DREW VO: I'm Drew Scanlon.
I'm exploring the world through the lens of games, and I'm doing it with the support of
people like you on Patreon.
Help us out at Patreon.com/ClothMap.
As we saw in the last video, the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s was crippling to the
entire Balkan region.
But industries like game development are slowly growing there, and helping to turn things around.
I asked Damir, the founder of a gaming conference called Reboot, to characterize each country’s strength.
DAMIR: That's slowly changing, but originally, Croatian developers were way more tech-inclined.
They were really building great engines, they were really great programmers. Versus Serbians
who were initially much more focused on art.
That's of course slowly balancing out, but that was one of the particularities.
Bosnia doesn't have a lot of game developers.
There are some ambitious people, some really great people there, who are trying to do cool things.
Like Prime Time Studio, who just finished a really beautiful cartoon with Hollywood actors.
It's called "Birds Like Us."
So they're doing cool things, but other than that I wouldn't say that Bosnia has that big
of a games industry at all.
DREW VO: Prime Time's office sits on a Sarajevo hillside, and though they still have a render
farm on site, further movie-making plans are on hold.
Due to lack of investment, dozens of animators were laid off when the movie was finished.
ANDREJ: Basically, when we started doing that animated movie, we had to train all the people
because nobody knew 3D back then in Bosnia. Nobody did it.
We trained 60-65 people.
Right now we're waiting for publisher investment so we can call back those people and start
working again.
Each floor has computers and rooms just waiting for people to come back.
It was a great hit for us.
Most of them were our actual friends, so it wasn't pretty.
DREW VO: The team is now focused exclusively on video games.
DREW: How many other developers are in Bosnia?
ANDREJ: Well, I know around 10 or 15 more that are outside this company.
DREW: Studios?
ANDREJ: No, not studios. People.
DREW: Oh! Okay.
ANDREJ: The current team is this, what you can see.
DREW: Andrej is the studio's creative director.
Damir and his brother Nadim are the programmers.
DAMIR: You basically put on the shoes that are required at the moment, so if materials
need to be done, I do materials.
If sound has to be done, I do sound.
DUSICA: I'm currently the only artist on the team, so I'm basically doing everything from
pixel art, digital painting, 3D modeling, texturing, everything that's considered art.
So I had to learn a lot of stuff in a short amount of time.
DREW VO: Dusica has an architecture background and taught herself 3D modeling using online tutorials.
DUSICA: Yeah, it's the only way, if you want to achieve something.
Because the school system isn't that great and jobs aren't really available for young
people, so you have to make them for yourself.
NEDIM: The vast majority of the people living here do not take game development as a serious industry.
When somebody asks "what do you do?" and I say "I'm a programmer for a video game development
company," they say "okay, but what do you do for a living?"
DAMIR: We are doing some outsource work to fund our development and fund our team, but
we did several prototypes for our own games.
ANDREJ: We're going to set most of our games in Bosnia, so you'll have a chance to experience
a culture that you haven't seen before.
DREW: I can only think of one...
ANDREJ: "This War of Mine," right?
DREW: "This War of Mine."
ANDREJ: Yeah.
It's an amazing game, and it tells the story from a different perspective: tough choices.
That's what the war was about.
But we're going to go another route.
It's called "Wa The First Dream."
"Wa" in Japanese basically means "empathy" or "helping others."
This is our main hero. He needs to fight 16 bosses in order to win.
With game choices, you will be able to save the bosses.
You can kill them, of course, but if you prefer to save them they will help you later on
in the game and you will get a different ending.
We kind of went crazy with creature design.
He has this book that he invokes creatures from.
Okay, he is charging.
I'll create a wall and he'll hit this wall.
So this is the first boss we created just to prove that we can.
And of course we'll polish everything; it's just a rough demo we did in... how long did
we work on Wa?
DAMIR: Overall, it was just a little under three months of work.
DREW: What was the reaction from people at Reboot?
ANDREJ: The reaction was really awesome.
We actually won the Visual Excellence award with this game.
DAMIR: Nintey-nine percent of the time, we use Unreal Engine.
ANDREJ: And we've changed it a lot, to suit our needs.
We couldn't do some stuff that we wanted, so Damir had to go in and change it.
DAMIR: Yeah, actually, the demo that we did had a lot of trees, a lot of foliage.
This "Foliage" option wasn't there.
We actually added that and submitted it back to Epic Games and it's part of the engine now.
We needed that for that demo.
That's the first feature we added to the engine.
