Interview with Oleg Prydyuk (King) about the Defold game engine

In the framework of the White Nights Moscow 2016 conference, we talked with Oleg Pridyuk, an evangelist of the international game development company King.



Prior to King, Oleg managed to work at Unity Technologies, then worked on game development at Game Insight. As part of King, Oleg develops the idea of ​​streaming the game development process, organizes round tables on game engines and is engaged in gamejams.
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From the interview you will learn:

• What is the Defold Game Engine?
• How to promote the game engine for free?
• What is cooler: Unity or Defold?
• How to make a world tour in 21 days at the expense of the company?

And under the cut, we will talk about the game development processes in King: which engines the company uses, and what requirements are placed on the games being developed.

According to the concept of King, games should be designed and developed in terms of hitting and keeping yourself in the TOP. The development and release of the game are different things, and these two processes require different approaches.



King constantly uses three engines: Unity, Fiction Factory and Defold. On Unity, developers prototype, but do not release the game. In King, there is not a single game that would be released on the Unity engine. Fiction factory and Defold are the company's internal engines that are used for production. Within two years, Defold was an internal development company, from March 2016 it was released into the world, and absolutely free, so now any development team can work on this engine.

Required parameters that are checked in all King games:

• The time to start and bring the game to a certain logical end is a meaningful gameplay session. The user has a short period of time during which he can play, and during the game he expects to get a complete result.
  
  
• Time to actually start playing (start-up time) - the time for which the game should load on the user's device with all the content, levels and sublevels, so that the user can immediately start the game and not waste time on installation. We are talking about the most important seconds for which the game should start, for these seconds and there is a struggle among the developers of mobile games. In this case, the logic of the game should not suffer: for a few seconds, the game should be synchronized with the server, check for updates and saves.
  
  
• Battery consumption must meet certain indicators. Focusing on the battery is really important, since the consumer can make a choice in favor of a particular game, based on how much charge he has left in a certain period of time.
  
  
• Stability with poor communication - the game should work without a Wi-Fi connection, as well as in conditions of poor communication, while maintaining all the settings that were in the game before.
  
  
• A place to play on the phone - the game should not take up much space: it should have a small size at the time of installation, there should not be heavy push notifications and updates, it should not take up a lot of RAM. Content that is no longer used by the player should not occupy space on the user's device.

Every two weeks, development teams receive a file with certain indicators on the factors listed above and finish the game to fully comply with these figures.

If the game is slow, no marketing and traffic buying will help it. So that a user in India, China or South America could play with the same pleasure in playing games on a mobile device as a user of a trendy smartphone in Europe or the USA, and release Defold.

Full transcript of the interview is available on app2top.
All interviews from the conference can be viewed on our youtube channel.