Blank Studio Q&A – Ex CD Projekt RED Devs Talk About Their Post-Apocalyptic Character Driven Game

wccftech.com:

Earlier this month, the dynamic and growing Polish gaming industry got bigger with the foundation of Blank, an independent game developer established by a handful of veterans who previously worked with CD Projekt RED (The Witcher, GWENT, Cyberpunk 2077) and other Polish companies like 11 Bit Studios (This War of Mine, Frostpunk), Rookiez from Warsaw S.A., Division 48 Studio, and Artificer.

Blank, headquartered in Warsaw, is already working on its debut project, a character-driven game set in a post-apocalyptic world.

Current employees include:

I've talked to Mateusz Kanik (who worked on all The Witcher games, GWENT, and Cyberpunk 2077) and Marcin Jefimow (credited for This War of Mine, The Witcher 3 expansions, GWENT, Soul Calibur VI, and Cyberpunk 2077) to discover why they decided to go independent, what kind of culture they want to instate at Blank, and what vision they have for their first game.

Many developers nowadays decide to branch off from triple-A studios to create startups. What were your personal reasons for doing it?

Mateusz Kanik: For me, basically, it was two things. One was that my previous company grew very fast into scale. that was bad for me. When I was meeting people at internal parties or even encountering them in the company's corridors, I could not recognize anyone by name anymore.

It was frustrating for me because I'm used to working with people I know. Creating games in such an environment made me feel slightly bad. The second reason was that for some time, I had been thinking about making different games than I was making at my previous company.

I was dreaming about making games that are more film-style, more polished, and more refined in every aspect, something that is not achievable right now in