Warhorse Studios Weekly Torch

DrFusselpulli · March 14, 2017, 10:39am

Martin “Ziggi” Ziegler is one of our Technical Designers and he was already guest in our livestreams like the E3 Gameplay or the first quest. He was born in Prague in Czech Republic and joined Warhorse Studios shortly after the Kickstarter campaign in early 2014.
Do you have any additional questions to Martin “Ziggi” Ziegler? Just ask here.
You can find a Spanish translation of this interview here.

1) Where can we usually find you lurking in the holy halls of Warhorse?
My desk is in the scripter’s department. However, since I need to be in touch with a lot of people all around the studio, I’m running around quite a lot, or I’m sitting in a meeting.

2) How did you hear about Warhorse?
I learned about KC:D when it launched on Kickstarter. That was only several months after I finished my university studies, just when I was looking for an exciting project to join. When I heard about Warhorse, it all came together. I spoke with Tomáš Plch, who had supervised my thesis, until Viktor Bocan replied to me asking whether I would like to mediate between his scripters’ department and Tom‘s AI team. When I came in to do a test, there was neither a computer or a desk for me to do the test on, so I was sat down with someone’s 12“ laptop under a coat rack by the entrance door, presumably to prepare me for how punk this entire development actually is. I came on board two months later.

3) Describe your position. What is it about being a technical designer?
We are where the creative design ambitions meet the more technical development aspects. In the end, we’re here to make the entire game work together as a whole. It requires quite a well-rounded skillset, which is what makes it so attractive to me.

4) Please describe Warhorse Studios:
A picture is worth a thousand words:

5) What is your favorite team activity?
Developing badass openworld RPGs.

6) Describe your usual day at the studio.
I usually come in somewhat later than the early birds and then start the day with a sitrep of what everyone is currently up to within my department. After that, I try to move on with any work that I have on my plate at the moment, which may mean working on the AI scripts, on some internal tools that make our lives easier, or recently also on voiceovers/localisation, and/or wherever else I can help the best at the moment.

7) What are you currently working on?
My most important responsibilities are the openworld systems and mechanics, so I am now reviewing them one by one as we approach our release date to make sure that they will be in a solid shape when we will ship KC:D to the public. For example this week in particular, I am working on how NPCs react to player’s crimes, such as assaulting NPCs, stealing, etc.

8) What do you like the most about Kingdom Come: Deliverance?
For me, it’s an excellent case of how a whole can be larger than the sum of its parts. It’s an openworld RPG, an epic story, a virtual time travel experience, a tactical combat game, a history lesson, and a beautiful digital landscape all in one.

9) What do you think is the most important part in the game?
I think that the realism aspect is what holds the game together. The main storyline is a real historical event and the side quests tackle the social issues that people had at the time. This all takes place in a place that’s reconstructed based on a satellite map. Even very small details in our visual assets are meticulously well-researched. The music is a modern take on a music that would be contemporary to the time. Our combat is based on choices similar to how people had to think about combat in that historic period. We’re very ambitious with the AI in how much we try to simulate. Whatever we put in, we try to think about how that element actually works in reality and start there; we obviously need to compromise a lot, but the ambition to be realistic is what underlies it all and ties it into a coherent whole.

10) How, when and with what platform or game did you first get acquainted with videogames?
I was so little that I have no idea what the console was, but the game was a mono-color, top-down arcade where you first had to drive a firetruck on a highway to a burning building and then navigate the fireman on foot between the flames in order to rescue the victims. I think that the faster you were with the truck in the first stage, the more time you had in the second stage. It’s pretty much the earliest memory that I have at all.

11) What was your most touching video game moment?
Spec Ops: The Line was overall quite intense and it made me think.

12) What video game are you playing right now?
Darkest Dungeon. I haven’t played such a well-designed game in a long time.

13) Which class, gender, or type do you usually pick?
I almost exclusively prefer the longer-range classes, usually casters. I virtually never play melee-damage dealers; I just cannot ever get into their flow.

14) Are there any videogames you repeat playing over and over again?
I finished the original Deus Ex at least six times. I would like to say that it is because you can approach it in so many different ways, but I always end up playing it with pretty much the same build and I make pretty much the same story choices.

15) How do you relax after a hard day at work?
I develop my own small games in my spare time. That may seem like a bizarre way to relax after a day spent developing KC:D at the studio, but developing small, well-focused games actually really does help me to relieve the stress of working on the huge, 5-year, 100-man, wild beast that Kingdom Come: Deliverance is. Other than that, I work out and I love to travel and read.

16) Your favorite music?
Pixies.

17) Your favorite movie or book?
Fight Club and Lost in Translation.

18) Do you have a Bucket List?
I’d like to travel around the world at some point.

19) Is it possible to buy you with candy?
French pastries certainly do increase your chances.

20) Who is your favorite historic character?
Aristotle, Émile Zola, and David Bowie came to my mind as an answer most quickly.

21) If you could say something to the fans of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, what would it be?
Thank you; we really wouldn’t be able to work on KC:D without you.

Do you have any additional questions to Martin “Ziggi” Ziegler? Just ask here.

DrFusselpulli · January 5, 2018, 12:46pm

Now Martin “Ziggi” Ziegler answered your community questions

The most recent ones are a board game and a card game, so unfortunately not really. I would like to upload more games over to itch.io when I have the time to polish them.

Badassness is a number that we use to express how brave, well-equipped and overall combat-ready each NPC is. We use it to drive many decisions, such as whether someone will run when they see you do a crime, or rather will engage you themselves.

When the situation is resolved, they will return to their usual activities, which I don’t even think is that unrealistic. Your reputation with them will have been lowered, so their future reactions toward you may change.

Yes, NPCs within camps raise an alarm, which calls nearby NPCs to help them resolve the situation. This also wakes NPCs up, in case they’re asleep

They will cool down in a while, and return to their routines.

Yes, everyone has worse vision during the night, which makes stealth easier. The luminosity of the particular position where you’re at also plays a role, but it is not explicitely indicated in the UI. The torch should work like you said, but I’ll have to check.

We haven’t showcased the pickpocketing minigame yet, so I can’t say too much, but it’s a pretty solid minigame that mixes incomplete information, time-pressure, and luck.

No, the NPCs do not respawn when they die.

DrFusselpulli · March 14, 2017, 11:46am

Luke Dale was born in Sheffield in England and came to Prague to work as an actor on Kingdom Come Deliverance in the role of Capon (or in Czech - Jan Ptáček), a young nobleman.
Do you have any questions regarding Luke Dale? Just ask here!
You can find a Spanish translation of this interview here.

1) How did you hear about Warhorse?
Well considering I am British and (unfortunately) haven’t played video games since being 16, I had never heard of Warhorse. But I was submitted for the role by my agent in London, and boom, the journey began.

2) Describe your usual day at the studio?
Each time I have been there it has been quite different, my favourite time visiting Warhorse was the week I spent filming the cut scenes. I had never before experienced motion capture so I was thrown in the deep end and I loved it. The scenes were fun to shoot and the team were great.

3) What do you like the most about Kingdom Come: Deliverance?
Every time I come I always feel totally welcome by the people that work there. I have always said it, the best part about the job has been working with everyone else.

4) Was this your first MoCap acting?
Yeaaaaah baby.

5) What is the main difference for an actor between acting for a video game compared to acting for TV or the theatre?
It’s a very, very odd mix of things with motion capture. There’s no audience, so you can’t feed off of anything. So in that way, it’s like TV. But then it completely doesn’t matter what I do with my face because no one will see that. So it’s odd. The best thing to do is to use your imagination as if it’s all happening for real and be as truthful as possible. (Although, miming water in the bath house proved to be tricky).

6) Can you describe your character a bit?
Oh Capon. He’s a teenager, so of course he’s still figuring out who he is and how he relates to the world around him. He’s testing things out, going too far. Which can make for hilarious situations. But as a member of the royal family it doesn’t earn him much respect. He’s moody, agitated, wants everything now and has a lot to learn about being a prince.

7) Playing some character from a foreign culture and time can be difficult, how did you get into your role?
I had help from the directors, but the main thing was to not worry too much and to approach the character as if it was me in those situations.

8) What was totally different than expected, when you worked on Kingdom Come Deliverance?
I didn’t expect the formality of T-Pose every time you start and stop the scenes. Let me tell you, after a few days of that, it gets a little old.

