How far from the idea of ​​the game to its realization: an interview with the developers of the Yocto Technology Group

Not so long ago, the young YTG development team (Yocto Technology Group) celebrated its first release. When I saw what they ended up with, it was pleasantly surprised. McGyro , and that is the name of their game for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, pleased me with an interesting concept of gameplay based on the presence of a gyroscope in devices, a fun and easy way of presenting the plot, witty dialogs, and a memorable visual style. In the artistic performance of the game, I, as a great lover of cartoon style, liked everything. It is drawn quite concisely, but at the same time it completely conveys the atmosphere of the American western. The spirit of the wild wild west is felt everywhere, even in the main menu of the game, which is stylized as an old wooden signpost, swaying slightly in the wind against the background of the desert landscape. So pulls to choose the road and go in search of adventure.



In addition to the cowboy theme, I was very interested in the path of the development team to their first release. What to hide, make the game many people dream. But not all dreams come true: someone will always be indie, considering the creation of games as a hobby; Someone improves his knowledge within the walls of the world-famous game development company, is satisfied with himself, and only sometimes there is a slight regret that he does (albeit very well) only one small component and cannot influence the concept of the game as a whole, with this suddenly begins to feel a lack of space for creativity, but the unpleasant feeling passes as quickly as it began; and someone is suddenly quite tired of their purely commercial projects and, under the influence of the autumn depression, begins to write to Habr how the novice igrodel dreams are not similar to the reality waiting for him. Many people dream of making games in the circle of their small and friendly team, in a cozy office, discussing new ideas with passion for a cup of tea or coffee. But how realistic is it? I hurried to find out about this and many other things from the developers, when there was an opportunity to poke around with questions.
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Let me introduce those who have been attacked by my question.



(from left to right)
Maxim Khrapai, Project Manager
Dmitry Cke, Animation Artist
Anna Pazyniuk, Artist
Alexander Pishchenko, Programmer
Oleg Zadorozhny, Programmer
Andrei Rozhkov, Creative Director
Ruslan Pichugin, General Director

All that was once only your idea has now become tangible and
material. How pleasant is it to realize?

Maxim: We had our own expectations regarding this game. Some of them were realized, some did not. For example, we have not yet reached the Top 10, but then we received a response from the players, and this is more pleasant than expected.

Oleg: Work on a project rarely ends with the first release, so we still have a long way to improve.

Alexander: I would say that the most important awareness that came at the moment of release is that we managed to make the game together. That is, we are a team that has worked together, which is able to embody its ideas, and not clone others, and bring them to the state of the finished product. And the most important thing is that people like what we have done.



First there was the idea of ​​a game about McGyro, and then a search for like-minded people to implement it? Or did like-minded people first appear, and then the idea came to create this particular game? Tell us how your team was formed.

Maxim: First, the main production part of the team gathered and exclaimed: “How long will we restrain the thirst to make games ?!” And almost immediately, fate brought us together with Andrey and Ruslan, who made the game possible.

Oleg: Not fate, but Anya.

Maxim: Yes, Anya + her LJ, which, as we know, is the best media.

Andrey: From our side with Ruslan, I can say that being gamers to the core, we always dreamed of creating a gaming company. True, our specialties are inappropriate - Ruslan is a lawyer, and I am a linguist. Therefore, in an effort to make money, we spent a very long time doing various things that we did not like. As soon as free money appeared, I immediately began to look for ways to do the job of a dream, and then a completely insane series of events brought us together with Maxim and the team. In my opinion, two weeks after the first correspondence in Skype, I flew to Simferopol to personally communicate with the guys. Soon after, we started working.

Decisions about the plot of the game, the number and complexity of the levels, Maxim, as a game designer, made solely? Or did all team members take an active part in their discussion? What is the most effective way to resolve such issues for a small development team?

Maxim: We have a small team, and all ideas are formed in close cooperation. There is no one person who would be assigned to do something and then it would be impossible to challenge his decision. I hope that this will happen in the future. As for the most effective way, I can not answer, because it depends on how many people and with which characters are forced to seek consensus.

