Original subtitles

There are many people who,

just like me, played with the

original S.W.I.N.E. in their childhood

and remember what made it

so fun and what the game was like.

Shortly, a new Hungarian game will be unleashed on the world.

The characters of S.W.I.N.E. are pigs and rabbits,

who fight each other in Orwellian surroundings.

S.W.I.N.E. came out sometimes in the mid-90s,

and I think I was still at high school,

when I started drawing rabbits and pigs.

I can’t really tell you exactly why that was the case.

I think culturally, pigs really work for us as a theme.

So many people from my age group

still might have gone to pig slaughters.

It’s actually strange that it’s pigs and rabbits set in an alternative

present-time war, while still being a fantasy game.

So we took ideas from all over the place,

the combat system is a little bit like Panzer General,

while the equipment and the unit movement are from Dark Omen.

Actually, the way this happened is that I had a friend in the late 90s,

who also had a group of friends,

who tried making a game, yet they wanted to make a Red Alert-type game

and he got me to meet with them once.

We simply...

felt the urge like

“Phew, we should start modeling something!”

We gathered at the flat of one my friends

with our little plans,

we had like, tanks

and whatever, anti-aircraft guns

terrain, rocks, houses and whatnot.

And we like showed them “Hmm, Maci, we got an idea like this.

What do you think about it?

We felt you had the ambition...”

He took a slightly more well-thought out approach,

really approaching it from the design perspective and the game mechanics side of things.

Saying “How about you

take part in this and we do it together.”

Actually, I told them, listen I think...

I think I have a far better idea than this.

So let’s not do a copy-paste of Red Alert,

but let’s do pigs and rabbits

to make a tactical-strategic game.

He liked the idea, yet offhandedly noted that it’s bullsh*t.

He has a far better idea

and pulled out some mockups drawn on

a few bits of paper

about a rabbit, a rabbit character

and a pig character, and its variations,

an image so to speak.

And we were shocked, like

“Phew, so it’s going to be an animal-like thing?

Like... a childish thing?”

And then he started going into the details of what it’s all about.

You know, in Hungarian culture we talk of “cowardly rabbits”.

Now, we proved in S.W.I.N.E. that isn’t the case.

In Monty Python’s film, 'Quest for the Holy Grail'

there’s the Killer Bunny, showing just how aggressive a rabbit can be.

Like with a British, wry sense of humor.

I really love absurd humor

and this is somewhat mirrored in the game.

If I’m not mistaken, I was about 9 years old when the original S.W.I.N.E. came out.

It already made a pretty big impact on me because

to this very day, I can still cite some of the statements

the units made by heart.

And we were already joking about this with the others

before we even talked about doing the S.W.I.N.E. remaster.

We really provided the actors -

without any marketing slogans, but really, it’s true – with instructions.

Actually, yeah. I agree with Gábor that

the Hungarian actors added a lot to the project.

So, if we received criticism from some field,

it came from language areas where this wasn’t a perfect fit.

The localization wasn’t perfectly executed.

Like the voice over recordings.

I know the Germans really made an effort and gave their best.

I don’t know if you remember we even printed the faces to show

who they had to play. And they started laughing in the studio.

“Come on dude, stuff some more tissues into your mouth!”

As a kid, we were having fun with our friends, at home on our computers

sending the files and listening to what they said.

And like “I'll change the landscape a little!” and this really

stuck with us, and actually with my friends as well.

The place we were working, was an old flat that was reconfigured

as an office with a sound studio.

Sometimes there were voiceover actors coming and going, doing recordings.

And we had to keep quiet at those times.

Sometimes other developers showed up in the room next door

and we did some work together.

For example, in one half of the flat, there was the Clever's team working on Screamer…

4x4.

Four by Four, yeah. Racing simulator.

That’s it…

So we developed a great relationship.

That turned out really great!

And we learned a lot from them!

Because they started doing this earlier.

I don’t know, like maybe a year earlier. Or something like that.

We made friends and so we kept on sharing ideas and helping each other out.

They helped us get through some pitfalls.

So we were just in the middle of this sh*t hot summer,

five or six of us locked up in a like

a nearly ten square meter room.

And they took the demo to ECTS, there was still a thing like that at the time

in London. So if the demo

1. isn’t finished or 2. no one is interested in it at ECTS, we could pretty much

head back to Békéscsaba to make sausage.

So basically those were the prospects and we worked ourselves to death.

Really. We just kept on drinking an endless amount of energy drinks.

Let’s do it! Let’s do it! We were sleeping at the office on blankets,

on my mom’s blanket, which she lent to me.

Actually, I got involved in game development as an accident,

when I met a team of developers,

working on the game S.W.I.N.E. – known as TRAIL at the time.

