Creating War Robots Stories video hits: dances, robo-ducks, and anime

War Robots Stories have become an institution of their own — a fun way to tell stories outside the War Robots narrative canon. Here’s a peek at how we make our videos, and the story of tackling multiple genres, from parable, to horror, sci-fi, and of course: anime.

War Robots, a multiplayer game about big, fighting robots is always evolving, with content that is constantly being enriched. For this reason, we need to maintain close contact with the community: to talk about what’s happening and what we plan to add, collect feedback, and somehow, entertain our players in the process. This latter point is where we come in — the community management department.

Patch notes are, of course, pretty handy, but players might not prefer just some dry summary, when they could have an entertaining story or an exciting video. And indeed, one of the key areas of our work is video content production. More often than not, we publish videos on our official YouTube channel (3.6 million subscribers). Over the past nine years, we’ve tried a lot of things: news-style voice overs; videos set in the game’s universe; videos with hosts detailing all the intricacies of new content; livestreams.

But not every video on our channel conveys some important information — sometimes we just want to entertain ourselves and the players, without any relation to game material or the overall plot of the War Robots franchise.

This desire gave rise to a special format on the channel (perhaps it doesn’t bear any practical use, but it’s very popular and fun). We call these videos War Robots Stories. And recently, as part of this series, we released a video inspired by the classic mecha anime genre. Let us tell you how it all works!

A quick shout out to the folks behind this article: Matvei Chernishevskiy, Community Manager at Pixonic, MY.GAMES, who was responsible for the video idea and video, and Content Manager Oleg Telitsyn brought it all to life in Unity.

The birth of a new series

Over the past couple of years, we’ve managed to significantly increase the number of subscribers on our War Robots YouTube channel. From 2015 to 2020, we hit approximately 500,000 subscribers, and from 2020 to 2022, 2.5 million. Of course, our main video content is squarely product-oriented and focused on the game itself: new robot reviews, feature teasers, update analysis. But, as mentioned above, sometimes we like to play around and release something experimental and entertaining.

For example, in some cases we had as much fun as we could: our robots danced (see below), played football, and dressed as robo-ducks. It was a win-win for everyone: the fans were happy, we got to break the routine and do something novel, and as a nice side-effect, our views and subscribers were growing.

At some point, we noticed that one of the War Robots Stories experiments had been picked up by YouTube’s algorithms with some very effective results. Our videos started appearing not only in our subscribers’ recommendations, but also in other people’s feeds — and these newcomers were getting interested in the game based on the videos.

Thanks to algorithmic recommendations and the evergreen nature of these stories, they have a very long tail in terms of views — people view even a year after their publication. This contrasts with video analysis of new features, which are mostly viewed during the first month after posting, and then the activity drops sharply.

This convinced us that the format was worth developing. In addition, we remembered the once popular machinima format (in which players acted out scenes using a game engine), which demonstrated that you don’t need mega-production values and huge budgets to tell interesting stories.

What are War Robots Stories?

As previously explained, War Robots Stories is a story format unrelated to the game itself or its lore. We come up with an idea (usually inspired by something famous like a movie or a fairy tale), transfer it to our maps and turn our robots into the heroes of these stories, trying to act out some famous scenes.

This was freeing; we didn’t have to adapt our story to the established War Robots plots and lore. We could just let loose our imagination, and do really anything. Well, there were only two restrictions: the first is the game itself, that is, we could only use robots, maps and other assets from War Robots. Although, of course, even still, there were exceptions here: for example, in our horror story there were references to the movie “It”. We didn’t put a little robot on a children’s bike (although we really wanted to), but used the red ball in the scene. The second limitation was actual resources, since all the videos are created by one person. (Cost-effective, which is always an advantage.)

Let’s look at some examples of our stories:

Episode 1: Rocky. A legendary story about failure, overcoming oneself, and triumph… but with robots. This was our first attempt, which showed us that the audience was interested in the format.

Episode 2: How the Robot-Cthulhu stole Christmas. The audience liked all the references, shared their feelings, and asked for more.

Episode 3: Horror story. After New Years, we decided to add a little bit of suspense. Around this time the sequel to “It” had just come out, so we made a horror video (filled with references, of course). The idea was actually born from just one phrase in a work chat: “the spider robot is dancing creepily.” And as for reference, we used this video with Pennywise.

Episode 4: A tale inspired by the boy who cried wolf. The robots played the role of wolves. And the boy was also a robot. As a result, a million views!

Episode 5: Robot afterlife. We decided to meditate on the topic of what happens to the robots when their life comes to an end. We added references to Egyptian mythology, and voila! …the video was ready.

The project kept developing and so did we. In 2020, War Robots was remastered and new features came that opened up opportunities for new stories. For example, in the New Year update, special-edition remodeled robots were rolled out, and a Christmas tree with gift boxes underneath was placed in the hangar (the main menu of the game), so we told a Christmas story.

Later, drones, ships, and orbital support appeared in the game, and this opened up a whole new space for us. “Space” calls Star Trek to mind, which we used as a basis for a new video.

Episode 6: Space and robots. A story about worlds where no robot has ever set foot. The players gave positive feedback. In fact, in the comments section, viewers often asked us to make this plot a full-fledged part of War Robots.

How we create videos

In the beginning, in order to shoot a video and act out a scene by the script, we had to do it live in the game. Each person played their role, and the operator controlled the camera. Naturally, it wasn’t always possible to shoot a desired scene on the first take. Actually, well, let’s face it, we almost never succeeded the first time.