9) Do you remember any funny moments, being in your role?
There was a scene (which I’m told unfortunately hasn’t made it into the game). Where I recite Shakespeare to a girl in a tower, whom I supposedly “love”. And all the while Henry is looking out to make sure her father doesn’t catch us and kill us. That was pretty hilarious.

10) In a video game you are able to solve things in different ways. How does this combine with linear acting?
Well I do like the multi-option fate aspect of the game. It gives the player control over the world they’re in. This isn’t the case with any other form of entertainment really. It would be very satisfying for an actor to play out different endings to films, as much as it would be for the audience to choose the ending of a film or reaction of a character, who knows maybe that will happen?

11) What do you think about the late medieval period in Bohemia, now that you played a character from that time?
Whenever I think about any time prior to today, I do think how lucky I am to be alive now. We take for granted everything we have. Back then if you cut your finger and it got infected, you might die, and there was very little to be done. Other than chopping it off.
Also, the smells. Can you imagine how bad everyone smelled?

12) How, when and with what game did you first get acquainted with videogames?
I can’t remember what game I first played. Probably an ancient verison of Fifa 97 or something silly. But the games that stick out to me that I’ve played and loved are: Abe’s Odyssey, Runescape, Spider-man (a very early version) and Gears of War.

13) How do you relax after a hard day at work?
Watching a film or a documentary usually.

14) Your favorite music playlist?
Arctic Monkeys. We grew up in the same town and their music was the soundtrack to my youth.

15) Your favorite movie?
Best films ever are:
Nill By Mouth
Lord of the Rings (All)
Barney’s Version
Selfish Giant
Big Fish
Flashbacks of a Fool

16) Your travel tip?
Learn: Hello, Please & Thank you. AT LEAST.

17) What’s your guilty pleasure?
Surely I can’t tell the internet that!

18) Do you have a Bucket List?
I do, it’s very long. The biggest thing is to go to Norway. I don’t know why, I just like Norwegians.

19) What is your weakest trait?
I don’t always wake up early. And I should, it’s wasting time!

20) Knights or Samurai?
Knights

21) If you could say something to the fans of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, what would it be?
I really hope that you enjoy the game. I know how passionate and hard working the team are, so it would be a shame if you didn’t, but I’m pretty sure you guys are going to love it.

Do you have any additional questions to Luke Dale? Just ask here!

DrFusselpulli · February 24, 2017, 10:14am

Luke Dale is not available at the moment, but you will find his answers to your community questions here quite soon.

DrFusselpulli · March 14, 2017, 9:59am

Viktor Podhájecký is famous for his colorful beard styles. He was born in Prague in Czech Republic and Joined Warhorse Studios in 2015 to work as a member of the AI team on Kingdom Come: Deliverance.
Do you have any questions regarding Viktor Podhájecký? Just ask here!
You can find a Spanish translation of this interview here.

1) How did you hear about Warhorse and how did you join?
My first time was during the Kickstarter campaign. I was impressed by the idea of an historically accurate RPG. It took some time to get the job. I graduated and started another school. I was a student of Faculty of Humanities at Charles University but games appealed to me more than the power of humanity studies. Therefore, I applied to Warhorse Studios as a junior programmer and I eventually got on board.

2) Describe your position. What is it about being a AI Programmer?
I’m a Junior AI programmer. I worked on several different tasks throughout my time here at Warhorse Studios. I started with testing because we needed to know if the AI system worked well. My kingdom consists of automated tests, automated performance profiling, some small game features, and I also contribute to some basic AI stuff e.g. system for spawning animals. Around Christmas time there was huge optimization work that was done on the AI system. I was happy that I could help with this and I tried to write some basic parts of our system.

3) Did you ever worked on Videogames before?
This is my first time working in the videogame industry. Before this, I had worked with my father on the development of measurement devices for electroanalytical chemistry. However, my most favorite job was stage hands in theatre

4) Please describe one of your colleagues or your department:
I knew him for quite a long time in college. When C# programmer was needed I wrote him and we met again here in the studio. Mr. Martin Šourek is a great guy with a big heart and he even wears borat pants!

5) What are you currently working on?
Automated profiling. We automatically run the game and measure how many FPS we can get and we also see what we should improve upon. Our department is also working on the console ports right now.

6) What do you like the most about Kingdom Come: Deliverance?
My most favorite part is the combat system. I believe it is great design and it could be a real challenge to get into and it can also be rewarding to discover how it all really works. It also looks really cool.

7) How, when and with what game did you first get acquainted with videogames?
It was Prince of Persia. We had a PC at home for as long as I can remember.

8) Which videogame character or figure is the best?
James Gastovski from Operation Flashpoint. Why? Because he is damn good!

9) Which videogame character are you?
Ezio Auditore da Firenze. Yep, Assassin Creed is my guilty pleasure. The atmosphere is awesome and the mystery behind the assassin is catchy.

10) What would a perfect game according to your wishes look like?
It could be a proper WW1 shooter. I’m really disappointed about the game design of current WW1 FPS. I would like to play a proper one with game mechanics based on reality, not just the same skin of mediocre games.

11) What game have you been really looking forward to but turned out to be a total disappointment?
Space Engineers. They earned a lot of money and it put them into another project instead of putting more time into the development of the game. They collected a lot of cash but they didn’t bother to deliver the game the way it was intended to.

12) How do you relax after a hard day at work?
Yoga, coffee or a concert. It is the best way to deal with energy deficiency.

13) Your favorite music?
I’m open minded about music. So folk, rock for chill-out. Concerts match well with stonerock. Parties deserve psytrance or techno.

14) Your favorite movie or book?
I always mention the triad. Master and Margaret Sinuhe the Egyptian Roadside picnic

15) What is your kryptonite?
Craft beer.

16) Who is your favorite historical character?
Jan Eskymo Welzl if just 10% of his story is true than he was the biggest adventurer.

17) Which is your favorite historic event?
Project Apollo. It was an insane amount of work. It takes more than 1,400 man-years of software engineering.

18) If you could say something to the fans of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, what would it be?
Keep calm and wait for the game!

Do you have any additional questions to Viktor Podhájecký? Just ask here!

DrFusselpulli · January 5, 2018, 12:45pm

And now we have the answers of Viktor Podhájecký for your community questions

We discovered performance issue with improperly set weather.
There was up to 100 000 particles and FPS went to 10.

Yes NPCs do have interactions.

Many

We use our behavior trees.
Detailed explanation preferred? Ok then take a look at this papers here, here and here.

In usual behavior tree you should travers whole tree before you can perform desirable actions.
We came up with queue based machine for tree execution to be able execute deep trees in short time.

Decisions of an NPC is driven by behavior. Behavior trees has an ability to model various things.
So it is up to scripters to use them in that manner. It is rather design question than scripting language.

AI routines fit into actual timescale. Their change is driven by daycycle planner.

There would be a problem if we increase timescale to the point where some rutines doesn’t have enough time to be executed.

Set a time scale of 1:1 should not be a problem from the AI point of view. I’m not sure if it would be fun to play.

DrFusselpulli · March 14, 2017, 10:00am

Jan “Smejki” Smejkal was born in Prague, in Czech Republic. He had close contact to Daniel Vávra from the beginning at Warhorse Studios and joined the team as a Designer very early. Before the launch of the Kickstarter campaign.
Do you have any additional questions regarding him and/or his work? Just ask here!
You can find a Spanish translation of this interview here.

1) How did you hear about Warhorse and how did you join?
tl;dr – If you hire me, you’ll end up on Kickstarter
That’s a rather unusual story.
Being a gaming enthusiast, I obviously knew about Warhorse since their very first announcement of, “Hey y’all, we exist! And we’re cooking something…” That was about 2 years before the KCD Kickstarter. When Wasteland 2 succeeded on Kickstarter way back when, I asked Dan on Twitter if he would ever consider launching a Kickstarter and he replied, “Nah, we got the money that we need now.” That of course happened before KCD eventually got rejected by all publishers due to their, “All is mobile now! Nobody’s gonna buy the next gen consoles” craziness. Let’s fast forward a year when Warhorse was seeking some designer talent (while still pitching Kingdom Come to publishers). I was a contributor for the same gaming site Dan Vávra used to write for during his post-Mafia2/pre-Warhorse intermezzo, so we kinda knew each other. Dan asked me if by some chance I wished to give the design test a try. I said to myself, “Yeah, why not. Let’s try the test just for fun.” As it turned out, I was among 6 lucky chosen ones to design the whole thing. Going from a programmer to a rookie designer wasn’t ideal but it was also tempting, so I didn’t reject the offer. A few weeks later I visited Warhorse to sort everything out and they said, “Could you wait a bit? We’re in trouble and we’re launching a Kickstarter shortly. Don’t tell anyone.” Damn was I hit with a massive flashback with that Kickstarter thing. From time-to-time I kinda feel responsible for it.
Well, long story short we eventually agreed that I would join the team by January and help them with the February campaign.

