While the WWII genre has been beaten to death in the FPS and RTS genre, the genre is a bit fresh for adventure gamers which is why were intrigued when Akella announced A Stroke of Fate. Being the journalists we are we sent over a few questions and there are the results.
Could you introduce yourself and talk about your role on the project? What kind of work do you do on a daily basis?
My name is Boris Chuprin, and I’m working on these games as project leader and lead game designer. And my and to be honest the whole team’s main goal is to make qualitative, interesting polished adventures for true fans of this genre. We also wanted to pay a special attention to the visual part of the game which is really made on top level in A Stroke of Fate: Operation Valkyrie and A Stroke of Fate: Operation Bunker.
Where did the idea of the game come from? Why did you decide to go the adventure game route rather than a shooter/action type game?
The idea of the game has originally come from our producer Sergey Belistov. He has suggested to concentrate on this topic and SPline has taken this challenging task to reveal the mystery of Fuhrer’s death.
How much of an influence was the movie Valkyrie on your game if any? What about Inglorious Bastards?
Well, we should remind that we’ve started to work on long time before the movie of Valkyrie with Tom Cruise was announced. The game and the movie cross solely in the field of historical facts. Talking about specific details details, the game starts exactly from the plan of Valkirye, its preparation, attempt at Fuhrer and hard failure of the plan.
What's the background of the character we'll be playing? What kind of person is he and what are his motivations? Was he based on anyone in particular?
There is no real prototype with the same name and surname. It’s rather a collective image of many patriots of Germany. The main hero is a man intoxicated with speeches of Fuhrer and his accomplices. He had been thinking that he goes right way for a long time, but at a moment he wrung from this hypnosis of advocacy. He has seen that Fuhrer leads German people to self destruction, that Fuhrer carries evil and war. That is why, the main hero decided to kill the dictator moved forward with the idea to stop this nonsensical war which has nothing about happy future of German people,.
Can you talk about how much research you did for the project? Did you call in experts/historians to ensure the locations / characters were accurate?
To be honest, the historical research was the permanent part of our work on A Stroke of Fate. We’ve started to learn documents and materials on the very early pre-design stage and finished just on the last meters of development.
We surely had a specialized team member whose job was dedicated to research facts and implement them into the game content. But all the other team members also read books, memoirs, newspapers of those years, and then we shared this information between each other, discussed it and decided what do we want to add to the game and what we don’t. By the way, I am a historian by original profession J.
Of course we’ve also invited historical consultants to clarify details. Sometimes some of the revealed facts contradicted with each other, and we needed to find the right decision how we can use them.
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