"We're not afraid of the Islamic State" - an interview with the creator of Hatred and IS Defense

Destructive Creations is not slowing down. Few months after the release of Hatred, the developers from Gliwice are working hard on another big - and yet unnanounced - project. It will be released next year, but in the meantime the creators want to remind us of themselves with a much smaller game, that will probably make a lot of fuss about them one more time. IS Defense is a simple shooter, that will remind you of Beach-Head, in which we will play as a soldier of the last line of defense against the attacking armies of the Islamic State. We talked with Jaroslaw Zielinski about this very serious game that came to life because of a joke, and we asked him about the overall condition of his company.

The last time I was in Destructive Creations' studio, we just found out about your existence. Back then you put all your eggs in one basket.

Yes, I said that if Hatred doesn't come out, we will all part ways.

Today, for a change, we talk in your new place, and from what I've seen, your team is much bigger now.

True, back then there was 8 of us, now there's 18.

This means that Hatred was a success.

Yes, but it was mostly a success in production. As a brand new studio, with the CEO and lead project manager who never did a similar job before, we managed to finish the game in time, and we managed to stay within the budget limits; what's more, we even had some money left because of preorders that launched in the meantime. When it comes to the commercial success, however, we really hoped that this will be the perfect move and that people will go for Hatred like crazy, but it didn't happen. Even though, we made a game that - altogether with preorders - made up for all the production costs within 4 hours, and we made enough money to keep working in peace.

Enough money to have that peaceful time for the next two years?

When we decided to launch the new project, we didn't yet have enough funds for the whole two years. However, we're in the situation where we don't spend the money we made after the release of Hatred, because the current sales are high enough to cover monthly maintenance costs of the studio. Even more than that, we're about to release IS Defense and there will be money coming from this as well. And that is great - I expanded our team, gave raises to people, and that's the most important to me.

Will the new project step into Hatred's shoes?

No. This time it won't be the usual going over the top and I think everyone will be really surprised. I really hope that thanks to this we will be able to find a publisher.

A publisher? But you just opened a store, you have your new distribution channel, why would you want to partner with someone who might want to put some pressure on you?

A publisher can do much better marketing campaigns, and that's why I want a publisher to take care of advertising the game. There will be no influencing us, because we will create the game all by ourselves, and our potential partner will not become our only hope, that - although aids us with money - will take our independence from us. In a situation like this, negotiating with publishers looks much different.

It seems that you're playing it safe. This won't be a "destructive creation"?

Don't worry, we will live up to our company's name.

It seems that you're playing it safe with IS Defense as well, although this might not be the perfect description. This time you take on a subject that's not really controversial, but rather really up-to-date and popular. The Islamic State doesn't invoke really good connotations, people usually support fighting against them.

Let's say that IS Defense is an artistic way of being against what the Islamic State does. Nevertheless, the IS suited perfectly for a production like this. We could, of course, do the Omaha beach landing and shoot the Americans with MG42, but we would end up with more accusations of Nazism, and we already had enough of that.

Is the game referring in any way to the enemies' faith?

No, we're not speaking of religion. There is no word in the game about Muslims, Islamic people, etc. We shoot the terrorists because the enemies are terrorists. We are not interested in their religion.

Even an idiot would connect the dots here.

Yeah, you can't avoid that, but this doesn't mean that we have to make our lives even more difficult for ourselves and attract even more attention. Well, if we were living in France, I might not have been brave enough to even touch upon this subject.

You're afraid that something bad could have happened?

Not really. There could have been be some objections, although we're not really touching upon the subject of religion. We don't make fun of Muhammad, which was the reason that Charlie Hebdo was attacked.

Is Poland more safe in this matter? No one will come and set your studio on fire?

In Poland? There's no chance for that. The enemy in IS Defense is depicted very clear, but I don't think we will be in any way victimized by the Islamic State or other fuckheads. What makes me wonder is why this is a taboo subject and no one makes games about ISIS. In Call of Duty we get tons of fabricated terrorists; we just call them with their real names.

You think this theme is enough to sell the game?

No, but I never thought it would work with Hatred as well, and it had nice sales anyway.

You have a tendency to touch upon really unpopular subjects, you choose the hard way to go against the trend. You created a clone of Postal, now you're finishing your work on a clone if Beach-Head. Where does this love to long-dead genres come from? Do you really miss being able to play games like these?

That was the case with Hatred, because I'm a really huge fan of the first Postal, and if I look at IS Defense from a different perspective, that might actually be it as well. These are genres that no one touched in years and we're satisfied in refreshing them in a modern form, because we would love to play games like these ourselves. Besides, I think there's nothing wrong with that. I would never make a MOBA, because there's already enough of them, and the biggest ones are so good, that the rest can't even compete with them. The situation here is a bit different, we have more freedom; but that won't be the case forever. Our new game will represent the genre that is well known and popular, but we will turn it upside-down anyway, because we will make the game our way. When it comes to "reanimating the corpses", this will end after IS Defense.