Ravensburger, the puzzle-making company

has, or rather had, a subsidiary known as Fishtank Interactive.

They were interested in the project.

Very little time passed between presenting the demo

and between going full throttle, and developing the game 100%.

We had no information whatsoever,

about approximately how long it took to develop a game.

We tried estimating the time based on the demo we developed by then,

and the work we finished by then.

So after all, we managed to finish the work on time,

but this was only because in a single week’s time,

we worked as much as others managed to finish in two weeks.

So we put a lot of extra hours into the project.

Once, I was working for 36 hours straight.

We even had a colleague who worked 48 hours non-stop while doing the demo...

So that means two days of non-stop work.

So this really stayed with me from the time.

I’m not sure this is a good thing, but after all

all of this had a really good vibe,

and we were so dedicated to the game.

A few features were left out, so...

And we had to edit a few things in some places.

But it was really great that we managed to finish the game,

and that actually, all the developers, an approximately nine-member team,

had no game development experience at all,

so you could say we did the game as “virgins”.

Everyone was pretty enthusiastic. This was the first game for everyone and it was an exciting, new thing to do.

So we put a lot of energy into it.

This is the game we had played with the most during development.

We played a lot of multi-player against each other.

I remember when someone figured out during the match that

the tanks dug in could still be towed

and attacked with all their tanks dug in,

of course, with the added defense.

The graphic design department was very small,

there were very few of us and it couldn’t really be called a department.

The computers were running all day and night,

so we had a dedicated Silicon Graphics computer,

and another one with Windows NT. Or maybe we had 2000 by that point? Whatever.

We even turned on the computers of those who went home

to keep the computer on so it would keep on rendering.

So, there’s the normal version of a unit,

and the dirtier or more grizzled version,

and the elite, veteran.

So the rabbits attain veteran levels differently than the pigs.

And I remember that on Intel-based machines

we got absolutely great results

but the AMD, we had an AMD too,

we just kept staring at it, wondering what the f*ck was it calculating on the shadow mapping.

So the two frames weren’t the same.

So there were a few pitfalls and then we got to the point where we were like

f*ck AMD.

So, before you start the new level,

I don’t know, I think from level two,

if you’re playing the game, it takes you to the shopping menu,

where you decide which units you’d like to deploy for the mission in question.

And we ran into some trouble with the units found there.

We did.

Obviously, we had some problems with the levels as well.

Despite all the hassle, the renders were really a challenge,

yet still turned out pretty good.

I also loved doing the units for the game.

We didn’t even have ZBrush or any more serious tools at the time.

And then Deep Paint came out.

It featured this little turtle.

It allowed you to paint textures

in projection mode.

But not in real-time 3D, but rather you had to adjust the settings,

project it, wait, generate it

and then bake it back on, or "generate".

So that was a pretty cool thing because

you could get “arty”.

We were pretty small, so one person did several things.

So apart from planning and designing the game, I also did the drawing.

I planned missions and scripts.

So in every stage there was always some work

I could do at the time.

Even though I had some extra ideas, I couldn’t really include them.

Or even though the other team members had some other ideas,

they just simply didn’t fit into our time frame.

And the good thing was that everything had its charm.

Everything could be witnessed as a separate experience.

This goes for building the levels and the scripts,

as well as, for example, drawing the units.

When the game was finished and it came out -

- I actually remember that when we submitted it, we were...

getting pretty close to our September deadline.

I don’t know… It was close to my birthday,

but that was entirely a coincidence.

However, what was really interesting was that we finished the game on Friday and submitted it.

At the time, you still had to burn a master CD,

send it out by courier and the courier had to deliver it by five o’clock,

and when the courier was here, we made him wait, and we were begging him,

just give us five more minutes and wait for us to finish the CD!

So we had a party at night and everyone was thrilled.

One of our colleagues, Lala the programmer, went home

and started playing the game over the weekend

and it turned out that the game didn’t work after Mission 4.

So the way we figured that out is that we got everyone

to come in and get down to work and fixed the problem.

Luckily, our producer was still here,

and he took the CD out on Monday and...

actually that’s what was sent to the factory, so...

I don’t remember that.

I remember we went to some medieval restaurant

and we were stuffing our faces. Eating, drinking, getting wasted.

There were dancers, too! Right?

Well, I don’t remember that.

I definitely remember that!

It was an amazing party!

It’s your first game and you can tell it works.

So the whole thing came together, from beginning to end, it worked fine.

That’s a fantastic feeling that will stay with you for the rest of your life.

Actually, we kept at it afterwards.

So we were supposed to make a DLC, but that didn’t happen in the end.

We started working on another game, but that’s another story.

Actually, we didn’t know how successful the game was and it

varied from country to country.

