#Like we have so many novels that are so good can‘t you take a theme from any of them and just do something???

[harpygon]

I‘m just thinking about german movies I actually like?? All quiet on the western front was good (but it won an oscar so that‘s no surprise), I liked the Felix Krull movie, …. I like thinking about the Bibi and Tina movies, but do I want to rewatch them?? (maybe listen to the music but not more). Systemsprenger was interesting and hard to watch and good i guess??

[aurelliocheek]

Through the Darkest of Times

A small Berlin team is developing a game about the Third Reich that until recently seemed impossible. Through the Darkest of Times is the first game from Germany to use swastikas openly.

Why we are making Through the Darkest of Times? Civil resistance in Third Reich Germany is still a relevant topic, and it sparks many stories of human heroism in a truly horrible time. Stories that surround us, the people at Paintbucket Games, right here in Berlin. As political people, the fact that we see fascist ideas rise again in Germany and many more countries in Europe and the US worries us a lot. In early 2017, we were asking ourselves if there is anything that we can do to stop those fascist ideas from becoming „normal“ again. Since the only thing we are good at is making games, we asked ourselves: „Why not make a game that tells the true story of fascism and what it meant for the people living in Berlin back then? Maybe we can even make the world a little bit better with this game :)“

Most games still tackle this period of history poorly and leave out the crucial parts. Nazi Germany is too often just shown as another faction without the horrors it is known for, and its aesthetics are commonly used without commentary or context. Games are a narrative medium, just like movies or books. They can do better than that. They should do better than that. We hope that Through the Darkest of Times will help to move the medium forward and encourages more developers to tell the real story, to show what really happened, and to not shy away from the ugliness of the Third Reich.

Members of the resistance meet every week at a secret headquarter. This is where members might bring up personal issues, which the player needs to handle.

Pitching Through the Darkest of Times to developers When we started working on the game, we weren‘t sure at all if this was a good idea. Maybe there are good reasons why most games avoided this topic? We pitched the concept at our Indie Game Collective, the „Saftladen“ in Berlin Kreuzberg, to other developers and got mixed reactions. „Can you kill Hitler?“ we were asked. „No, you can‘t – because the historical resistance couldn‘t,“ we answered, which seemed to leave people unsatisfied. „But how do you win?“ was another ­frequent question. „You survive ‚til the end of the war, and you try to resist as much as possible,“ we said.

That answer wasn‘t satisfying for our fellow game designers either, who were looking for clear player goals, obstacles, and rewards. Jörg Friedrich, founder of Paintbucket Games and our Game Designer, has been teaching game design for more than ten years; he knew what they were looking for, and he knew that our concept couldn‘t deliver on it. Not yet.

The first playtests Despite this mixed feedback, we started working on a prototype, hoping that once the idea would be in a playable state, people would grasp it. The first prototype ­allowed to play out the fantasy: By clicking on text-labeled-buttons, you could send out the members of your resistance group on missions, collect resources, and gather more support. Members generate heat and will be arrested if you don‘t look out for them, and the group would lose morale over time and dissolve once morale goes too low. All of this was told in text only. The only visual element was the character editor for our procedurally generated characters, your player character and the members of your resistance group. Then, in April 2017, we had an open door event at Saftladen and let ­people play the prototype. Several people played the game – most of them for more than 30 minutes. „You are onto something.“ said one player to me. Maybe we weren‘t so wrong about our approach after all.

A lot of different approaches for the narrative scenes were discussed before we ended up with the paper cut solution.

Is it right to make such a game? To this day, there is one question that remains: Is it right to make such a game? Ethically? Morally? Moreover, what will survivors and relatives of the Third Reich say about our intent to develop a game about the true horrors of Nazism? To be safe, we reached out to relatives of resistance fighters, memorial groups and historians, ­showed them the prototype and got their opinion on our approach. This was an ­entirely new experience for us, and we ­learned a lot from talking to experts, witnesses, and chroniclers outside the games industry. There was only positive feedback. „Please make this game! We need to tell people what happened through this medium too,“ said the employee of a memorial site to us.