2) Describe your position. What is it about being a Designer or Scripter?
I spent 2 years in the design team writing quests and generally just doing design work.

I have worked as a scripter for over a year now, which is a bit closer to my technical heart. On one hand, I finally get to bitch about my former design colleagues as I turned into someone who has to implement all the unmakeable crazy shit they’d come up with. On the other hand, I no longer own the quests I wrote which I pity a bit. Some underwent major changes by the hands of former colleagues as the design developed further and some, as usual, ended up being canceled for the time being. So that’s it. Designers write and design stuff while the scripters implement it. I’ve lived both of these lives.

3) Did you ever work on Videogames before?
tl;dr - Praise old Fallouts and you’ll be fine
Before Warhorse, I used to work as an operator system programmer for a certain Swiss producer for some special machines. In the meantime, I was a part of the English-to-Czech official translation team for Fallout New Vegas and later I lead translations for the DLCs. And as I’ve said before, I used to be a contributor for one of the largest Czech gaming sites where I mainly reviewed games. I am also a Fallout universe addict so for about 4 years I co-lead the largest Czecho-Slovak Fallout fansite (people from there ‘recently’ released a Fallout 1.5 Resurrection mod. Try it). I should also add that Fallout 3 and 4 are shit not for me. As I’m writing this I’ve realized that this seems to be a good enough background for becoming a designer since Jan “Bodkin” Němec (who also works for Warhorse as a designer) was also working on the translations, and also used to be a programmer and was also a prominent member of the Fallout fandom. We knew each other for years before Warhorse but believe it or not, we arrived at Warhorse completely independent of one another, just running into each other one day saying, “How the hell did you get in here?”.

4) Which job would you not want to do?
I would never want to script any of my larger quests. They were… complex. I would have a hard time trying to resist the urge to kill the author. Some might end up in our future works so I might eventually get killed by my present colleagues who will be assigned to script them. Wish me luck!

5) What is your favorite team activity?
Hermetically seal myself from others using headphones and just write the hell out of the code. Also our occasional LAN parties.

6) What are you currently working on?
I’ve recently finished implementing the very last quest in the game. I can’t wait for the players to get this far and see it in all its glory along with credits and of course followed by pressing “Start New Game” again.
Now I’m working on another main quest by Jan “Bodkin” Němec. Script-wise, it’s one of the largest in the game.

7) What do you like the most about Kingdom Come: Deliverance?
I am convinced the combination of the theme, genre, and production quality have enormous potential. It would be a shame if somebody used that to create some mediocre boilerplate bullshit.

8) How, when and with what platform or game did you first get acquainted with videogames?
PC. Start to finish. My first games were Warcraft, Sim City, Wolfenstein, Doom, Lemmings, and plenty of others for that era. At the age of 12, my gaming life completely changed when I got my hands on Fallout 2 . This was where I realized that games could be something more than just goals and scores and levels and boss fights and challenges and whatnot. I also realized how pointless the age restriction systems are. Fallout was 18+ and I even played the American version where you could kill kids. IMHO a deep thought-provoking but violent game is more enriching to a child’s mind than some forgettable non-controversial action-y movie tie-in. But I digress. To complete the circle, I finished the new DOOM a few days back. I enjoyed the HELL out of it. I mean it was HELLuva good.

9) What was your most touching video game moment?
I was completely blown away by Spec Ops: The Line but not by what is usually part of the discourse. I have never ever grown to despise a protagonist so much. And that was actually the designers’ goal. Total sync. I enjoyed my hatred. Bigly…

10) Which class, gender, or type do you usually pick?
When a certain group of people finally make the gamedev companies offer a playable old black-maori confined-to-wheelchair, left-eye-missing gender fluid omnisexual, I’m definitely picking that one… as a warrior, of course. Until then I will continue trying to mimic myself and play as a mage if need be.

11) What would a perfect game according to your wishes look like?
The version of Kingdom Come I’m imagining in my head of course. There are still no dragons or magic, but there is a nuclear wasteland.

12) How do you relax after a hard day at work?
That’s an oxymoron! When the day is really hard I catapult myself head first into bed. On a normal day I run about 10km, watch a show/movie, play a game (Witcher 3 currently, Torment is next), play with my dog Ralph or just simply spend some nice time with my wonderful wife.

13) Your favorite movie or book?
Books:
- Robert Merle – Malevil
- Stanisław Lem – Solaris
Movies:
- Children of Men
- 12 Monkeys

14) Your travel tip?
Granada and Ronda, Spain. I’m totally blown away by these places.
Cordóba on the other hand? The former grand mosque was beautiful but the rest of the city was a major letdown.

15) Sport is…
Yes. I totally agree.

16) What’s your guilty pleasure?
Bizzare and facepalm inducing jokes.

17) What was your greatest mistake?
Whatever it was it has been outweighed by what came instead.

18) Do you have a Bucket List?
I guess making a bucket list should be on my bucket list. But I suppose life instead of mere survival is a good thing to have there.

19) What will be your famous last words?
Wait, they’ll be famous?

20) Is it possible to buy you with candy?
Uhm… that’s a strategy I’m using on others! From time-to-time my wife bakes some deliciousness for our department.

21) Who is your favorite historic character?
Can’t decide between Isaac Newton, Leonhard Euler and that no-name guy who introduced Albert Einstein’s parents to each other.

22) Which is your favorite historic event?
a) The destruction of pre-Colombian civilizations by the Spanish. We can only imagine all the things that were lost irretrievably.
b) Doing the same as Kingdom of Bohemia in Europa Universalis.

23) You have to fight in medieval times… who are you? Which weapon do you choose?
I’m using my legs to get the hell outta there.

24) Knights or Samurai?
Maxim gun

25) Where are you born?
I was born in Prague and I spent a third of my life near the place where the next part of KCD is to be situated. I can’t wait to see it come to life in a game like ours! It’s truly a place like no other.

26) What was your favorite subject and your most hated one at school?
Despite being a trouble maker I was always a good student. Ironically I’ve always had an A in chemistry despite me hating it. I find it easy but dull and uninspiring. To surprise absolutely nobody… physics, electronics, automation, math, history, and language were my jam.

27) If you could say something to the fans of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, what would it be?
For now you are mainly fanning an idea, partially made up by your own minds. When the final product hits the shelves be fair but definitely judge us. Judge us hard. For that is the only way that we will get better.

Do you have any additional questions regarding Jan “Smejki” Smejkal? Just ask here!

DrFusselpulli · January 5, 2018, 12:44pm

Here are Jan “Smejki” Smejkals answers to your community questions:

I would compare my previous programming job to guys who create tools for us. As you might guess they don’t actually work on the game itself. And when it comes to game development I much more enjoy being closer to the content.

Games you can learn in matter of minutes fare best. So Rocket League, CS:GO, Team Fortress 2, Trackmania are among the most popular. MOBAs, strategies (AoE2, Starrcraft2), game which don’t allow private matches, games with limited team sizes, and games where loosers have to wait for long time, no matter how much some of us would like to play them, suffer inevitably. We also tried GRID, Battlefield, Overwatch or Unreal Tournament 2004.

https://forum.kingdomcomerpg.com/uploads/default/original/3X/5/7/570fd0835a7c6512ade159ee990c4d40ba7b9d35.PNG

Yup, that’s it. There are many idependently moving parts affecting each other. That’s why it’s so big. It’s a quest where your goal is to find a guy and if you find him right away then about 80% of the script turns out to be pointless.
I took me about 3 weeks to script it.

You‘ve just described DayZ. Literally. It also uses a part of the real Bohemian landscape. This part, to be specific. They just replaced the areas south and east of the river with sea.