We got a lot of positive feedback in Germany and Hungary.

The response wasn’t so positive in England and America.

In Hungary, what was surprising for me was when

I got together with some relatives and some kid was going like

ooh, you developed S.W.I.N.E.? That’s my favorite game.

S.W.I.N.E.’s sales weren’t good at all.

So it didn’t begin as a successful project,

yet over the years, we noticed that

a lot of people started playing with it.

For example, I think it was due to the fact that

it came out as a giveaway with the German GameStar magazine.

In 2004 and then in 2005, the game became available for free

and we noticed that an incredible cult following developed for the game.

We always wanted to do a follow-up to S.W.I.N.E.,

but life just had other things in store for us.

We worked for multi-national firms,

and over the last 4 years, we created another game developing firm

and apart from seeing how the game was still popular to this very day,

unfortunately, some support was lost for multiplayer games,

GameSpy, I don’t know exactly, I think a few years ago,

which made it seem like this came couldn’t be continued.

People wouldn’t really play with it anymore.

Then we made an effort and started looking into who had the rights for the game.

It didn’t take long to find them,

they were with our former co-owner and his firm.

We managed to get the rights from him,

so from this point on, it was pretty obvious that we had to

keep the thing alive!

I think not everyone has the chance to

subsequently work on a childhood classic or favorite.

I feel there is a visible difference.

Actually, I didn’t think at first

that we planned to do so much for the purpose of a remaster.

Additionally, we sorely underestimated the time necessary for this.

Looking back now on the task list, I feel we really did our best.

Well, if you compare the two versions on a current computer,

side by side, first of all, it runs in a full-screen borderless version

allowing you to switch back and forth,

and check your e-mails and chat on Facebook with ease,

without flashing the screen and stuff.

So, we kinda modernized the thing

so it would technically run more smoothly from a modern perspective.

We completely revamped the shadow mapping.

The game became brighter and more colorful,

where this was appropriate and I think it really shows.

I had a readymade UI to work with, that came out a while ago,

so it involved its redesigning,

yet still entirely in the same style,

it’s just that the whole thing had to be redone in a higher resolution.

It couldn’t be modified and we had to

fully follow the direction that was already given.

All the UIs look the same way on the maps, in-game,

they’ve just been ramped up and remastered and more nicely drawn.

Perhaps I could compare it to the way the current films

are remastered.

Perhaps it might have a new target audience

who hasn’t seen it,

yet it still has the old target audience that already saw it and played with it.

Perhaps, after all these years, it might offer something new for those

who haven’t played with this game.

We wanted to add a number of new things and in order to do that,

the coders had to do the modifications.

I provided the graphic support for that.

In the previous version, the vehicles didn’t have moving wheels,

and the caterpillars of the tanks didn’t move.

Actually, this wasn’t obvious, but now you can see it in HD and it looks great.

We had to allow the wind to have effect on the trees.

But we just simulated a wind.

So the coders had to write the code for that.

It was interesting to break out the old code,

fortunately, I wrote most of the original game, so

there were a lot of things I remembered.

Back then, we didn’t have a lot of time to do any documentation.

We’ve learned a lot since then and it features a lot of things that I look at and feel,

yeah, I wouldn’t do it like that today.

The fans mainly played with the multiplayer.

Yet there were specific errors when the game just froze.

The game has very few fans who still play with it in the various countries

and sometimes, they play a match with

two players from Hungary,

one from Croatia,

someone from China,

and someone from South America

and this poses a real challenge for the multiplayer code

that we didn’t consider at the time.

Back in 2001, the greatest challenge was that

we had someone playing from home on a 28.8 modem.

We don’t have problems like that anymore.

Sometimes, one of the services providers of a player in Asia is

a lot slower than the ISP of another user.

So it’s worth sending the data through another person,

instead of sending it directly,

as surprisingly, that can prove to be faster.

That’s partly one of the reasons why we’re doing this HD remaster

is to gauge the need for a game like this.

For example, if we’d get some great data, let’s say

a lot of people buy the game and there’s a lot of interest,

then I think we’d do S.W.I.N.E. 2.

Yeah.

Within the team, everyone agrees that

we’d definitely like to do it,

but we haven’t gotten into the details yet.

There are some ideas. In fact, we planned a DLC at the time,

but unfortunately, it was never released.

Well, I feel that since this is the best pig-rabbit strategic game,

it should be on everyone’s shelf or in the Steam library.

Good meat goes bad again!

May the Iron Tusk be with you!

One thing’s for sure, S.W.I.N.E. 2 would include a third race

of rats.

If you go online, you can find this information.

That the rats would be the third race?

Plus there was a lost mission: 'Air Force One’, so we had one of those, too.

This information is up on a few fan sites.

Uh-huh...