; its title is a reference to the cinematic masterpiece and a backronym for “Scavengers, Trespassers, Adventurers, Lonely, Killers, Explorers, and Thieves.”
The creation of the game is proceeding, but staff members are juggling their job with volunteering, military service, and Russian attacks on civilian properties and homes.
Tara Kukurian, one of the game’s community managers, stated, “We have air raid sirens continuously.”
During the video diary, the chief concept artist for the game, Anton Kukhtytskyi, can be heard asking, “So, cat, the workday begins with a siren?”
“During the bombing, we run to the bomb shelter,” the game’s voice director, Andrei Maksiuta, says over smartphone footage of someone running downstairs.
Oleksandr Levchenko, one of the game’s animators, comes from Mariupol, where a months-long siege of the Azovstal steelworks gave Ukrainian forces elsewhere important time to organize and acquire Western weapons.
He said: “Since the beginning of the war, I have not communicated with my parents. Not knowing whether your loved ones are still alive is an indescribably awful sensation.”
Maksym Tkachenko took a video of himself squished between a bathtub and a washing machine with the caption, “This is now my office.”
Dariia Tsepkova, one of the game’s stories designers, stated that she lived and worked in a hallway for three months with a Hostomel-rescued one-eyed dog.
“When there’s a war outside your window, it’s difficult to write violent adventures,” she added.
Dmytro Iassenev, the game’s primary AI developer, has joined the Ukrainian military alongside other team members.
He stated, “I never envisaged a conflict in Europe in the 21st century.”
Oleksii Ivanov, another of the game’s community admins, stated in a video message recorded for the diary that he was “defending my country against the Russian aggressors.”
In another tape, the game’s narrative creator, Maksym Hnatkov, stated that he would return to work on the project following a Ukrainian victory.
US authorities have stated that the fight has reached a crucial point that could define the rest of the war’s trajectory.
CNN was told by a senior NATO official that “one side or the other is about to emerge victorious.”
“Either the Russians will advance to Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, or the Ukrainians will prevent them from doing so. And if the Ukrainians can maintain their position in the face of such a large number of forces, it will be significant.”
