HeroCraft: a look at the development of mobile applications from the inside [interview]

HeroCraft is a Russian company engaged in the development and publishing of games and other software products for mobile phones, which is cooperating with our company at the moment in the direction of developing games for the new proprietary platform bada. Founded in 2002, today it occupies a prominent place among Russian mobile application developers.



Under Habrakat, you will find interviews with several of its leaders, telling both about the work of HeroCraft as a whole, and about their work with Samsung, which provided the company with new development prospects. All questions you are interested in can be asked in the comments, Alexey Sazonov will try to answer them.





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Interview participants

Alexey Sazonov - commercial director, 30 years old.

Pavel Prokonich - CEO and co-founder, 29 years old.

Yuri Keshishev - Head of Porting, 36 years old.

Oleksandr Similetov - Director HeroCraft-Ukraine, 28 years old.

Dmitry Bezugly - project manager, 25 years.



My questions will be highlighted in " bold and italic, " the answers will be given in "plain text," and my comments on the answers will be " regular italics ." Alexey Sazonov answers all questions, unless it is noted separately.

Interview

How was your company founded?



Pavel Prokonich, CEO and co-founder of HeroCraft, responds:



It happened in 2002. Five students, with minimal (mostly computers) capital, decided to organize their business. In short, it was a rare successful case of a garage startup with an initial capital of $ 20,000. The money was earned by the company's founder, Andrey Petrov, he released the game for handhelds at the right time, we spent the first year selling it. The office was removed in the barracks, converted into an apartment, in the kitchen there lived two furious Staffordshire terriers. Now Andrey is working on a new startup, he has solid funding, but the Staffords continue to live in his office and bring him good luck.



What do you have at the moment? What achievements, what plans?



The most recent achievement is our android version of Farm Frenzy, which was nominated for a very prestigious award at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Mobile World Congress, the largest congress and exhibition on mobile devices, is held annually.



Also, the game is in the TOP of the Android Market ( link ) and Nokia OVI.



One more achievement: Mobile game publisher # 1 in a Q1-2009 quality chart - ranked first in the composite index of reviews according to the authoritative resource PocketGamer.



As for the growth of the company itself, over the past four years we have grown from about 40 people to 80, the game portfolio has increased from 30 to 100, about 20 are in development. At that time, most of the games were J2ME, something was already on the versions Symbian, Windows Mobile, old Palm, a little BREW. Of course, then added the game under the iPhone. We still have not abandoned J2ME (although many companies have either greatly reduced the work in this direction, or have stopped supporting their applications on this platform altogether), but we have rebuilt strongly on Android - currently we have 15 games on this platform.



From the new - 3 almost finished projects under Bada (two of them with the most direct participation of Samsung - got into the partial funding program), and we will do a couple more games, because we want to try our hand at the “Bada Challenge” with a prize fund of $ 2.7 million :)



It is important that at that moment we established international sales - at different times we had up to hundreds of active partner accounts: content providers, portals, and the like; Now accents are shifted to the "app shops" that grow like mushrooms.



Although it is even more important that we have established work with copyright holders and licensed IP (brands) - in those days there was no way without it, and now it is also important. Crimsonland, Postal: Babes, Majesty, we are releasing the first projects with KranX and Alawar, here, again, I would especially like to point out the Jolly Farm, with which the Android Marketplace TOPs and Nokia OVI have been torn. In general, the products of our company are officially recognized by the Top App on Nokia OVI. And this is despite the fact that only one port was sold (group N97 / 5800), other devices were added recently.



They also made games according to the largest Russian-language licenses - here you can mention “Field of Miracles” and “Daddy's Daughters” (they also used to make PC games for them, and also took first places at the respective sites).



We have already written about the above event: Competition for developers on the bada platform .



Your team, as far as I know, is dispersed in different cities. It's right? How does the collaboration work?



We have units in St. Petersburg, Donetsk, Krasnodar, but the majority of our team is still in Kaliningrad, about 40 people. But it happens that the entire project, for example, in Kaliningrad, and the artist (ours, not an outsourcer) is in St. Petersburg.