Was that reanimation spontaneous?

Yeah, this was really an accident. The idea wasn't new (the developers from Destructive Creations wanted to make a similar title on game jam, but they couldn't get there - ed. note), but giving that idea a real shape was completely spontaneous. I came to work one day with that idea in mind and I wanted to see how much I can make of it by myself. I made the controls, I ask my colleague to make me a simple beach, and if I had a bigger problem, I ran to one of our programmers to ask for help. So I was slowly working on this with a little help from few people, and in time all of us actually started focusing on it more. You know, this game was to be a little crappy thing that we probably wouldn't even sell for €1, but in time people in the team actually believed that this might work, and as a result IS Defense looks much different today.

How much different?

There was no skills, no progress, and there was only one map to start with. That's actually a good example. When I came up with few gameplay ideas on one map, I concluded that you can use them on other maps as well, so I asked our artists to create more levels. When we already had three maps, I thought that it would be actually nice to do something on one of them to unlock the other. In the meantime I noticed that the mechanics are well scripted, so I thought about modifying skills. Once that was working well, we had to have a nice UI. And it went on and on - something came out of something else and the project grew naturally. On the other hand, we had to stop ourselves at some points, there have to be certain boundaries. I feel bad that we don't have a bigger variety of enemies, but AI sends so many of them against you, that you don't really have time to look closer at them, because you have no idea what's going on. The whole process was supposed to take a few months, so I finally said "stop, no more content, we need to polish it now. We must release it".

Hatred is available for few months already. What's your perspective on everything that was going on around this game?

From my perspective, it was all crazy. I repeated multiple times in interviews that I never expected this shitstorm to happen. I thought that the world is more mature and won't perceive the game as a cheap provocation - that's not why I made this game. However, I remember other things the most: removing Hatred from Greenlight and a mail from Gabe Newell, who wrote to us a day later. These were the most exciting days during the production process. When I saw the apology from Newell and the game was greenlit again, I couldn't believe my own eyes.

You really had a stroke of luck.

Indeed, that's why it all worked out. If we were removed from Greenlight for good, I don't think we would make it; after all, Steam is about 75% of digital distribution. My one regret is that we couldn't release the box version of the game, although we were negotiating that, and what's interesting, we weren't the ones to come up with this idea. We never even dreamed of international distribution, but it would be possible to release the game like this in few countries. Unfortunately, when it came to specifics, people negotiating with us were halted by their own marketing and sales departments and there was no one to talk about it anymore. I really regret that it didn't work out, because the boxed Hatred could reach more people that weren't directly interested in it from day one. When the project made so much fuss in the media that are not strictly related to the gaming industry, many people got curious and they wrote to us few months after the release asking whether the game came out already. These people, however, had no idea what Steam was.

So you made your own box.

Yes, the game is available in a boxed version, but only in our online store that launched yesterday. Some of our fans asked for the box, even though they already have a digital edition. So we made a couple of hundreds of boxes and now you can buy it.

Speaking about the fans. When I was here for the first time, you showed me how many people responded to you. Has anything changed in that matter?

No, we're still in touch with all these people. Before we released the survival mode in Hatred, we didn't go to a testing company, but instead we took some of the most active fans on the forums and we gave them access to the beta. Hell, they tested it much better than anyone else. We got walls of text with comments, all the bugs noted - and in a really professional manner, I must say. We got what we wanted, and they could play it earlier - everyone was happy with that solution. I think that our community will be content with IS Defense, because it's a hardcore game, as you could see by yourself. Will the community grow after that game? I don't think so. However, mods for Hatred should do that, because we will finally release the editor that we announced before.

Will a layman be able to handle it?

The advantage of the editor is that these are Unreal Engine 4 tools that we modified, and you can easily find all the help you need online, as the support in case of these tools is really well-developed. This thing has enormous possibilities, and IS Defense is the best proof of that - in its core, it's actually a mod for Hatred. Obviously we implemented lots of adjustments that are way beyond the standard mod, but if someone was stubborn enough, he could actually do something similar if he spent a lot of time with the editor.

What are your other plans for the future?

We slowly work on the new project that I already mentioned. We plan to release it in 2017, but we will probably reveal what it actually is this year. As I said before, the genre will be a surprise, because people got used to us making games where you blow the shit up, and this one will go in a slightly different direction. You shouldn't expect any controversy from it, but most probably there will be some dumbass from Polygon who will say that he "played for so long and didn't notice any black guy in it". Only time will tell what comes out of it.