When the Real World Collides with Your Game...

I'm going to be very honest: there was a lot of debate in the studio about whether or not this would ever see the light of day.

The short version of the story is this: Months ago we made some content poking light fun at Ukrainian/Russian relations, with Jack making a fun “heroic” picture of Olga, and accidentally drawing her as a Soviet soldier. She, being a Ukrainian, is a bit stunned. The main point of the joke, of course, being a jab at Americans for not knowing shit about Europe or European history (largely true). In the story, Olga corrects him, Jack admits his ignorance, and all is good.

Three months ago when we wrote all of this... It seemed cute, lighthearted content. And then we all kind of forgot about it.

As it turns out, because Olga didn’t have her own room in the game yet, this content was in the game, but actually unavailable. We wrote the drawing game to not allow you to draw pictures until the girl you are drawing has a room to hang it in. 

So this month we finally got around to the part of the development where we gave her a home (and to be clear, having a big part of our one Ukrainian character’s story happen this month was also pure coincidence), and this content magically unlocked. And we played it last week for the first time in months, having kinda forgotten what we wrote. 

And, well... In the new world context... It was a completely different thing.

To be honest, there was some talk about leaving it in because we thought it was nice content, and it was funny when we wrote it. But with everything that's going on right now...  There's just too many people with too many emotions running too high right now...  and we wanted to be respectful of what was happening. So this content has been cut from the game. We’re replacing the Soviet/tank thing with something completely non-political.

That being said, the whole point of Patreon is to show people what's going on as we build the game... and this to us is a fascinating story of what happens when the real world and a lighthearted game collide, and we thought some of our supporters would be interested in this strange occurrence. So we made you a video of the content we cut, in all of its now-strangely-inappropriate relevance.

When you watch, I think you’ll see how uncannily relevant it all became. And I swear, we changed nothing. This was all written like last November/December.

As a side note obviously we are all stunned and deeply saddened by what is happening in Europe right now. I personally have spent much of my career working with people from both Ukraine and Russia on various projects, as have many other people on the team. None of this makes any goddamned sense to us. All we can say is that we wish we lived in a world where jokes like this were still funny. And we hope we get back there again someday.

Until then, our love to the people of Ukraine.