We then added four more developers, and after two months, we had a real vertical slice of the game to prove the graphics concept,” said Roman. “It took three people five months to prepare a comprehensive plan for the project. “I realized I had to find the right mix.” After three internal hackathons, the team found the right mix, and Age of Magic was born. At Playkot, he had developed a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) prototype, Portal, that he said was “ambitious, large-scale, and hardcore – and nobody at Playkot liked it.” He was convinced that the basic game elements were awesome: the heroes, locations, battles, and conflicts. Game Producer Roman Zorin had been working on “a world torn apart by magic” since he was in school. That fundamental shift also helped Playkot boost their ARPU (average revenue per user). We love really sophisticated graphics, so we wanted to build games that showcased that and we also wanted to reach those intense, loyal players – that’s why we chose to diversify.” With strategic RPG games, there are fewer players, but they are much more intense, and they tend to spend a lot on their gameplay.
Roman said, “Casual social games pick up lots of players, but they aren’t necessarily committed to the one game. But again, Sasha, their CEO, was looking at trends rather than the status quo. In 2014, SuperCity, made with Flash, won Facebook’s Best New Game Award, and SuperCity Mobile, released in July 2017, became Playkot’s first Made with Unity game. That’s pretty fast considering the level of quality we have.” “From brief to artist to production-ready, with Unity we can develop a character in four weeks, with complete testing and working out all the animations and visual effects. At Playkot, the art of game design is the biggest priority – that’s why we chose Unity.” Another important benefit was speed. “Some companies try to build technology showcases, using every possible shader and anything to look more cutting-edge. This time, they recognized the huge opportunity emerging in mobile gaming.Īccording to Roman, one of Unity’s strong points is how it lets developers focus on art and game design rather than technical aspects.
Sasha and Oleg recognized the importance of VK and emerging social networks.
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HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript were increasingly important web technologies, and the founders of Unity had developed early versions of their gaming engine on the Mac OS. The popularity of iOS devices, and Apple’s rejection of Flash, was significant for Playkot and most other game developers. It doesn’t have to come from the art director or a lead – just being part of the team gives you a voice.” “My colleagues can bring to life any idea if it’s good enough. That year saw the launch of Pioneers and SuperCity as well as their first non-Flash, mobile-device effort: a dice game, Farkle Live, for iOS and Android.Īccording to Guk, one of the keys to Playkot’s success is their democratic creative environment. It was a relatively easy-to-learn tool, and web developers could embed simple animations using a cross-platform viewer.įlash was certainly Playkot’s primary development tool when they added Aleksey Guk, their first art director, in 2011. In 1996, FutureSp lash Animator (or “Flash” before it got acquired by Macromedia) let designers lay out vector-based animations on a basic timeline. Playkot’s evolution is similar to that of many Flash-based developers. Increased focus on art and game design as Unity allowed them to allocate more resources in those areas and less on troubleshootingĪccess to a deep global pool of Unity developer talentįaster porting to diverse mobile platforms By August 2010, VK had grown to nearly 10M users when Playkot launched Club Life – attracting 2.3M players – more than 20% of all VK users – after just one month.Īs Playkot continued to grow with titles like SuperCity and became one of the top-20 Facebook game publishers by revenue, they chose Unity to transition to mobile platforms ( SuperCity Mobile is made with Unity) and keep developing social and casual games until they found an even bigger success with the high-quality RPG, Age of Magic. As the income stream continued, they added resources and started work on a new game. But within a week, they fixed the bugs and posted another game that immediately attracted paying players. Predictably, their first effort didn’t work that well.
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