Picking a genre: A Strategy-Narrative-Roguelike When we told people about the game, most expected it to be an adventure, something very story heavy. However, we went for a strategy/management game at the core. While we wanted Through the Darkest of Times to have a strong narrative, we also wanted the pure game systems of a strategy game. We wanted to create decisions and situations that don‘t feel pre-designed but grow from the player‘s own choices and the simulation of the game. Only this could give players the freedom to tell their very own resistance story. A disadvantage of that approach is that some players tend to forget the narrative and only play the numbers eventually, min-maxing everything. So in order to break through a players strategic mindset, we added a lot of narrative ­sequences that play like a visual novel and ask players to make tough and often moral decisions – decisions that usually have no right or wrong answers, only bad or worse. Having that kind of underlying systems in the game loads your narrative choices with mechanical significance, making them meaningful. E.g., if you have an event where players can help out a member of their group with money, the choice becomes vital because that money might be needed at a different point in the game.

The reduced character and face shapes is inspired by 1920s German expressionist art. The advantage of these simple geometric shapes is that the different face parts can be combined to allow for procedurally generated variations.

The roguelike parts came naturally We knew that Through the Darkest of Times had to be challenging – that it needed to be hard to survive until the end of the war to adequately cover the theme of the game. This meant that players would often not reach the last chapter. ­Decisions needed gravitas – choices required to be tough. We also wanted some kind of permadeath in the game to add more tension. To make this choice acceptable, the game needed to offer enough variety for the players. Also, since most narrative bits in the game have to do with the character you play, the members you have in your group and the supporters you meet, these were the bits we had to vary when you play again. This is why all characters, the player character, the members and the supporters are procedurally generated and different each time you play, giving you a diverse base for your resistance story, even though the historical timeline stays the same.

NPCs are people too In Through the Darkest of Times, you play as the leader of a resistance group, but it was also crucial for us to show the player that the members of your group are not units whom you can just order around. They are civilians, not soldiers. These are people with families, with jobs, and no one is ordering them to fight in the resistance. They voluntarily decided to risk their lives to fight an inhumane regime. If they don‘t like the direction you are taking the group in, they will leave – and the same will happen if they lose faith in your cause.

We also wanted to show that these people were not born as resistance fighters, but that they were often just really „cool“ people. Before the Nazis came to power, these people were used to enjoy the art and the music of Berlin in the roaring 1920s – and suddenly, all these things were gone. We wanted to create NPCs whom players could talk and build a relationship to, but who followed their own agenda. This is why NPCs have personal political views, quirks, and a hidden loyalty to the player – elements that can lead to internal conflicts which make the life of a resistance group even harder.

Writing slogans at Berlin’s walls at night is one of many missions players can send their resistance fighters on.

Providing a feeling of closure ­instead of winning or losing Ending a game of Through the Darkest of Times with a „You lost – Try again!“ or even a „You won!“ screen felt wrong. We had to find a way to provide a feeling of closure without a classical winning or losing solution. We solved this by adding a procedurally generated epilogue. Whenever a game ends because you reach the end of the war, your group dissolves, everybody got arrested, or the player character dies, the game generates an epilogue, based on the members you had in your group and the decisions you made during the game. In this epilogue, you learn what happened to every group member after the game ended. Maybe one member dies in the war, another member is deported and killed by the Nazis, while another one might survive in exile and comes back later and lives a fruitful life. In the end, our game is not telling the players that they lost. Instead, it tells them the story of their resistance group to the end – a story that they wrote and created – and providing them a feeling of closure.

