GAMEDEV Irkutsk region. Seriously?
In the preface, I would like to warn readers that this material is an attempt to summarize the experience of teams involved in developing games in this region, the reasons for their appearance, as well as the desire to introduce the STOPGAME audience to potentially interesting projects that are at the production stage. The choice fell on the fourth largest subject of the Russian Federation, of course, not by chance. The author is a resident of this region and it would be fair, first of all to the guys living next to me, to highlight their activities first of all.
Where do specialists come from??
“Probably like the rest of us,” we will answer ourselves and, of course, we will be right.
As a child, the average game developer enjoyed the same flood of projects that brightened the childhoods of millions of children throughout the newly formed country. The delights of the capitalist system poured like an avalanche across the borders with neighboring states onto the shopping arcades of all cities of the Russian Federation.
In subjects located in relative proximity to the borders with neighboring states, many of today’s successful entrepreneurs earned their first capital by importing gigantic amounts of goods that are outlandish for post-Soviet people. Irkutsk was no exception in this story. The tables and display cases of trade representatives were cracked by Chinese copies of popular game consoles and games of that time.
Over time, yesterday’s children grew up with interest, watching the development of the industry. Computer clubs, local networks, rewritten blanks with images of games were inalienable elements of teenagers in the early 2000s. After graduating from school, graduates faced a difficult decision regarding their further choice of higher education institution. And here, for ambitious minds eager to connect their lives with the gaming industry, the Irkutsk region could offer a wide selection of technical universities that provided an excellent education and a strong base in the exact sciences, so necessary for learning programming languages and understanding game logic.
The leading technical universities in the region are:
IRNTU – Irkutsk National Research Technical University (whose graduate, by the way, is Vasily Galperov);
IrGUPS – Irkutsk State Transport University;
ISU – Irkutsk State University;
AGTA https://nonukgamblingsites.co.uk/review/slottio/ – Angarsk State Technical University;
BrSU – Bratsk State University.
As a result, many graduates of these universities, having carried through the years a love for games and a desire to develop them, united and founded game development studios.
Megagame (formerly IO Games)
Megame (formerly IO Games) is a developer of computer games for Nintendo Switch, Android, iOS, PC. The company has been in existence for 5 years and is growing every year. Today they employ 24 people, and the total audience of games is more than 30 million people for all time.
Like most of the teams involved in game development in our country, Megame focuses on the mobile sector and small projects for Steam.
The studio is currently creating a cooperative online Roguelike shooter in the world of cyberpunk CyberCorp.
The game is being developed for mobile devices, PC and Nintendo Switch (according to the developers, this platform is a priority).
It was thanks to the early build of this game that the team found a publisher in the Kaliningrad studio HeroCraft, as a result of which they received the opportunity and funding to develop a version of the game for the Nintendo console, says Dmitry Dukhnich, founder of MeGame.
In the “release date” column the developers indicate 2021. Unfortunately, there is no more detailed information about the project.
"K12" – developer of games and applications for social networks. The main office is located in. Angarsk. More than a million users visit applications daily, the number of users has exceeded 18 million
Give me back my 2007!
Everything is according to the canon of old browser games. All projects developed by this studio are focused on social networks.
In modern gamedev realities, games with the names “Bathhouse”, “Brides”, “Masquerade” evoke nostalgic flashbacks to the boom period of browser games. To my surprise, this niche is still popular.
Unfortunately, many projects by independent developers never went gold (although when this was rare, yes?)
But there is one notable long-term construction project that I personally have been following for many years now.
The authors describe their game as a horror game with elements of interactive cinema. Work on the project has been carried out over the past 9 years by developers from Angarsk, Irkutsk and Novosibirsk.
Looking at the screenshots, you begin to feel the feeling of provincial chthony and the lack of changes outside the window.
The game is divided into reality and dreams. Reality is a small, but open for free movement and developing as the game progresses, location in which the main character lives. The most ordinary city, the most ordinary Khrushchev building, people, animals, courtyards, shops, etc. Everything is like in any residential area. You can call this the base location.
Most of the gameplay consists of jumping through various dreams, in which creepy entities, unusual people live and strange things happen. Each dream is a separate unique location. The main character will have to search for various objects and people, as well as fight monsters, survive, study various phenomena and events., — Mikhail Zhitkov, author of Introspection 2020
Conclusion
At the moment, the Irkutsk region is not a bright star in the sky of domestic game development. Many talented guys work remotely for large studios and publishing houses. In the future, they will grow into great specialists, and some will want to develop games themselves.
And here the question arises. Will they stay in the Irkutsk region or leave for a region more prepared for this activity??