Why did you think that such a project would be successful? What do you like most about the game that is released?

Maxim: Initially, the bet was made on controlling the gyroscope. Well implemented projects with its use was not. Most likely due to the small number of devices with it, but the market was expanding and we wanted to recommend ourselves well with a niche product. The control finally turned out to be convenient, although it takes some time to get used to (now we are working to ensure that players without a gyroscope have more comfortable control).

Andrew: The management really turned out to be convenient. Of course, the flawlessness of the mouse is very far away, but it is much more convenient to shoot than in the shooters with the controls, sharpened by the touchscreen. Most of all I like the fact that our game is original - this is not just another clone, for good or bad.

What was the most difficult in working on the visual style of the game? In creating characters?

Dmitry: At first it was hard to get used to this amount of art, I have never had to draw 10-15 drawings a day before.
The visual style was created specifically for this game, taking into account the volume of graphics and timing (I like to experiment with style like no other, so it was fun and entertaining to work). It all began with thinking through the rules of style and its boundaries, the structure of the body of the characters. The basis was taken from the color schemes of my graffiti works, the fatty Shane'a offline, and something from Angry Birds. Tons of reference for the old wild west, its setting and surroundings were studied. In the end, it turned out that you see.

I know that in your game the plot is served in the form of comics about the everyday life of Sheriff McGyro. Every new day starts with a new comic. Who owns the idea of ​​such a plot? Who painted these comics?

Maxim: Initially, the idea to submit a story with comics is mine, I also did the first storyboards and wrote dialogues, later the plot, the composition of frames changed greatly edited by Andrey and the publisher's comments. Sketched comics Anya.

Anya: I am not a graphic artist by vocation, but rather a painter, and now I needed to make a comic for our game. It would seem that the quasi-realism, in which I and most of my friends of cg-artists work, should be more complicated than more decorative “drawn stories”. Not here it was! Even when I more or less got my hand with these comic book inserts, I was still shocked by how much work, in fact, was spent on them. The only thing with which I had no problems (which I sort of painlessly “ported” from painting) is color, combinations of color and light, but that’s all. The rest - the storyboard, contour, fill, edit - turned out to be new to me. I highly recommend everyone not to suffer with Photoshop and contour in SAI (Japanese analogue of Photoshop). Still, of course, it was quite difficult to adapt to the style of Dima, but these are trifles. After all, in the end, everything turned out! Having drawn so much, you feel yourself to have conquered the mountain! So I can only imagine what the guys feel, who have collected their own project with their own hands.



Your game is in English. Is it focused on the western market?

Andrew: The lion's share of the income of games for iOS comes from the US market, therefore it’s absolutely natural our orientation. This is our first project, and right after the point “make an excellent game” there was a point “earn millions of dollars”.

How did the characters sound?

Andrei: For voice acting, we hired commander Eric Gusky, his voice says Ghat from Zeno Clash. It was very nice to work with Eric - he did everything from the first take, very quickly and for a reasonable fee. The same thing I can say about Chris Voigt, the man who made us an awesome flash movie. You can familiarize yourself with the work of this talented Australian on his website - www.greasymoose.com

In your video they say that the game is "full of wacky humor". Where did this wacky humor come from? Who wrote the dialogues for the game? Replicas of the characters wrote immediately in English? Is there a wordplay in the dialogues that only English speakers can understand?

Andrey: Dialogues were written by Maxim and I, but the plot and humor were born by the midnight task. As Maxim said, we are a small team, and everyone is participating. Dialogues were written mostly in Russian, and then I translated them.

Maxim: For me personally, it is very difficult to deliberately invent jokes, much less make an amendment to the English language. It was very good to have an acquaintance with slang in the translation team, especially cowboy.



IPad games are becoming more popular. Large PC projects, such as Mirror's Edge, Resident Evil 4, Call of Duty, NFS, are also ported to the iPad ... What do you think about the potential of this platform for game developers? What is the best game plan for the iPad?