Creating an Art-Style that the Nazis would have banned As we started to think about the visuals of Through the Darkest of Times, we had to realize that too often games tend to copy or imitate fascist aesthetics to portray the epoch from 1933 to 1945. We wanted to do it differently. With the end of World War One, revolutions started all over Europe – not only in societies but in art and design too. German artists developed a variety of new artistic ways to express themselves and to deal with the trauma of World War One. They began to portray their environment, and the people around them in a broken, emotional, direct, and touching style. German Expressionism, the Art of the Weimar Republic, was born. When the Nazis got into power, this was banned as „Un-German,“ so-called „Entartete Kunst.“

The Nazis installed a complete rollback to pre-war heroic Historicism in writing, art, and architecture. They wanted to influence and inspire people with the help of art and thereby plant their fascist values in people‘s minds and thoughts. One of the most popular genres in literature at that time was the so-called „Fronterlebnis“ or front-line-experience literature. War was celebrated as a spiritual experience. That‘s when art started to be another form of Propaganda. Sculptors, Filmmakers, and ­Architects as Arno Breker, Leni Riefenstahl and Albert Speer created a new look for Nazi Germany / The Third Reich. Many games copy this look to make it „look Nazi.“ However, for Through the Darkest of Times, we wanted to find a better way to portray that era.

Art research and German Expressionism as „Counter Art“ There is an incestuous tendency among game art, where games learn solely from other games. But we as developers and designers can and should learn from comics, graphics, novels, movies and other artists who create styles that are underrepresented in video games. Under the influence of the art and graphics of the Weimar Republic era in the 1920s and 1930s, we created a distinct visual style for Through the Darkest of Times. As an example, we were heavily influenced by Käthe Kollwitz, whose paintings catches the sufferings and horrors of war from a very civilian and female perspective. Another example would be John Heartfield, who uses collages to show the core and nature of ­fascism and political violence. And not to forget Otto Dix, known for his exaggeration of proportions and dedicated ugliness to reveal the hypocrisy in the way that war was painted as heroic in his time.

Today‘s artists also had a significant influence on us, like Art Spiegelman with his MAUS comics, or the graphic novel „Berlin 1931“ from Felipe H. Cava and Raúl, which is painted in the way of German Expressionism. Last, but not least: „Waltz with Bashir,“ a great animated movie with sharp graphical pictures about the war in Lebanon 1982 and the traumatized soldiers.

Before moving into the “Saftladen” indie collective, the team was working from home and met from time to time to work closely together.

Starting with procedural characters One of the first things we did was creating the character generation menu. We were trying to achieve two things in parallel here: First developing a system to create characters with different attributes and faces, and secondly defining the first look of the game. The first corner points were shaping out quite fast: We wanted to tone the game in a monochrome tint, but keep the option to use color for special occasions. That made the game not look like a Hollywood movie, which was essential to us and allowed us to lead the player‘s attention. In the case of the character generator, it turns out that having the faces of our resistance fighters in black and white graphics, but keeping the eyes in color creates a powerful relation between you and your avatar. Our second idea was to do the graphics in a quite rough, bold, and blocky way, which reminds on woodcut or linocut prints. That style gives us a bold and distinct picture and a hand-crafted appeal. The reduction of the color palette to black-white-red also quotes the graphic design and poster art of the 20s and 30s. Having those points decided helped us to go further with other aspects of the art direction.

Using historical scenes as a base, but stage design as a role model for environment and backgrounds For every scene we create, we invest a good amount of time for historical research. Even if our look has a more abstract and reduced approach, we keep an intense eye on the details. We‘re collecting a lot of historical material, may it be for architecture, typography, cloth or uniform details. Even if we don‘t bring all those references into the ­actual game scene, it creates a believable tone and adds time-specific elements to scenes. As we started to combine the procedural characters and the background environments, we realized that both need room to breathe to unfold their impression. That‘s why we‘ve looked at stage design at theatrical performances and let it inspire us. For example, Brecht created a unique theatre experience in the 20s in Berlin, and John Heartfield also did some exciting stage designs for his plays. In Through the Darkest of Times, we then created the graphics in a way that puts the story in the foreground, just like in a theatrical performance. Sometimes the environment transports the idea of the moment; other times, it is a reduced stage to let the characters stand out. Also, every now and then, even one strong picture is enough.