In general, this process demanded a lot of time and required a large number of participants. Naturally, this didn’t suit us, so we were looking for ways to optimize our workflow. Our valiant developers came to the rescue: they wrote scripts to control robots, and one person could control all of them. (We actively use this tool to shoot our videos for both the community and marketing.)

Initially, we work out a scenario where robots act like actors. The responsible person is to place the characters on the map and explain to them their roles, just as a director would do. It’s all like, “you go here, and you run to the lighthouse and shoot at the enemy, and then you use your ability and shoot back.”

Our robots just walk and shoot at each other in the game. Yes, they have their own unique abilities, but their functionality is very limited. Whereas in War Robots Stories, robots are endowed with souls and emotions — and so it’s not enough for them just to walk and shoot.

Therefore, we use the standard timeline in Unity with specially created animations for a specific scene. But nothing would have worked out without cinematography, and the Cinemachine plugin for Unity really helped us with that.

A separate problem was making the robots unlearn everything that our programmers taught them for stable work on mobile devices, and make them work according to the animation on the timeline; the dozens of scripts and components responsible for client-server interaction and robot control prevented us from directly controlling a robot using animation, so we had to ruthlessly take them out.

As a result, we ended up with a fairy tale, a Christmas story, a horror movie, a biblical parable and a sci-fi epic in space. We started running out of ideas, and then it dawned on me: why not try anime? That kicked it off.

So we come to anime

The anime idea came to us while brainstorming and trying to figure out what other cool things we could do within the format. Relatively recently, space-style War Robots Stories were released: which could be taken as a Star Trek reference, Sci-Fi itself, or the space opera genre. While we promoted this video as being anime, our focus was actually narrower: in the script, we wanted to express our love for the “anime mecha” genre.

We initially feared anime was too far from the War Robots setting, but there were a couple of counter arguments:

• Previous stories have seen even more abstract ideas and settings: for instance, horror movies and philosophical parables.
• New robots had recently appeared in the game (Seraph, Nether), with designs much closer to well-known franchises than previous robots.

So we proceeded, drawing inspiration primarily from timeless classics like Neon Genesis Evangelion, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, Armored Trooper Votoms, The Super Dimension Fortress Macross, and, of course, the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise. Indeed, the video is full of homages to specific scenes from these series.

When choosing scenes and franchises, we were guided by the cult status of a particular series as a whole, but we also checked for mentions within our social networks. For instance, we noticed that in some comments, inevitably, users would note that some new robot looked like a Gundam, or a ship would remind someone of Macross.

We wanted to hook the viewer with these callbacks, and make them draw parallels with the anime mecha genre within a familiar format. But the problem with our format is our limitations in terms of artistic tools: we don’t use text, relying solely on visual images and music. In addition, runtime is short, which means we must quickly set the atmosphere of the video. Specifically, the viewer should understand that it’s “anime” in front of them, not a video game scene. Not to mention the fact that we actually needed to tell the story.

The plot includes space and ground battles, fights with “ordinary” robots and those with more “unique” designs (to play off this common anime trop about the discrepancy between the extravagant designs of main characters versus the bit players), a battle with some enemy from space (with a Cthulhian style) and, of course, the merging of robots into one “megazord”.

The music also helped greatly, the video teaser was especially cool, serving as kind of a typical opening theme: even from this moment, the audience immediately understood what was ahead. We managed to convey the spirit of the anime opening and set the tone for the future Stories. (It’s funny, but many people rated the trailer higher than the video itself. Maybe in the future we’ll consider the short format as a possible option, perhaps for music videos or some comedic clips.)

Moving on the story, given the short duration of the video and limitations of the format, we understood that the script should be simple and clear. The video depicts a conflict between two opposing sides, without revealing their motives, but emphasizing the “thoughts” of the robot pilots (yes, robot pilots within robots… you’ll have to get used to it).

Our pilots are rivals, they’re constantly fighting one another, with their entire life centered around becoming stronger in order to defeat their opponent. This makes their lifestyles and thoughts very similar, so when an external threat appears, a common enemy, both sides understand that they are in fact the same — and that only by uniting will the two nations have enough strength to confront the terrible horrors arriving from distant space.

Concluding today’s story

Although we don’t touch upon the plot of the original game in our stories, War Robots is a game about combat robots, and it’s mecha as it is (it is really mecha, actually, if we analyze the tropes of the genre). Many of the designs in the game already roughly correspond to what the viewer is used to seeing in mecha anime. This worked in our favor, and we only needed to add a plot, suitable characters, effects, and a visual anime vibe. All in all, quite a lot of work. But the result was worth it: we realized that these experiments work, and at the same time came up with the idea of super-short formats for future creation.

Despite any potential difficulties in terms of creation, this kind of content seems to liven up and stand as a great contrast to the more serious, analytical material on our channel. And it’s very cost efficient!

War Robots Stories don’t provide users with any useful information regarding the game, but they offer a few minutes of entertainment; adventures with familiar robots, and that’s already great. The high number of YouTube views confirms our hypothesis that this format is a winner. One of the most popular videos on the official War Robots channel is from Stories series (the horror video, with 1.5 million views). We’ve also noticed that, over time, people view these videos again and again, so, who knows how many views the anime video will have in the end!