ANDREJ: So we're looking for investors or publishers right now for this game, but meanwhile
we're working on other games.
DAMIR: We're trying to move away from war themes with our games and touch upon some
of the older culture of Bosnia, because when you dig deeper, you find such a wealth of
myths, untold stories, mythology.
By and large, it's a very unique setting that's woefully left unexplored, not just by the
world, but by the local people here as well.
ANDREJ: For example, we recorded a song in Bosnian and when we played it for investors
they thought that it was Elvish.
DREW VO: Wa has other Bosnian touches too, like these ornate tombstones called stećci,
which are common throughout the country.
ANDREJ: When you publish a game, the media always calls it "the first Bosnian game."
We personally have made three "first Bosnian games."
There are around 15.
ANDREJ: Here's the trailer for our recent game.
It's called "Ragtag Adventurers."
Four-player co-op against bosses.
You can play it multiplayer.
We made this just to test out if we can make an online multiplayer game without problems
and we did.
It was fun for us because this game was picked up by Sodapoppin, a Twitch streamer that has
around two million subscribers.
We were so nervous: "please don't crash, please don't crash, please don't crash."
And it didn't!
DREW: Did you see a boost from that?
ANDREJ: Yeah. A lot.
That was the biggest boost that we ever received.
We cannot do a Kickstarter from Bosnia, of course.
DREW: Why not?
ANDREJ: We're from Bosnia.
They don't allow it.
ADNAN: Bosnia is not wealthy.
We had a bloody war, and we have a big bureaucracy in our country.
We're the only country with three presidents.
DAMIR: We have plans to do a Nintendo Switch version but we can't get development kits.
They only do European Union markets.
We had to go through a subsidiary European country so we could actually have development
kits shipped to us.
You just have to kind of find workarounds.
DREW VO: It's not just video game developers that have to find workarounds, of course.
As Joe explained, there are also quirks to buying games in Bosnia.
JOE: These are all digital redemption codes.
You have to set up an account like you're in a different country, because Bosnia isn't
even listed on PlayStation.
And you have to use codes from that different country.
Everybody here would love to be able to buy with their cards, but they can't because they've
set it up like that.
You have to have a card from the country that you've set your account to.
DREW: A credit card.
JOE: Yeah, so your credit card must be from Croatia or Germany or the UK, if you have
that account.
You cannot use a local credit card.
It tells you that it's not for your region.
DREW: So their only option, then, is...
JOE: It's just the codes.
DREW: So when a customer comes in here, do they say "I would like..."
JOE: He tells me, yeah, "for German account," "for English account," "for American account,"
"for Croatian account."
DREW: And you've got all those?
JOE: Yeah.
DREW: Wow.
JOE: We went to Gamescom and we found a crap-load of people from America to sell us codes, so
we get in touch with them and that's how we do it.
We buy from them.
I mean, you're not getting 50 dollars for 50 dollars, you're getting 50 dollars for
like 53 dollars.
And therefore it's much more expensive than when you buy it normally, like when you go
to Walmart or Amazon.
But you cannot buy from those places because you're limited to the country you're from.
Amazon doesn't accept credit cards from here, Sony doesn't accept credit cards from here, so that's it.
You're stuck with the codes.
NEDIM: I think the Wii-U didn't allow it either, but you had to register as being from Croatia or...
ANDREJ: Yeah, I was always from Italy.
DAMIR: Yeah, I am from Italy as well.
You can't actually change the store language, so I have an Italian store.
I kind of had to memorize it.
ANDREJ: We're mostly Nintendo fans here.
I remember you could register your Nintendo products to receive some free gifts on the
internet and I registered all my things.
Then I wrote them an email: "I cannot do this, this, and this.
Can you help me?" and they banned me.
They said "this is not an answer you expected.
We are sorry but we have to ban you."
It was soul-crushing.
DREW: Wait, why?
ANDREJ: Well, because "you're from Bosnia."
They don't allow this country because they don't have any agreements with them.
I don't know.
DAMIR: But the 3DS and the Switch do allow you do download digitally, and there are no
restrictions, actually.
They only problem is, as I said earlier, the phone app.
The phone app for the online service isn't allowed in Bosnia, so you can't download it.
Not officially, I mean.
You can find unofficial rips online and use it.
Really, the whole motto is "find workarounds."
Make it work any way possible.
ANDREJ: We couldn't buy Maya or Max for our studio because we were from Bosnia, so we
had to make a special deal.
We called people from Croatia to get licensing and everything.