The character creator where you can create your resistance fighter was the first visual element that was ready.

Using vector graphics and Unity for a scalability Every graphic we made for the game is painted as bitmap – like in photoshop ­– and then later converted to paths in Adobe Illustrator and saved as vector graphics format SVG. They are imported to Unity via the SVG-Importer-Plugin, who creates Polygons out of them, a system that you maybe know from TextMeshPro. Vector graphics are resolution independent and have two benefits for us. The first benefit is more artistic, because, other than sprites, we can use them in Unity like Meshes, scale them freely without any loose in quality or resolution. Second is more technical: For whatever screen resolution we want to release, the graphics will look sharp and crisp in any case.

Animation in Unity Both environment and character animations are made with Unity On-Board tools. For the characters, we have built a simple hierarchical rig with game objects. It is pretty much a digital paper doll or jumping jack toy. Animations are made with the timeline system. We often use a Sprite-Sheet-Like frame animation system which comes with the SVG importer for small animations as blinking eyes or flickering fire. For a more significant movement of the characters, we use standard timeline animations, sometimes without interpolations in the anim curve, to create a frame-by-frame look as in Lotte Reiniger‘s Paper cut animation movies from the twenties of the last century.

Resistance fighters don’t fight the regime 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They are civilians, not soldiers, and they need to have some good times too.

The sound of resistance – Finding the right audioscape for Through the Darkest of times The sound of Through the Darkest of times consists of three main pillars: Sound design, music in the narrative sequences, and music in the headquarter, which is the strategic planning screen where you manage your resistance fighters. We explain to you these three pillars and our approach below.

Sound design The reduced visual novel-style, animated images in combination with players reading text was what defined the requirements for the sound design. The visual style resembles paper cuts or shadow puppetry, where you see the outline of a story and fill the gaps with your imagination. Sound is an excellent tool to spark imagination, but the mix of timed actions in the visuals and users determining when to progress the story complicates things a bit.

One example: The text tells you your main character is walking down the street. You see the road and a train passing by in the background. The sound design in the game has to cover the ambiance of the place and the train passing. However, what about the footsteps of your character? At first, we thought about making all sounds very radio play like, with all actions connected organically. This would mean that we would play the foot sounds along with the background sounds as soon as the scene starts. But what if a player decides to read a line ten times before getting to the line where the character stops? If you had heard footsteps while reading, it would have seemed as if you had been walking around all the time, covering far too great a distance. If we let the footsteps end after a set amount of time, that again would be weird if for some reason you just started reading about your character walking and the sound has already stopped.

That‘s why we tried to carry the paper cut style forward to the audio. Instead of having organic audioscapes, we have isolated events. One example: The Gestapo knocks on your door. Since we don‘t know, when you‘ll be reading the sentence nor when you will continue to the next scene, we play a knocking-at-door-sound but no footsteps of them on the stairs, no voices, whatsoever. Just like the visual representation of the figurines, the knocking-sound is cut out and pulled in front to draw your attention. What happens in between is left to your imagination.

The music of the game is played by Berlin swing band “Rufus Temple Orchestra”. Sound designer Almut Schwacke directed the swing band.

Music for the narrative sequences The game is made up of four chapters which each feature a specific time. It begins with Hitler becoming chancellor and ends right after the war. During the narrative scenes, the primary purpose of the ­music is to depict historical events and to set the mood. When we started working on the narrative music, two things were evident to us: First we wanted to keep the narrative music direct and straightforward so people could empathize with it, and second, it should not contain synthesizers. These were very real and horrible events to depict, and we wanted them to feel real. We also use instrumentation as a tool for differentiating the four chapters from each other and evoke specific moods. Using „real“ instruments has the advantage of people recognizing them. It gives us the chance to have them connect instantly to a sound they know and also have them be irritated by little alterations to that sound. As an example, in the first chapter of the game, we use a prepared piano (a piano with objects placed on or between the strings, or some strings retuned, to produce an unusual tonal effect) for precisely that rea­son. The sound of a standard piano is pretty non-controversial; nearly everybody knows it and feels comfortable with that sound. A prepared piano can be anything between very weird and scary, and in Through the Darkest of Times, it embodies perfectly the growing horrors while Nazism grew stronger and stronger.