Maxim: It seems the potential is great, but it is not always possible to control the popularity of this or that game. This can speak a list of games that are published Chillingo, and about which you have never heard. As a result, in the top sales can compete several massive projects from famous developers and an arcade from the Japanese with graphics bad flash games. For iPad, those games are suitable for which you do not need to go headlong into the game that will allow you to fill in a few hours of time, and which can be closed at any time.

Ruslan: The potential of this platform is very high, because with each new generation, Apple's tablet will give developers the opportunity to create more technologically advanced and interesting games. But, unfortunately, the threshold for entering this market from a financial point of view and from the point of view of competition will be higher, and soon there will not be young young teams in sight. I am sure that the future is in big projects with a long gameplay. Of course, the puzzles will remain, but gradually will be crowded out by large projects.

In the technical execution of the game, what difficulties did you encounter when you started writing under iOS? Are there any general recommendations that you could give to those who are going to start writing games for the iPad, iPhone and iPod?

Oleg: For me personally, this was the first project under iOS, so there were some difficulties when meeting the new system, but they are quite surmountable. Advice - it is desirable to have the widest possible range of Apple devices for testing your applications.

Maxim: I can say this: yes, iPad2 and iPhone4 are quite productive, but in order to really sell out massively, you need to focus on the entire line of devices. And this imposes serious restrictions.

Whose engine was used to create the game?

Alexander: I already had the experience of writing my 3D game engine for PC in C ++. When the question arose of studying the market of ready-made technologies for creating a project on iOS, we were faced with the fact that there are many and few engines at the same time. A lot, because there are really a lot of them, from very simple wrappers to full-featured software infrastructures such as UDK. As a result, such problems have surfaced - the “big” engine is a paid one and / or it has a high threshold of entry in terms of studying its Asset Pipeline. Ready-made “small” free engines had a number of problems with functionality, performance, and the fact that they were not written in C ++.
In fact, we needed to find such an option so that we could start production instantly, without wasting time learning a new programming language, without studying the sharpened Asset Pipeline under the engine, having complete freedom to implement the features of the game, not resting on the limited Engine API. And with all this we needed to get a boost at the start of the project. In other words, they needed the advantages of their engine and a stranger at the same time.
As a result, I settled on using Oolong Engine 2 (distributed under the MIT license). This is a low-level graphics engine, which has neither its own renderer nor Asset Pipeline. To be honest, it is difficult to even call it an engine, rather, it is a framework or even a large library.
It contains functions for loading models from 3DS files, a texture wrapper, a minimal wrapper for the OpenAL sound library, support for loading .blend scenes. It also comes with the Bullet SDK and some other third-party libraries, for example, for networking (and more recently, LUA).
We should also mention a rich set of examples on the basis of which you can quickly figure out how to create a simple project for iOS and load the first objects.
As a result, we used the functions of loading models from 3DS, a texture loader and a sound wrapper, and this gave us the necessary boost to start development. Asset Pipeline we have developed in the course of work, focusing on our objectives. Render engine, game objects and logic are also written as the project develops.

And how was the assembly of game levels done? Was there a specialized editor for this? Who was involved in the creation of levels?

Alexander: To build the levels, we used opensource editor Gleed2d. This is a fairly easily modified editor written in C # and based on the XNA Game Studio. We did not immediately come to the final selection of the basis for the creation of our editor, several open-source editors were tried, who did not fit for one reason or another. What was important in the first place was to keep the level in a convenient format. Most other editors either saved it in their own, and you had to write an additional translator, or in difficult-to-read xml. There were no such problems with Gleed2d.

Maxim: I was completely responsible for assembling the levels. They were going in a two-dimensional editor, the events were scripted by the simplest triggers there. More complex tools were needed for McGyro. True, I did not have enough cascading copy, I hope Oleg implements it to work on the update. In order not to build the build every time the level was changed, we used the Public folder in DropBox to store the levels, and the application loaded them via Wi-Fi. I do not know how original this implementation is, but it helped us a lot.