Or, for example, a common thing - some small remote team programs, draws, and then porting to a large number of devices, with localization and other functionality, is done in Kaliningrad. Well, if the team is remote, and some kind of interaction is required (for example, the game designer is here, and the others are there), there may be overlays, if there is no constant contact, active work of the project manager, and so on. These are all working moments, we try to solve them as problems arise.



Many companies, for example, outsource testing or even testing along with porting. In fact, it does not take a month for us not to receive an offer from any developers in porting or testing our product :)



But the guarantee of high-quality and successful work, when you can quickly respond to the bug reports from partners, is still your own porting / testing department.



How, by means of what there is a remote work of offices? What own know-how, what software?



Dmitry Bezugly, project manager responds:



There is a lot of communication on projects (icq, skype), during which certain issues are being clarified. All we throw in the total pile. We continue with iterations. We select pieces of projects with which we will work in a short period of time (about 2 weeks), and implement them. We used to use Mantis for this, but now we plan to abandon it and switch to the Jira + GreenHopper bundle (it seems to us more user friendly). Oh yes, every office has its own lead, we communicate mostly with it, so as not to break.



How are things with hiring? I think Habr users will be particularly interested in this question.



Pavel Prokonich, CEO and co-founder of HeroCraft, responds:



We work with a large number of small teams, we finance promising projects. Always welcome to all. As for staff members, it's nothing special, we are looking for familiar, local bulletin boards, vshtate.ru. Freelancers and remote employees - sometimes it happens.



I see, thanks. And what about outsourcing?



Outsourcing minimum. It happens, for example, posters for the game (aka splash) draws an outsourcer. In addition to fully own development - over the years, a pool of developers close to us has also been formed. In the role of the publisher - sometimes we help prepare the game for foreign sales (by the way, games are now released with at least 8 localization languages), often we port and so on. We can say that we help domestic talents to meet a foreign player.



Wow, great. Is it possible in more detail?



There are no special developments in this kind of work, although there are plenty of volumes in this direction. Imagine that some young successful team comes to us with a project. If the game is worthwhile, then we help them to finalize the game to a foreign market in one direction or another: we make a “campaign” (story), we balance the gameplay, in general, as I said above, we helped domestic talents in the best way to show themselves in the world. the market.



How wide is the device support at the moment, because you are a global market player?



Well, that would be too bold a statement. Yes, we are a major player in this market, but no more.



Yury Keshishev, Head of Porting Department:



Our database contains information on almost 3000 phones, among them there are phones that we have never supported, but, nevertheless, we know about their existence. In active support, we have a little less than 1500 phones grouped in 75 groups. We constantly monitor the emergence of new models and the withdrawal of models from sales, which leads to the emergence of new groups and the removal of obsolete ones from support.



We try to buy key, group-forming devices so that in each of our groups there is at least one telephone available. Most often we buy in our city, sometimes you have to order phones abroad. As a result, we have about 150 telephones available, the oldest telephones are put to the mercy of the younger generation. In active use, we have about 70 phones.



In addition, we use the services of paid remote access to DeviceAnywhere phones, as well as free remote access to phones from Nokia.



What about platforms?



Now the main platforms are J2ME (including Blackberry) and Android, from which we expect that it will naturally gradually replace wah. This is what we are seeing now, as many J2ME partners one by one include Android in support. probably, the Google platform will save the fading business of traditional content providers, operator portals and similar companies.



Plus, we are porting our best games to the iPhone (and also announced one game on the iPad), bada, Symbian and Windows Mobile. The last two are losing points at the moment, but this is more of a natural process due to market expansion.



Developers are somehow divided into teams, for one reason or another?



No, Android is the same people as J2ME.



What is the current situation with Andorid?