The game ends with a cutscene and up until then you can do whatever you want. So it is similar in the sense that the game ends. However in cases like Fallout 3, New Vegas and many others you play the last mission for tens of minutes and are then forced a hard ending upon you. And that’s where we are different – you can do whatever you want until the last minute, not until the start of the last long mission. Also the very-last-autosave-before-ending will be created. You can just reload it and once again be about a minute far from the ending.

I was born in this spooky house.

That tease of mine was intentional of course! You don’t want me to spoil it, do you? If you do then I must disappoint you. I’m of course talking about the thing we reffered to as Act2 during our Kickstarter campaign but I don’t know which form the next part of KCD would take, and even if I did I’m not allowed to tell. Simply put the next time you see a new map in some next KCD project and deem the location’s central feature unusual then it’s the place I was talking about.

These are just different variables with confused and confusing names. One (called time scale) sets the speed of game(program) time. If you set it below 1, everything, including animations will be slower. If you set it above 1 everything gets faster. The other variable (called time speed) sets the ratio of game-world-time to real-world-time. If you set it to 15 (which is what we have now) then 1 real-world hour spent in the game will result in simulation of 15 hours of the in-game daycycle. If you set it to 1, the game day simulation would match real world timeflow. If you set it to 0.5 the game day will take 48 real world hour to complete. As it was stated our simulation is really ready for nearly any time speed.

Fun fact: We implemented proper simulation of sun traversal across the sky based on date and geographical position. So, if you set the time speed to 1, move to central Europe, and start playing at the exact time the in-game clock match yours, then movement of the in-game sun across the game-sky should be in total sync with movement of the real sun.

DrFusselpulli · March 14, 2017, 10:27am

Jakub Rous was born in Stod in Czech Republic and he is one of the newer members of Warhorse Studios. He joined quite recently in November 2016 and his main job as an Environment Artist at this stage of the development is optimization and bug fixing in the World of Kingdom Come: Deliverance.
Do you have any questions to Jakub Rous? Don´t hasitate and ask here.
You can find a Spanish translation of this interview here.

1) How did you hear about Warhorse?
I first heard about Warhorse sometime before the Kickstarter campaign. I was still in university at the time and although I did do 3D modeling back then, I wasn’t really seriously planning a career in the game industry just yet. It all changed during my 2016 year-long stay in Australia. There I enrolled in an intensive course about game asset creation with industry veteran Brett Briley. That really helped me to embrace all the different workflows and I learned a ton of new things. When I got back to Czech Republic, I tried to get a job at Warhorse Studios and joined the team in November 2016.

2) Did you ever work on Videogames before?
Not professionally. I did some “projects” in Unreal Engine, but those were basically game ‘doodles’. I was always interested in the technology to make interactive stories, so I experimented with it. That’s also why I got into 3D modeling some 10+ years ago, that way I didn’t have to only use models included within the engine for my experimentation.

3) Describe your usual day at the studio?
Usually I arrive at 8am, turn on the PC, start to sync and update processes and then enjoy our excellent (and free!) breakfast. After that I work on bugs and other tasks for another 9-10 hours. We are now heavily focused on optimizing the game as much as possible, so the majority of the work is about tweaking stuff which was already created. It’s not as exciting as creating something new, but the result are worth it.

4) What are you currently working on?
Right now as the rest of the 3D graphics team, I’m working on optimizations. We want you to have the best experience possible not only on PC, but also on consoles. So we are working really hard so the results play as smoothly as possible.
There are also some places that still need a bit of work graphics-wise, so everything will look better than life (of course).

5) What do you like the most about Kingdom Come: Deliverance?
The fact that you’re not an all-powerful hero that can one-hit most of the enemies. In other RPGs you also start weak, but the sense of real danger usually diminishes over time as you become more powerful. KCD delivers you the feeling of being more powerful than you are too, but you are still in danger of being (very rapidly) dead if you act too hot-headed. You still need to use tactics and be aware of your surroundings even if you have “the best" weapon and armor in game.

6) How, when and with what platform or game did you first get acquainted with videogames?
I first began gaming on Commodore 64, thanks to my older brother who introduced me into it. However, my memories from that time are very fuzzy since I was like 5 years old. My first strong gaming memory is from Wolfenstein 3D and Mortal Kombat (yeah, I played it when I was about 7, loved the fatalities, and didn’t grow up to be psychopath. Lucky me!).

7) What was your most touching video game moment?
The saddest was probably the scene that plays after the death of certain someone in Metal Gear Solid 2 (not gonna be spoiley, players of MGS2 will know which scene it is).
Unfortunately, I cannot pick the best scene, there are so many competing for that title. One of the most memorable scenes for me is also in Metal Gear Solid, specifically the boss battle with Psycho Mantis where you had to switch controllers to beat him. It was the first time that I experienced a game breaking the fourth wall. Psycho Mantis reading my memory card, that scene really imprinted into my mind.

Also, I must at least mention Undertale since it’s my favorite game of 2016. One scene especially caught me off guard. It’s during the genocide route. I didn’t really have the skill (and heart) to clear the game this particular way but couldn’t resist to at least look up some let’s plays. Near the end of the game, our fellow yellow antagonist will comment not only on the character we are playing as BUT also its player (breaking the 4th wall again) as well as people who rather watch it on YouTube than to have the guts to play the genocide route themselves. I guess that counts as breaking the… 5th wall? Mindblown.

8) Which class, gender, or type do you usually pick?
Stealth ranged type. Also, if I have that option, I play with female character rather than male.

9) Are there any videogames you repeat playing over and over again?
Skyrim, Unreal Tournament, Zelda series, Anno 2070. Skyrim mainly because of the extreme number of mods that really prolonged the game life into infinity. The community around that game is absolutely awesome and I love it to death.

10) What game have you been really looking forward to but turned out to be a total disappointment?
Crysis 2. It just wasn’t memorable experience for me at all.

11) How do you relax after a hard day at work?
I usually relax by playing my favorite games or watching silly animal videos on YouTube.

12) Your favorite music playlist
These days my favorite music is soundtrack from the new DOOM. I listened to it at least 50 times now and it still doesn’t bore me. Other times, it heavily depends on mood. I can listen probably to anything except for hip-hop and country.
Some of my other favorites are soundtracks to Legend of Zelda, Age of Wonders, Unreal Tournament, Starcraft (first one only), Silent Hill (Akira Yamaoka is freakin’ genius!)

13) Your favorite movie or book?
One of my favorite movies of all time is definitely Noriko’s Dinner Table from the director Sion Sono. Although it may be a bit unusual, it has a special place in my heart.
As far as books, that would be Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami.

14) Your travel tip?
Scotland. Especially north east part. But if you’re not fond of chilly weather, then I would recommend Cairns. It’s a beautiful small city on the eastern cost of Australia. Warm sea, tropical islands, coral reefs, yummy seafood. What else do you want?

15) What’s your guilty pleasure?
Topokki or sometimes ‘Tteok-bokki’. It’s a Korean spicy dish that became my most favorite food beat only by sushi. It’s basically fast-food, nothing you would put a ‘quality’ sticker on. But I just love it. I always annoy my girlfriend when I ask her day after day “Can we have topokki for dinner?”

16) What was your greatest mistake?
I had an opportunity to take a big step towards my dream at young age and I didn’t go for it.
And also that I didn’t shave for the photo in this interview.

17) What will be your famous last words?
“The experiment was a major success!”

18) Is it possible to buy you with candy?
With this, absolutely:

19) What is your kryptonite?
Onion. And that’s a bit unfortunate since many Czech foods have onions in them.

20) You have to fight in medieval times… who are you? Which weapon do you choose?
That depends on what kind of fight it would be. I’m usually fond of ranged weapons such as bows, but if that would not be an option, then a spear probably since it can still be considered as ‘kinda’ ranged.

21) Knights or Samurai?
Samurai all the way!

22) What was your favorite subject and your most hated one at school?
My favorite subjects were IT and English. The most hated was physics, which is a bit strange considering that it is my favorite subject to self-study now. I guess priorities do change over time.
My grades in history were just good enough to not fail.

23) If you could say something to the fans of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, what would it be?
Let the hype continue, the result will be worth it!

Do you have any questions to Jakub Rous about him or his work? Don´t hasitate and ask here.