The second chapter of the game, which features the time around the Olympics, will probably be more pompous in instrumentation. However, we will also adapt the sound and slightly twist it to express the festive mood of the Olympic Games, but also make clear the increasing threat for all those who did not follow the Nazi policy.

Chapter Three, the outbreak of the war, has to be pretty unsettling. We have not yet committed ourselves to music for this chapter, but perhaps we will take something inspired by Arnold Schönberg. Schönberg was an Austrian-American composer, music theorist, composition teacher, came from a Jewish family and emigrated to the USA in 1933. That would incorporate the spirit of the so-called „Entartete Musik,“ and we would also follow our art guideline of making something that the Nazis would‘ve despised. The narrative music in chapter four already exists; it closes the circle and comes back to traditional piano as a familiar sound. The music is by choice not interactive, but laconically meanders along illustrating the helplessness given a world war rolling over your head.

Even minister of family affairs Franziska Giffey took a look at the game, and after being skeptical at first, she had to admit that the way the symbols were used in TTDOT was appropriate for the matter.

Music for the systemic game screens of the game Apart from the music in the narrative sequences, we also wanted contemporary music of that time in the game. The idea was to have a radio playing in your resistance group‘s headquarter. That way we‘d have a lot of variety in the game and also portray another piece of „normal“ life. Even when times are desperate, people will listen to ­music that makes them feel good. It would give us the option of including a broadband selection of genres without displaying everything as wanted or chosen – a radio station you listen to still does not always play songs you like. Moreover, back in the early 1930s, you probably would have listened to military marches even if you‘re a pacifist.

GEMA! Oh no! Like a lot of other indie games in Germany, we immediately ran into a well-known problem when we were looking for suitable music for our radio idea: GEMA licensed music. As much as we would‘ve loved to use tons of contemporary titles, the licensing for games is ridiculously costly, so that wasn‘t an option. We then thought about composing soundalikes, but arranging them realistically and pleasantly without having skilled instrumentalists of all kinds at hand would‘ve been quite the effort. Also, that was totally outside our budget, which in the end turned out to be a blessing, because it made us come up with a solution that is perfect for the game.

Long live the public domain! We went on a hunt for public domain compositions from that time, and carefully selected a bunch of titles that ranged from Jazz through Yiddish and resistance fighter songs to military marches. We then booked a fabulous recording studio and proceeded to record those tunes with a swing band, the Rufus Temple Orchestra. They are experts in playing swing music from the 1920s, but skilled enough to pull off the other titles as well. Luckily, we now have a bunch of made-to-measure tracks for playing in the background and giving you that feeling of being in that time.

Three im­portant game design rules that you need to break to make a game about being oppressed

1. Keep players always in control of the game! However, when your game is about being a civilian who is opposing an authoritarian regime and society, you put your audience in a situation of powerlessness.

2. Have fair rules! But when you play as a person being at the mercy of an inhumane regime, the game has to be unfair by definition.

3. Allow players to seek for a clear ending! Within the context of a game, that usually means being able to win or lose the game. In our context, „winning“ and „losing“ felt like the wrong way to end Through the Darkest of Times.

  Jörg Friedrich Game Designer, Co-Founder

Jörg was Design Director for Dead Island 2, Lead Level Designer for Spec Ops: The Line (both YAGER) and Creative Director on Albion Online (Sandbox) before he co-founded Paintbucket in 2017.

  Sebastian Schulz Art Director, Co-Founder

Sebastian was Staff Artist on Dead Island 2, Senior Lighting-Artist for Spec Ops: The Line (both YAGER) and Staff-Artist for Albion Online(Sandbox) before he co-founded Paintbucket in 2017.

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