This is a rather voluminous question. At the moment, not everyone understands that, firstly, the world has not come together on the Android Marketplace - there are a lot of channels for the implementation of Android games. Unlike Apple's apshop, sales are not held there by any method. And the android-games are already sold on the same channels as J2ME (i.e., Andorid will gradually replace J2ME), that is, now that an independent developer can properly sell the game for this platform - he cannot do without a publisher or intermediaries. Of course, you can still make a brilliant game, promote it at all angles - and get into the TOP10 - then there will also be great money, but this is until big publishers have fully occupied the top. And all of them have already announced an increase in the number of developments for this platform.



What are your plans for our bada platform?



Two or three games for Badu should come out this summer. These are our already mentioned above “Farm”, “The Field of Miracles and together with the Korean partner - the futuristic races with the“ moss ”.



What can you say good, and what is bad about us? Honestly :)



In general, we are very grateful to Samsung, they are really very attentive to the developers, and let us into very interesting projects. There are no negative impressions. The only thing I want is more openness and flexibility in the shops, but this is all such a complaint. Some manufacturers do not do this either, and a parody of some kind of appshops. Samsung themselves found us at one time, offered to participate in all sorts of programs, helped with contacts, and most importantly - made it possible to earn. But sometimes such companies breed violent activity, but they forget about the most important thing - we want to be able to earn money.



Also, such opportunities as preloading of games and demos, meetings and seminars around the world are encouraging - all this can only be welcomed, the company is really trying to attract developers and give them the opportunity to make money.



As for the development tools for the platforms - is there any specifics? What are the sdk's like that at all?



Yury Keshishev, head of the porting department answers:



With today's success, the company is largely obliged to the right decisions in the choice of tools and technology development directions, adopted at the very beginning of its development. As a result, the company currently has a set of tools that includes both open-source applications and proprietary software integrated into a single software package.



For game development and porting, the Eclipse IDE, the ProGuard obfuscator and the SDK provided by the phone manufacturers are used. Additional plug-ins have been developed for Eclipse to speed up and facilitate the development and porting of games and applications. Graphics are created in Adobe Photoshop, to create animations, maps and font sets using a proprietary program called HeroTool.



SVN is used to manage versions of the source code and resources, which has recently been gradually replaced by Mercurial and Git. To configure and store information about projects, partners and phone groups, HeroBase is used, a database based on MS Access, which allows the entire team involved in the project to work on a project: programmers, testers, managers.



Integration with Microsoft Word / Excel and OpenOffice Writer / Calc allows you to create various reporting documentation for working with external development teams and customers. The database includes tools to accompany the game throughout its life cycle - export / import of game texts to add localizations, add new ports, customization according to customer requirements, test results, etc.



The subject of our special pride is the JMBuilder program, which allows you to make a commercial product from a ported game — a game in a specific location, customized to the requirements of a certain content provider. The program has its own scripting language that allows you to write almost full-fledged programs with cycles and conditional operators, has a friendly user interface and the ability to interact with databases and spreadsheets. The HeroBase database has the ability to call JMBuilder directly on the forms of working with projects, content providers and phone groups, JMBuilder, in turn, collects games by reading data from the HeroBase database.



The company pays great attention to the development of tools, so all of the above programs and plugins continue to evolve, new features and functions are added, and support for new platforms.



Alexander Similetov, HeroCraft Ukraine Director:



We have developed our own SDK for smarts - it works on Symbian, Windows Mobile, iPhone, Bada, mobile Linux (Palm OS was previously supported), Windows XP / Vista / 7. There is a version in both C ++ and C # under Microsoft XNA.



We transfer it to everything where it is possible to write on C ++. Our SDK is written so as to significantly simplify the transfer of games from Java to C ++ in semi-automatic mode. From chips - a sound with 3D effects, graphics output in a compatible software mode or through an accelerator. Own 3d engine, 2d, GUI engine.

Post Scriptum

On this we will finish today, but soon one of the company's specialists expressed a desire to write a separate article on Samsung bada - we hope that this material will find its reader.



I would also like to express my gratitude to Alexey and his colleagues for their help in reading the article for factual and other errors - this is a new topic for me personally.