DrFusselpulli · March 16, 2017, 1:06pm

And here are Jakubs answers to your community questions:

I actually love bibimbap, never had a dolsot one though. However when I have to choose between that and tteok-bokki, I always choose tteok-bokki! It’s just sooo good I prefer it over everything else

Basically everything you said will be in the game and more.

You are correct that optimizations do lower something down, however it’s not always something that a player can see. For example, one of the things we worked few weeks ago was the creation of an “occlusion proxy”. That is basically an invisible sheet of geometry inside the walls of houses. This sheet’s purpose is that anything that is located on the other side (relative to the player’s location) will not be rendered at all. You will not find out that majority of the world is not rendered when you’re inside the house. But your graphic card and CPU will know, that’s for sure

Another non-destructible way of optimizing is to “merge” things. For example, we are using lots and lots of vegetation. Normally that would heavily affect performance, but we are merging the grass into small groups that are basically seen by graphics card as single objects instead of seeing every individual strand of grass as a single object. It’s a bit more technical, but in the end it saves a lot of resources and you will not be able to tell the difference gameplay-wise.

There are many more ways to optimize the game. Do not be afraid though. We are not really downgrading the graphics. In majority of cases we are just trying to make it so that it uses resources more efficiently

DrFusselpulli · March 31, 2017, 3:05pm

Prokop Jirsa is one of the Warhorse Studios designers since the beginning of 2014, before the start of the Kickstarter Campaign. He was Born in the city of the famous beer, Pilsen, in the Czech republic and today he will use his writing skills to answer the call of the Weekly Torch.
Do you have any questions to Prokop Jirsa? Please ask here!
You can find a Spanish translation of this interview here.

1) How did you join Warhorse?
I joined Warhorse on January 2014. And to this day it baffles me how weird it was.
I was finishing my masters in economics and was preparing for serious job hunting. But as a gamer I was obviously reading all the Czech gaming sites and one article caught my eye. It was about one small Czech gaming company with big dreams. And they were hiring!
Unfortunately, I found out that gaming startups aren’t really looking for people that can valuate derivatives. Weird, isn’t it? Nevertheless, I would blame myself till the end of days if I didn’t at least try to apply, so I chose the one profession that nobody really knows how to do anyway – designer. And here I am

2) Describe your position. What is it about being a Designer?
You are either writing some crazy stuff or dealing with some crazy people. Like all people in Warhorse studios!
The thing about designers in Warhorse is, that you actually do many different things during the development. Designing features, events and quests. Writing dialogues, codex entries and tutorials. Constant playtesting and helping with production. And in the end even directing the voice overs.

3) Did you ever worked on Videogames before?
Not professionally. I joined Warhorse right from the University so I only had part time jobs outside the industry up until then. Quality management implementation for example.
But I did some modding and my ultra short Shadowrun Returns campaign must have been at least promising. They hired me after all.

4) Which job would you not want to do?
You know the guy that has to stand in our hallway for hours in full plate armor every day? Man that would suck. Although I tried talking to him once and he completely ignored me. What a dick…

5) What are you currently working on?
We finally finished most of the voice recordings so I am mostly playtesting and polishing the quests and various features of our game.
This week was kinda like this:
- Two 4 hour sessions of voice actors directing.
- Weekly torch writing
- New dialogues for events.
- Quest objectives, map markers and logs readjustment and polishing.
- Two new tutorials in both the short and long version.
- Overall experience gain design polishing.
- Skillchecks adjustments and testing.
- Alchemy and potions UI design polishing.
- Skillchecks visualization UI design polishing.
- Subtitles lenght adjustments.
- New design and NPC routes for one stealth mission.
- And many other smaller things…

6) What are some of your notable accomplishments?
My quests obviously! Hopefully you will enjoy my weird characters and many possible solutions. Recently I also heard some dialogues I directed with the actors and some of those are really good!

7) What do you like the most about Kingdom Come: Deliverance?
Chicken killing. Really, try that!

8) What is the most difficulty when creating a quest?
To balance what is possible with what is cool. And knowing what will look good after years of production.
The fact that we are (as designers) at the beginning of the whole game production and that our bad decisions could potentially waste huge amounts of company resources can be quite intimidating…

9) Can you tell us about one of your quests without spoiling too much?
Not really… Although I am quite fond of the way you can fail some of my quests and the story still continues. Try enlisting for example and just leave your commander. That was one of the loudest shoutings we ever had in the voice recording studio
Nobody treats you like a hero in our game…

10) What was your most touching video game moment?
The “secret” ending from 2008 Prince of Persia. My god that was beautiful and smart.
Or the revelation of the link between the two protagonists in Game of Thrones RPG.
Interestingly I don’t consider either of those games especially good…

11) Which videogame character or figure is the best?
Kreia from KotoR really managed to question the jedi morality much better than any movies ever did.
And Morte from Planescape. I really loved that lying little bastard!

12) What would a perfect game according to your wishes look like?
Basically Bloodlines 2. Preferably without gamebreaking bugs on release
That game had everything I love about RPGs: Intriguing story with mature lore, excellent and memorable characters, multiple solutions for every quest, with rewards only for completion (so you are not forced to “farm” exp anywhere) and an interesting RPG system and combat.

13) How do you relax after a hard day at work?

14) Your favorite music playlist:
It changes a lot. Currently I am listening to Oxygène from Jean-Michel Jarre.

15) Your favorite movie or book?
Hard to say. But Foundation from Asimov probably influenced me a lot in my formative years.

16) Is it possible to buy you with candy?
Nope, try Argentinian medium rare tenderloin steak.

17) How do you like living in the Czech Republic?
Quite a lot. It is said that living abroad makes you appreciate different cultures and point of views. That is definitely true, but for me it also made me appreciate our culture. The things that I took for granted.

18) You have to fight in medieval times… who are you? Which weapon do would you choose?
I am just an ordinary guy in A-10 Thunderbolt mowing anybody that opposes me with 3,900 armor piercing incendiary shells per minute!
You thought I’d choose a medieval weapon, didn’t you? Heh, I don’t like dying…

19) Knights or Samurai?
Seriously? That would be a blood bath. Medieval knight is an outcome of centuries long arms race in Europe. Samurai were poorly armored, with swords made from very bad iron. Any stronger contact of the swords would result in the katana shattering.
I would even bet on unarmed knight against samurai as he would be near invincible in his armor against samurai sword designed to cut flesh…

20) If you could say something to the fans of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, what would it be?
We are really trying hard to bring you something different and original. Hopefully you will love playing the game as much as we love building it

Do you have any questions to Prokop Jirsa? Just ask here!

DrFusselpulli · January 5, 2018, 12:43pm

here are Prokop Jirsa´s answers to your community questions:

If the outcome of the quest is a historical event it changes only the path to that. If you are smart, it can be easier, or you can get additional rewards for example. In non historical quests we have more freedom, so the whole outcome can change heavily based on your decisions.

Regarding the interconnectivity of the quests – some quests are like that, meaning that some paths in one quests, can close a different quest or even provide a solution for quest not yet started.

But every quest in our game influences the whole reputation system. If you make someone happy his personal reputation influences the local reputation and that influences the whole faction reputation. So if in one quest you make many people happy, skill checks in another quests will be easier. If you are forced to steal some things in one quests, local awareness will rise, more guards will show up and the stealth part in another quest will be harder.

Both. We are trying to offer paths for different playstyles, but those are usually just “paths” to the end. But if there are decisions in the quests they are usually play style indifferent.

Yep it changes, it’s even funnier now We now have a crime for killing farm animals as well, but i am not sure if chicken counts.

Usually you speak to someone, or one quest starts another. But some quests are started in a more original way

You get different rewards for different solution. Also, try refusing the material reward some time, you might get surprised

I won’t spoil this one for you

Anything that has strong visible outcome in the game fast. I like results

Sure. And not only for story reason. Given the time i would polish for all eternity

DrFusselpulli · March 31, 2017, 2:41pm

Tomáš “Bary” Barák, born in Znojmo in the Czech Republic, is one of the programmers for Kingdom Come Deliverance. He juggles the CryEngine code to bring Kingdom Come Delivernace to life and create the base on which the game is built. He joined Warhorse Studios in November 2013, only a few months before the start of our Kickstarter campaign.
Do you have any additional questions to Tomáš “Bary” Barák? Just ask here.
You can find a Spanish translation of this interview here.