Are you going to port McGyro to other platforms?

Ruslan: The feasibility of such an event is still under discussion, but in terms of probability, I can say that the first possible platform for McGyro after iOS could be Windows Phone. As for Android, PS Vita and other things, I think that it’s too early to talk about it, because this is our first project, and we need to focus on those markets where we can get the greatest profit.

Your publisher is Chillingo. How can you characterize your collaboration? Did you have to correct something in the game because, say, the publisher didn’t like it? As far as I know, publishers are now seeking to produce simple games, so as not to scare the audience with complexity. Did you have to simplify something in the course of development?

Andrei: They helped us with advice, sometimes to the point, sometimes not. For example, adding a screen centering button was their idea, and this made the game really more convenient. In general, we are pleased with the cooperation with Chillingo.
However, the question of whether to go to the publisher or not still does not have a definite answer. Although the AppStore has grown, high-quality products are still always in sight, whether they have a publisher or not. In general, my opinion is - if your game is original and interesting, and not just another Cut the Birds, you can take a chance with samizdat. Here are some good tips from Swedish Triolith Entertainment designer: www.triolith.com/2011/11/24/publishing-your-mobile-game-free-diy-marketing-my-insights-so-far

Game development requires funding. How risky today is to invest in the development of games for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch? What was the most expensive development of the game?

Ruslan: Financing of the game was completely out of my pocket. The decision on whether to start this project was made by me, as an investor and Andrey, as an ideological inspirer and part-time my best friend. I can say that we looked at a lot of options where to invest money. I see iOS game development as a business. And in this sense it is no different from other types of business. Your risks are everywhere. The main thing to know is the kind of activity where you are going to invest, and if you know it, then there is not much difference between investments in the gaming industry or, say, in real estate there. As for the biggest expenses, game development is an intellectual activity, and it is carried out by people. So most of all left and goes to the salary of employees.

Do you have ideas for the following projects, or maybe you are already working on something? Will there be updates for McGyro?

Maxim: We have enough ideas like any creative team. Now we need to finish McGyro, we promised players multiplayer and are preparing the appropriate update. Despite this, we are working on several ideas for future game mechanics.

For some reason, I got the impression that domestic developers are mostly engaged in casual flash games, games for social networks and other similar online projects. Almost all large PC or console projects are published abroad. Do you plan to concentrate on developing for iPad, iPhone and iPod in the future or can you try some other platforms? What kind of game plan can a small creative team afford to succeed in today's market?

Ruslan: I believe that the iOS market should be perceived as a platform for building a large creative company for developing games for all types of gaming devices - from Android to PC and consoles. We, of course, will not stop creating games for Apple devices. Plans to develop in the direction of large platforms. Thanks to Steam small teams can declare themselves on the PC. It is not surprising that we are looking in this direction. As for what games are best done for iOS, then, of course, these are puzzles and arcades. But, as I said, the market is growing. The hour is not far when doing something simple will not be so profitable, and all novice developers will have to compete with the shaft of big and serious games, like Infinity Blade or Modern Combat. So today you can still have time to make a puzzle and get rich, but tomorrow it can not pass. That is why we decided to go the way of originality and make a distinctive project.

Alexander: As for large projects, there are simply few teams in the post-Soviet space that can produce products of world quality, and therefore not many investors who are willing to risk investing in inexperienced teams. And with a low-quality PC single, of course, you won't get far, it just may not pay off.

Oleg: I agree, but the matter is not only in the absence of teams (the same Nival with the fifth heroes proved that they can make top games in the CIS), but also that the further, the more enormous money projects start to cost. Playing $ 100 million each is no longer a rarity, and there are very few people willing to invest such amounts, if not to say that there is none at all.

On this my questions were exhausted. Many thanks to the Yocto Technology Group for such detailed answers. I would like to wish the guys good luck and get with their success another confirmation that dreams still come true.