In honour of Ukrainian Vyshyvanka Day, I wanted to share a story about how I depicted the death of enemy soldiers in Threads of War.
Most of the enemies in the game are tanks. What’s the simplest way to show that a tank is destroyed? Create an explosion animation. Additionally, we leave behind charred remains for a while. If you played the demo version, you've seen what that looks like.
To add variety, we needed to come up with other types of enemies. So we added soldiers who crawl on the ground and shoot at us with anti-tank weapons. There’s only one way to destroy them — by running them over. But how should their destruction be portrayed?
- Explosion — illogical.
- Blood — doesn’t match the game’s style.
- Stylised black blood — unreadable.
- Breaking into pieces — crude.
- Some kind of pattern — no clear connection.
Eventually, we came up with a great idea.
There was a video at the start of the war, where a woman under occupation tells an enemy soldier to put sunflower seeds in his pocket so that they’ll grow after he dies. It went viral in Ukraine for several reasons — people under occupation do not accept enemy rule, the sentence implied that the enemy soldier would die soon regardless, sunflowers are considered "Ukrainian" flowers, and the image of an enemy’s death transforming into the growth of a flower is deeply poetic.
I took that idea as the basis and depicted the soldiers’ destruction as a sunflower sprouting. :)
It works beautifully with the Ukrainian embroidery theme and is deeply symbolic, like many other elements in our game.
Happy Vyshyvanka Day!