1) How did you hear about Warhorse? How did you join?
My colleague from the university told me about the studio. He joined the studio in 2012 I think, and he was really excited about his job. I was really unhappy with my job at that time, so I decided to quit and started working for Warhorse.

2) Which job would you not want to do?
I have done some webs before and I dont want to by a web developer in any form for any company anymore. That was my most boring programming experience ever!

3) Please describe Warhorse Studios:
A bunch of young, talented people, full of passion. My co-workers are, in the end, the thing I like the most about Warhorse!

4) Describe your usual day at the studio?
It depends on the stage of the project. In the beginning we were implementing a lot of new features every day. These days, we focus more on bugs and optimizations, but typically I sit at my desk and work with Visual Studio (which I personally hate). Fortunately there are not many meetings happening anymore.

5) What are you currently working on?
Mostly optimzations of the code. With todays hardware, it’s really important for the game to utilize all resources for most of the time. For example, if you have an 8-core CPU but your code can utilize just one, your game will run 8-times slower than it should run. That’s like 4 FPS instead of 32, whichis a lot! We have achieved most of our FPS by executing pieces of code concurently instead of serially.

6) What are some of your notable accomplishments?
Feature-wise I am responsible for the RPG module of our game. We now have a pretty complex rpg system with cca 500 buffs and perks. We have managed to implement that with a relatively clean code and the system is mostly data-driven – that means easier modding.

7) What was your most touching video game moment?
I remember many touching moments in Warcraft 3 (+ FT), like Arthas killing his dwarf friend. Also, the Diablo series has pretty impressive moments (mostly in cutscenes). My favourite one is with Mephisto (after you kill him) and the gate to hell.

8) Which videogame character or figure is the best?
Gordon Freeman – he never speaks and almosts never shows himself in the game.

9) Which class, gender, or type do you usually pick?
Magic-based characters like sorcerres, wizzadrs, druids and even necromants are my favourite. I usually don’t play paladins and warriors – they are boring.

10) Are there any videogames you repeat playing over and over again?
I have played the old Fallout series (1+2) many times along with Diablo 2 and AoE 2. My favourite multiplayer games are: Starcraft BW, 2 and Unreal Tournament (the first one).

11) Most hilarious bug you have ever encountered or worst video game experience?
The moment when I have learned to make more save files? I was playing Fallout 1 and the game crashed during the save. Unfortunatelly, it damaged the save file which was the only one I had. So, I had to start over…

12) How do you relax after a hard day at work?
Sometimes I play the guitar. I have finished the amazing Lego Bucket Wheel Excavator during this weekend! I rarely watch TV or read books.

13) Your favorite music playlist?
I am a cross-genre kind of a listener. I will list some of my favourite artists here (from all genres I currently enjoy, most important first): Technimatic, Pink Floyd, Underworld, Steve Vai, Dub FX, Kiasmos, Kraftwerk, Iron Maiden, Totalni Nasazeni, Michal Pavlicek (Prazsky Vyber, Stromboli), High Contrast, Above and Beyond, The Cinematic Orchestra, Monkey Business, Dubioza Kolektiv, …

14) Your favorite movie or book?
As I said before, I dont read much nor watch TV/movies, but I have loved the StarWars serises since I was a kid! I have played a lot of StarWars games too!

15) What species is your spirit animal?
This is a strange question. Nobody asked me this before. The first animal that comes to mind is a whale.

16) Do you have a Bucket List?
No, but I have many dreams I wonder why there is no question regarding dreams here? I always wanted to be a scientist working in a secret underground lab, or be a good (not necessary famous) musician.

17) If you could say something to the fans of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, what would it be?
If you have ever wanted to be a game developer, go now and start working in the nearest gaming company. It is now much easier to join the industry than you might think.

Do you have any additional questions to Tomáš “Bary” Barák? Just ask here.

DrFusselpulli · January 5, 2018, 12:32pm

Here are Tomáš “Bary” Barák´s answers to your community questions:

Sorry, I have to disappoint you, but nothing like real-time simulated massive destruction of castle walls will appear in KCD. Those things usually look great in a prepared demo scene, but it is not an easy task to integrate such features in a real game. For example, the simulation is unstable or unpredictable, it eats a lot of CPU/GPU power. CryEngine physics is unfortunately not an example of a stable and easy to understand module. But you can look forward to see our character dirt/blood/damage system. Basically every piece of armor/cloth has ability to become dirty, damaged or covered by blood. That’s something that fits our RPG open world game perfectly.

In theory, there is nothing like “you need at least 4 cores”. If you have lesser number of cores, your operating system will serialize the work for you. So the game will run slower, but it will run. In practice, you fine tune the application to the hardware you are targeting. It is always easier to design, write and debug sequential code rather than parallel. So many applications are single threaded. Such applications will not benefit from a many-core CPU at all. Some applications or tasks are easy to write in a parallel/multi-threaded fashion – like a video codec. Such applications will benefit from more cores a lot. KCD is somewhere in between. We have managed to parallelize many tasks (like AI, updates of entities, RPG, …) and some tasks were already parallelized by CryTek (like physics, skeleton updates, audio, …), but there is still a lot of work that is executed sequentially. Currently KCD runs best on a 8 core CPU. If you remove 4 cores it will slow the application almost twice, but if you add 8 it won’t run two times faster (my guess ).

Some of the threads are fixed: the main thread (the main game loop and control of the other threads) and the render thread (the draw call submission). The rest is dynamically assigned by the operating system. We plan to experiment with the AI thread/job.

We currently don’t have any Ryzen CPUs in the studio. But we plan to get some to test and optimize for. We have a good relationship with AMD, I would say, better than with Intel :).

KCD won’t fit into 8GB of RAM on PC. It will probably swap a lot or you will have to lower the detail to spare some memory. Please buy at least 16GB :).

That’s not true anymore! The AI team has improved the performance of the AI system a lot in the last months. We have also started to use AI behavior LODs. So now we are able to simulate more than 500 NPC brains in 10ms on PS4 (not counting the thousands of smart/trigger areas and objects). The whole system runs in a separate thread, so it does not block the main thread anymore. Render is our current bottleneck.

I had to move to Prague to study the university I wanted to study and to find a job I wanted to do. We have number of co-workers from Moravia, they drive hundreds of km every weekend to see their families. We have also Americans and other nations working here, they all had to move to Prague. So what are you going to do? Každopadně díky!

DrFusselpulli · March 31, 2017, 2:23pm

Pavel Beskeyd was born in Kežmarok in Slovakia but moved to Prague in the Czech Republic. Formerly working for 2K Czech, he joined Warhorse Studios in 2015 to work as a 2D Artist on Kingdom Come: Deliverance.
His wall paintings are adorable. Medieval churches and castles were very colorful once, and he brings this former glory back to our enjoyment.
Do you have any questions to Pavel Beskeyd? Please ask here!
You can find a Spanish translation of this interview here.

1) How did you hear about Warhorse?
Just like many of my fellow colleagues at Warhorse Studios, before joining this great project I had been working for 2K Czech. I hear from my friends that they are hiring at Warhorse Studios and they’re looking for someone to create the wall paintings and medieval illuminations.

2) Describe your usual day at the studio?
Sometimes I make some of the designs for corporate designs, prints, t-shirts, etc. but mainly I create murals for interiors in the game (e.g. churches, castles, chapels, altars, etc.). Together with our historian Asia Nowak, we are looking for references and suggestions as a source for a complete interior.

3) What are you currently working on?
An interior painting of a small church in Rattay., Prophet’s and scenes from the life of Jesus Christ. I’m also working on Madonna on the altar, St. Sigismund, and St Procopius

Before the painting:

and after:

4) What are some of your notable accomplishments?
Interior painting of the cross corridor at Sasau Monastery. It took me over half a year. It is a free reconstruction of the cross corridor painting at the Emmaus, from which much hasn´t survived (after insensitive reconstructions and a bombing in the WW2).

Interior of the Church of St. Martin in Sasau with scenes from the life of St. Martin

concept:

and realization:

Here you can see the church in a small video:

Or Sasau Church altar with central motive of the crucifixion. Above, St. Martin is cutting the coat. In the opposite stands St. Ludmila. Down in the row are St. Sigismund, Vít, Adalbert and Wenceslaus.

5) What do you like the most about Kingdom Come: Deliverance?
The visual of the entire country and the emphasis on realism and detail. This way, the game allows an impressive trip into the past.

