"There is no history. Only contingency"
- Laurence Oliphant, The Difference Engine, (William Gibson)
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Our spring releases are here! We are kicking off the year with the release of World of Kaiserreich: Union of Britain. This will be the second in our three planned WoK Remasters, with WoK Ottoman Empire also in production. Last year, I told myself I need to get better at showing some of our process and behind the scenes work, so I've dedicated this dev diary to a deeper dive into the Union of Britain remaster.
If you are visiting this dev blog for the Early Access release, you can find the hidden link here 😉
So World of Kaiserreich: Union of Britain is a special one for us, because it is, I think, the first big hit video we released back in 2017. Returning to it now, eight years later was an interesting challenge. The main idea of the WoK remasters is that we add new content, art and animations to older projects. The Union of Britain video, specifically, lacked a dedicated loading screen for the mod. I ended up pulling an old sketch back in called Scarlet Dawn and making a new version of that together with Yana.
A look at the original 2017 Scarlet Dawn sketch, and the finished version released for WoK UoB 2025.
Various sketches and concepts for Scarlet Dawn. The keen eyes will notice earlier versions had a Whippett, before settling on the Mark V
The Union of Britain is a pivotal country in Kaiserreich lore, so it's always been behind on the art and loading screen department. The answer is the loading screen called 'Scarlet Dawn', showing us the aftermath of the capture of London by Syndicalist forces.
We ended up going through a ton of sketches for this particular loading screen. The inital concept had a lot more characters and action present. I even built the entire scene in Blender to try and capture the composition, but it never really came together. In the end, we moved to a single character overlooking the aftermath of the events of the sketch. Fun fact: because the Houses of Parliament face West, this is actually a sunset scene and not a sunrise one. 😁
These days, each WoK release is paired with 'mood pieces' as well as patreon support art, depicting some of the Patreons that backed that particular project specifically. Together with the music release, the idea is to have a comprehensive project that really sells the 'vibe' of a certain lore, without diving too much into the actual alt-history (that would be Documentary territory)
For our older World of Kaiserreich videos, we would generally just make a slow zoom or painting video of the art . With the current generation – what we call a 'seventh-generation' World Of video, we try and mix some archival footage, some animations with a personal perspective. Normally speaking we would also record new audio for a remaster. In this case however, I felt the original delivery was so strong, we straight up brought back Benjamin Middleton - the original narrator - with the exact same audio as we used for the 2017 video. I think it was amazing back then, and it’s amazing today. This is why the mispronunciation of 'kleptoclats' is present in this version as well.
To wrap up the release, I am preparing a bunch of shorts about the behind-the-scenes work on the WOK series, as well as uploading the music from the video.
Our next release will be WoK Ottoman Empire! This thing has been in production forever, complicated by the fact that our main Turkish narrator joined a Hollywood production and is no longer allowed to work non-union due to their bylaws 😅. So we are stuck between the VO which isn't quite finished, or casting an entirely new actor, which has not been easy to find!
When we have some time to collect stuff on KRDOC9, I will do a deep dive into the process behind Kaiserreich Documentary as well. It's proving to be a tough project, as we are trying to condense a very chaotic 1908-1936 in China into a 90-minute video.
Thanks for reading! If you are looking for the comments section - it was proving quite difficult to reply via Shopify, so we are going to move discussion to a thread on Discord. If you have comments and questions, join the thread here! https://discord.com/channels/335877451227856896/1347553727334191176
Regards,
Vincent