So money wasn't the problem, we couldn't get the software.
DREW VO: And when you do manage to make a game, the challenges aren't over.
ANDREJ: People in Bosnia don't buy games that much.
Piracy rampaged through Bosnia after the war ended and now, so this is not our market.
DAMIR: Based on the average salary of a person in Bosnia, paying 60 dollars for a full-priced
isn't really an option for a vast majority of people.
So that's why, in a weird sort of way, piracy is what keeps video games alive in this country.
ANDREJ: During the war, people were robbed of the chance to watch movies and play games.
Mostly, not all of them.
Then, after the war ended, piracy gave us a chance to catch up.
Games were two dollars and you could buy them everywhere.
It was our chance to catch up with the rest of the world who left us behind, because we
didn't know about Mario or things like that.
The good thing, I mean "good thing," is that the consoles that came here were direct copies
of Japanese consoles.
So we played Japanese games mostly, and those were the best games ever.
I brought some–it's called "Famiclone."
It's a direct copy of the Famicom.
DAMIR: The games were one or two euros.
They were always like "9000 in one," "a million in one," which were just ROM hacks from the NES.
DUSICA: The people who had consoles usually got them from their relatives outside of the country.
People who didn't have those played PC games mostly.
ANDREJ: It was an amazing experience to go out as a kid and buy those games.
We would always take them apart, switch the actual game with some crappy one and return
it to the shop.
Everybody did that.
DREW: Did you ever then buy one of those?
ANDREJ: Yeah!
We understand people.
When we published our smaller game on Steam, after three or four days there were instructions,
on YouTube, how to play it online for free.
And it was kind of awesome to see that coming full circle.Piracy doesn't harm our sales, let's face it.
If people want to buy it, they'll buy it, as a collector's edition or just to support
the publisher.
So we really don't think that piracy harms anything.
We're kind of catching up with all the titles that we pirated, because we've bought a lot
of games.
I wouldn't be in this industry if there wasn't any piracy.
I wouldn't play games, I wouldn't love games, I wouldn't connect them with a part of
childhood that I love.
So, piracy kind of helped us.
DREW VO: As Prime Time's founder, Adnan, explained, the studio's video game roots run deep.
ADNAN: You know, after four years of siege, people living in basements, in
houses that were destroyed...
For many kids, for many people, there was no chance to ever buy, in that period, a Sony PlayStation.
I bought it because I was working for the U.N. and I had a very good salary at that point.
And I bought it–
DREW: From where?
ADNAN: I bought it from a guy who–
ANDREJ: He knew people.
It "fell off a truck."
ADNAN: They were real consoles.
It was the first gaming center, and the name of the center was "Warp."
I bought like 200 games–very good, high-quality pirated copies–and it was like "oh my God,
I need to open every single copy."
To test it, to see how it worked, and see what the game was about to make a summary
to have for kids and people who come, to see what game they're playing.
And you would just see the [gasps] "my God!
We're playing Sony PlayStation!"
The kids were so happy about that.
ANDREJ: Some new studios will open, surely.
There are some smaller groups of people working on smaller games and we help them
with game development meet-ups.
They have a chance to present their game, and we tell everybody to buy that game.
When you publish a game from Bosnia, all the gamers will rush to help you, if your game
is two dollars on Steam, or three, five, 10.
Let's build a base so Steam recognizes you.
Because Steam right now is a mess.
There are around 10,000 games coming out every year, so it's really hard.
When we published a game, in a day we were on page seven or eight.
Without marketing you're not able to promote your game.
That's why we plan to make a community that will help those games.
DREW: And how do you do that?
ANDREJ: Well, basically calling everybody you know.
Because everybody knows everybody here.
We get contacted five times per month by random people just wanting to come to the studio
and start learning.
And everybody has that opportunity here.
They can even freelance for a much higher salary than they can get doing any regular job here.
So that's a good thing.
DREW VO: But the challenges Prime Time has faced don't seem to have
dampened their spirits in the slightest.
ANDREJ: It's not something that we find bad or tragic or anything.
As you can see, we're not depressed or anything.
We want our work to speak for us.
We have so much to offer.
ADNAN: I was 18 when the war started.
I served for four years as a soldier, and I was shot at once.
And, you know, I'm so happy for every single day I live.
Every new morning I'm just happy that I'm alive.
DREW VO: Cloth Map is possible only because of our supporters on Patreon.
If you liked this video, and want to keep seeing more like it, we'd love to have you with us.