6) How, when and with what platform or game did you first get acquainted with videogames?
My uncle was a big fan of computers since the 80´s, so I would join him by the computer since childhood. I remember our Atari with cartridges and the games like Berzerk, Montezuma, and Moon Patrol.

7) Are there any videogames you repeat playing over and over again?
The game is like Minecraft: I like creative games that don´t limit me much and I can create my own environment.

8) What would a perfect game according to your wishes look like?
I would enjoy something like a mix between Transport Tycoon and Bridge Builder.

9) How do you relax after a hard day at work?
Good meal and drink. I like to play board games with my family or friends. I also enjoy sleeping.

10) Your favorite music playlist
Alternative, punk.

11) Your favorite movie or book?
Book: Ed Wood, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.
Movie: Slaughterhouse – Five, Death Is My Trade

Both of these works are biographical and both fit precisely into the historical facts.

12) If you could say something to the fans of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, what would it be?
I hope they will like our game and will enjoy it.

Do you want to know something more about Pavel Beskeyd? Just ask here!

DrFusselpulli · April 5, 2017, 9:10pm

This time nobody asked a question to Pavel Beskeyd. But that does not mean that we didn´t got any feedback.

Pavel was very happy to hear about your comments. As you liked his pictures so much, here are some more of them. Enjoy:

DrFusselpulli · April 7, 2017, 3:11pm

Tereza “Fura” Semecká was born here in Prague and joined Warhorse Studios a year ago, on the first of April 2016. But this was no April fools joke, she is taking her job as a scripter very serious. Just read what she has to say about it.
Do you want to know more about Tereza “Fura” Semecká? Just ask here!
You can find a Spanish translation of this interview here.

1) How did you hear about Warhorse?
The first time I heard about Warhorse was on TV a few years ago. I thought something like, “Wow, I’d love to work there!” I thought I might at least try to learn the CryEngine but the poor old computer I had was not able to run it. I looked up few different game engines and ended up starting to learn Unity3D.
I joined Warhorse on April 1st, 2016. It all started with a crisis in my previous work so I was thinking about what I wanted to do in the future. I applied to Bohemia Interactive at first and got an interview for a position in Brno, which was not so attractive for me. I thought that I might as well try sending a CV to Warhorse too. To my amazement I got a reply the day I sent the CV and we agreed on an interview. Evidently, it went well.

2) Did you ever worked on Videogames before?
It was about sixteen years ago when I first thought it would be cool to make a game. I started some programming classes, learned the basics, but I didn’t have the patience to stick with it. It took me another seven or eight years before I tried again and somehow I managed to learn more of it and I actually began enjoying it. Still, I was nowhere near the point where I could make a living out of it or even make games. I took a job at a bank and forgot about making games for some time. I learned to script in Excel and a little bit of database stuff and I occasionally worked on small hobby projects which I began and I never finished except one or two of them, like a memory game or a maze generator. When I got some experience, I ended up in a data warehouse department (do not confuse “warehouse department” with “Warhorse Studios”, this is another thing). It seemed pretty cool at first but it was not in the end. The best thing about this was that it made me rethink what I wanted to do. I got to the point where just the decision of quitting the job was a huge relief. Luckily by that time, I met a person who helped me decide that I might as well try to apply for a job in game development, which is what I always wanted to try. The day when I handed the resignation to my boss was one of the best in my life. So, here I am

3) Which job would you not want to do?
Clown. I’m not that funny.

4) Describe your usual day at the studio?
I make coffee. I drink coffee. Repeat until evening.

5) What are you currently working on?
Writing answers to those questions, thinking about making coffee.
Oh, you mean at work? Quests and more quests - old quests, new quests, fixing quest bugs.
Currently, I’m working on a quest Night attack. It features attacking. At night.

6) What are some of your notable accomplishments?
Learning to make fun of myself. I was a real Grinch, as one of my colleagues would call me when I’m grumpy.
Being able not to consume more than three or four cups of coffee a day and stay awake.

7) What do you like the most about Kingdom Come: Deliverance?
Nature and the environment. It feels authentic. Only thing that I miss is the scent of morning in the forest.

8) How, when and with what game did you first get acquainted with videogames?
First game I remember is Goofy’s Railway Express on PC. I still don’t understand how it kept me entertained, even for a few moments. Few years later I got my hands on Descent, The Incredible Machine, and Heroes of Might and Magic; those still feel like games that hooked me up for good.

9) Which class, gender, or type do you usually pick?
Druid. Female druid.
Or, something which shape-shifts, casts bad-ass spells, and has cute pets. Pets are a must-have so it can be a ranger if druid is not an option. Best would be necro-druid, who would raise/summon skeletal animals that will kill wandering villagers and then spill their blood onto the roots of trees to awaken them as evil treants, to roam the forest and make them want to feed on the living too. The druid’s forest would be full of evil creatures lurking in the shadows, watching you with only a spark of cold blue fire in the empty eye-holes. Imagine a little skeletal kitten with blue fiery eyes cuddling to get scratches…
A little tour to my own creepy world. You’re welcome.

10) Are there any videogames you repeat playing over and over again?
Baldur’s gate 2. Even though the RPG system sometimes feels like random chaos and classes are poorly balanced, I still find this game engaging because of many aspects. As an occasional Dungeons & Dragons player I love the complexity of the Forgotten realms world and how you can encounter characters from books. I repeatedly played it just to see how the story goes with different party members. Characters feel alive and their interactions not only with the player but also with each other are simply wonderful. For example, when Viconia (a bad-ass evil dark elf cleric) was hitting on Sarevok (a bad-ass main evil guy from BG1) he replied how he’d been to hell and back and he wasn’t scared of anything except her. Well, it doesn’t sound very funny if you don’t know the characters…
And of course, you can play as a druid, which is a big plus.

11) What would a perfect game according to your wishes look like?
Definitely RPG. Simple base stats, like Skyrim or Ultima Online - lots of skills which you would advance by practicing them. Crafting more like UO or Minecraft - you can grow plants and trees, mine ores, make houses and equipment, tame animals, wander into dark dungeons to obtain rare materials., and the ability to write your own story in this world as either hero, nobleman, simple craftsman, or just a lone wanderer.

12) Most hilarious bug you have ever encountered or worst video game experience?
Broken animations. For example, instead of a normal walk, the character was moving while playing the sitting/riding horse animation. That made me laugh for a solid fifteen minutes several times. But to be honest, it is fairly easy to make me go into a crazy unstoppable laugh.

13) How do you relax after a hard day at work?
I began training Jiu jitsu recently to get in shape and unwind a little. Apart from that, I spend an awful amount of time at the computer playing games, mostly Heroes of the Storm with a bunch of friends or coding some stuff for a hobby project which is slowly growing. Maybe one day it will become a real game. Sometimes I draw silly pictures or I try to write short stories to keep my mind occupied with something else than technical stuff. There are even days when I try to go out and socialize, but only in moderate amounts.

14) Your favorite music playlist
Melodic power, speed or heavy metal, folk, rock, orchestral music. Whichever keeps me in the mood to get things done. Currently Dreamtale.

15) Your favorite movie or book?
I can’t decide between Dogma and Galaxy Quest; both of those are hilarious.
As for a book, it is definitely the Earthsea series by U. K. Le Guin.

16) Sport is…
Trolling. Have you heard of it? It’s fun, you should give it a try.

17) Is it possible to buy you with candy?
Nope, but you can try pizza… or very good coffee.

18) What is your weakest trait?
I am lazy as hell and have little to no patience at all.

19) You have to fight in medieval times… who are you?
I believe you already can guess now. Druid it is.

20) If you could say something to the fans of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, what would it be?
Thanks for your support and patience. We are all trying to do our best to make this game great! Special thanks to you all for reading the weird stuff I wrote.

If you have some more questions to Tereza “Fura” Semecká, you can ask them here!

DrFusselpulli · January 5, 2018, 12:28pm

Here are Tereza “Fura” Semeckás answers to your community questions

I’ve played the quest through many times during the development phase, so I don’t consider myself a good judge in this matter, still it seems pretty playable to me. Light is low, but feels pretty good for the action. Apart from that it is partially stealth mission which means you don’t really want to try that during the day when you can sneak through in the cover of darkness.

Good idea! I should at least give it a try

The bug was due to wrong indexation of animations, so the game thought it played right animation, but there was another one bound to that index.

Depends on the quest and design, there definitely will be savepoints but to be honest I am not sure whether it will be exactly at the start of every quest, more like at the point before crucial moments of story.

It is hard to tell, because the quests now seem to me more like work than entertainment although I still enjoy working on quests. I consider special two quests I worked on each one for different reason. First is “Piece of a Saint”, it is small but it is first quest I ever worked on here in WHS. Second one is “Stone dead” which is most complex quest I worked on so far and apart from some serious headaches it gave me lot of experience in scripting (that much, I leveled up several times).

Yep, maine coon kitty, her personality is a very good reflection of my worst personal traits

Nah, no plans
I learned that my plans never end up exactly as planned. I’m sure the life will surprise me with an opportunity when the time is right for me to move on.

It is more like work from a colleague who left us so these are new for me, not really new in the game

DrFusselpulli · July 19, 2017, 2:44pm

Luboš Suk was born in Nová Paka in Czech Republic and joined Warhorse Stuidos around half a year ago in October 2016. He is a part of the now bigger Quality Assurance team, to find bugs and glitches and get them fixed.
Do you have any questions to Luboš Suk? Please ask here.
You can find a Spanish translation of this interview here.

1) Where can we usually find you lurking in the holy halls of Warhorse?
It may sound boring (as it is…), but it’s behind my desk. This is because my job is to test the game and its content, which is hard to do from a couch or from the kitchen. I do hope one day that I will be able to say that I’m lurking in a hammock near my desk.

2) How did you hear about Warhorse?
I heard about WH studios from one of the scripters, Tereza Semecká, in the Summer of 2016. She was talking about how awesome it was to work here and how she has fulfilled her dreams, bla bla bla. So when I moved to Prague, (due to my girlfriend who is a PhD student here), I tried to apply for a job. To my surprise, it was successful! I then joined Warhorse Studios in October of 2016.

3) Describe your position. What is it about being a QA?
I’m working in the QA department (yay to a bunch of guys who break everything and only play games the entire time). How is it being a QA member? It’s depressing and no one likes you! Why? Because you broke their precious stuff and you’re telling them, ‘OMG! This doesn’t work!’
But seriously, what is it about being a QA? I think it’s a great responsibility (yeah, laugh now…). We are testing the game again and again to figure out as many issues/bugs as we can. Try this, try that and again… how to deal with nasty issues/bugs? It’s not just, ‘write it down and move along ,sir,’ we need to examine that bug, describe it correctly, and find as much information about it as we can (otherwise our job is useless if we just write out, “This doesn’t work…”). So we spent a bunch of time trying something again and again (and again…) to figure out what really happened.
Many bugs are tricky ones that need certain conditions to be met to reproduce them. So there is a plenty of time looking into debugging tools and logs. After a bug is reported (and fixed) our job isn’t done. There is a need to review if the fix was enough, so it’s almost back to the beginning.
To make a long story short, being a QA member can be frustrating.
Another task for a QA member is to rate the quality of a game (oooh it looks great and meh this looks shitty) which can be unpleasant. No one wants to hear that they’ve done something wrong (I know that behind everything, much effort and hard work is put into it). So, you can get an easy reply, “you don’t understand this, so STFU and GTFO” and it’s not pleasant to hear. It’s probably the same as hearing, “what you made isn’t good enough.” Rating the quality is an important part of development, because we all wanna make something great, I hope.

4) Have you ever worked on Videogames before? What have you worked on previously?
Previously, I worked (as a volunteer) on development for Czech Ultima Online Freeshard, but I think it can’t be consider ed work, because it was really for fun. And about my previous real job? I worked for TRW Automotive (now ZF/TRW) in Jablonec nad Nisou, where I worked as a support IT guy in the CAE department (tool coding, creating and maintaining databases, customer communication). The main part of the job was to create and maintain tools, which saves time for the other guys and it made their job easier.

5) Describe your usual day at the studio?
A usual day? I think that every day is unusual, but for simplicity, every day starts in the morning (some breakfast and coffee), get new data from the builder, check emails for some bug fixes from the previous days, and prepare the status for our QA review ,which is at 10 o’clock. For review, we are discussing the state of the game and the plans for the day. And that’s our our daily routine: trying to break everything!

6) What are you currently working on?
Currently I’m working on quests (as everyone else is in our department). With this in mind, I’m maintaining feature tests, which runs on tests levels and it helps us with testing common tasks (movement, basic features, shopping, etc). This way, you don’t need to test them again and again every day; you need to only look at the test results and focus on the complicated stuff.

I also have a special build on which I’m catching some nasty errors, which can have an impact on game performance and overall functionality for programmers. There is also another build where I am catching errors for NPC behaviors. After that, I need to go through the errors and distribute them between responsible people so that they can fix them (also for game performance and more deeper game testing than just simple playing).

7) What are some of your notable accomplishments?
Dunno. Maybe there are other people who can tell what notable accomplishments I’ve had (if there is something )

8) What do you like the most about Kingdom Come: Deliverance?
Probably the story-line and combat system. I like the medieval theme and the atmosphere of the game, which has great potential.

9) How, when and with what platform or game did you first get acquainted with videogames?
My first time was when I was 8 (maybe 10?). Not exactly sure, but it was on a platform called, “Didaktik” (an 8bit Czechoslovakia PC) where games was loaded from audiotapes. Then I spend some time on DOS games (Wolf 3D, Blood, Dune 1 &2, Civilization, and many, many old games). A very important gaming moment for me was when I discovered Ultima Online – a game which absolutely amazed me (along with MMORPGs). I met awesome people there and I spent a lot of time there…

10) Which class, gender, or type do you usually pick?
As a class I prefer summoners (Necromancers are the bests) and I absolutely choose a female, because watching a chick ass while playing is much more better than playing as some dude.

11) Are there any videogames you repeat playing over and over again?
There are many of them, because there are not many new games that I like. I absolutely play games over and over like Fallout 1&2, old RTS like KKND2 and Red Alert 2.

12) Your favorite music?
Picture will be enough

13) Your favorite book?
I’m mostly interested in Czech “trash” science fiction. Authors like Jiri Kulhanek, Frantisek Kotleta, Miroslav Zamboch.

14) Your travel tip?
Norway for sure! Awesome nature, nice people, Nordkapp, Tromso, Trollstigen, wildlands…. Just get your car packed, buy stuff and go, but beware of wolverines and elks (and also trolls).

15) Sport is: MTB
When I lived in Liberec (Reichenberg), I really loved bike trips (mountain trips, downhill, and hard terrain ride) but one day some bad things happened and some **** stole my bike!

16) Is it possible to buy you with candy?
Candy isn’t bad, but have you ever heard about meat?

17) Which is your favorite historic event?
There are multiple of them, e.g. battle of Vienna, battle of Wizna, the siege of Prague in 1648 (where some ordinary people did unusual deeds). Also, events like Charlie Brown and the Franz Stigler incident or Walther Wenck in the battle of Berlin

18) Knights or Samurai?
Kenshin

19) If you could say something to the fans of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, what would it be?
Keep calm and be patient (and don’t be a lousy troll)! This is not an ordinary game - there are many good ideas and cool features, which can be fun in a game, but it’s not easy to make everything work together.

Do you have any questions to Luboš Suk? Please ask here.

DrFusselpulli · May 10, 2017, 10:10am

Here are the community answers from Luboš Suk:

Mainly I testing on PC version. Stuff like quests, NPC behavior and etc… but when I working on profiling I need to switch on consoles too. (and sometimes almost break my fingers on the controller. (yep im clumsy with that little plastic toy)

Im specialised on breaking Terezas’s stuff and she hate me for that! But i dont think we aren´t specialised on bugs here, because you never know what breaks, so you need to deal with everything what appears.

In not focused on console testing, so I can’t answer this question correctly. But I think that consoles are awesome and without bugs

Yep, what was in alpha/beta was a bit annoying. But for now save and load seems fine and will works like a charm

It depends on what you call main bug don´t be worried and wait for the surprise.

It depends on what I currently doing. While testing game quest & features we need to listen to the game or discus with colleagues (lot of chitchat here ) but when i need to focus on something music is great choice (some epic music ofc).

Hmm currently im relaxing by writing thesis, so only planning how I will relax after work But probably new MTB, some travel (need to try new hammock) and you know Starcraft remastered version coming soon…