Developer Diaries: One Day in London #1

1. How it all started

Where do startups start? It’s always different. Someone has a huge number of “ideas per million” in their head, one of which sooner or later finds its realization. Someone has been hatching one idea for years and one day finds the resources to implement it. For someone, the role of the push is played by chance.

I always assumed that I would not “work for my uncle” all my life, but at the same time, the day when I stopped doing it and started working for myself always remained somewhere out there, not today – and today there was study and work in which I smoothly moved up the career ladder, from an ordinary full-time artist-dean to an art director.

And then one day I went on vacation in an unusual company for myself – all these people held some very decent positions, many had their own business. They were older and more experienced than me, and, perhaps, they were where I always wanted to go. I asked one of them how old he was when he became the CEO of his own company. After calculating something in his mind, he gave me a figure – 26 years old. “And I’m already 27,” I thought in some confusion. “What am I doing wrong?”

I came back from vacation with a firm conviction – we need to start doing something urgently, otherwise it will be too late. Back then, I had little idea what exactly to do, where to start, and what difficulties await me – I just suddenly realized what I needed – now, today, otherwise all my dreams will remain dreams.

The same evening I shared my thoughts with a friend, he was then working as a PM on one of the social projects.

– Listen, – I tell him, – we need to organize our own studio.
– Well, yes, maybe someday something like this could be…
– No, you don’t understand. Now. Starting today, I want to start doing this. Go with me?
– Aaaaaaeeem… Ahhh, yes, in the end! Why not! Own studio! Good idea!

A few days later, we found a programmer who had been hatching a personal project for a long time, but could not find like-minded people. We let him in on our secret plan to seize power in the gaming industry, and he agreed to join our ranks.

This is how the prehistory of OWL-Studio began – at that time it still had neither a name, nor, God forbid, a business plan, timelines, or even a more or less clear idea of what would happen next. But we had a goal and a desire – as it turned out, this is enough to start with.

The next few months were probably the most rosy in the entire existence of the studio. We met in the evenings after work, discussed ideas and plans, came up with a story based on which the novel One Day in London later appeared, drew gameplay diagrams in notebooks and came up with names for characters. The first attributes of teamwork began to appear – a Google dock with a description of the project and a general drop-box, where we dropped references and sketches.

The first problem I encountered along the way was the transition from words to action. It’s good to sit with friends in a bar and dream about how you can do everything great and beautiful, but come in the evening after work, and instead of serials, stirring Roach and communicating with your family, take it like this and do work again, and for free, that is, for free… And even if it was our own idea and our own business, even I could hardly force myself to do something. It became obvious that it would not be possible to combine a managerial position at work and the management of my own project intelligently, I would have to choose – and I changed the art director’s chair to the long-forgotten spear of a freelancer. Fortunately, some old connections from the freelance period remained, and it was possible to build your schedule flexibly enough. Gradually, our novel began to manifest itself in the flesh. The first sketches, user-story storyboards, interface layouts appeared, and the first, very strange, but already working demo, on which it was possible to get to the location of the aiii… to be in it.

At this stage, we met a marketing girl. The girl was very active and energetic, had a lot of experience in those things that we did not even suspect in our simplicity, and most importantly, she also had an idea of her own project, for which a team was needed. We showed her our achievements, she told us her own idea – we got into each other and decided to cooperate.

So the studio gradually began to have an organization. We came up with the name (originally the novel was called One Week in London, the abbreviation is OWL), applied for brand registration, bought a Jira for ten users, set up tasks and began to prepare for the first release of the “light” – the spring DevGAMM conference in Moscow.

Already in the process of this preparation, I faced the second problem on the way to forming a studio – this is the transition from a friend to a leader in a group of like-minded people. We had the first deadlines and the first commitments, and it was quite difficult to demand that our friends comply with these deadlines – especially considering that none of them received anything for it and, as it were, participated solely on the basis of enthusiasm and their own initiative… It is especially difficult to do this when you are a girl. At this stage, we lost the first soldier in our ranks – PM, having assessed the scale of the disaster, wisely decided to “stay friends”.

Anyway, on the morning of May 15, 2016, we, nervous and sweaty, huddled around a table at the DevGAMM show case. By that time, the studio already had not only a name, but also a website, corporate mail and studio business cards, a page with a description of the project hung on the site, and the demo version included several locations, a video clip and the first mini-game with drawing runes.

We can say that this conference was one of the key points in the development of the studio. It was there that I finally understood what we were doing and why, what our risks were and what could be done to avoid them. And after her, our circle of interests finally began to turn into a real startup.

2. From idea to business

So, the conference died down, the first shock of the first appearance in public and, so to speak, “in the kitchen of the industry” passed, and our problems and our potential became obvious.

Problem #1 is speed. With the speed at which we were working at that time, and with what we planned to do, it would have taken us three years. I think the enthusiasm would have died out at best in a year, or even earlier – and that show case would have remained the only achievement of the team, and the project would have smoothly dissolved into oblivion, becoming another drop in the endless sea of the same unfinished business. And this problem led directly to problem #2.

Problem #2 – resources. Enthusiasm is great, of course, but its resource is extremely limited, and the result is unpredictable. In order to change the situation qualitatively, it was necessary for the team to work on the project for money, and better on a permanent basis than overtime.

Problem #3 is a visual novel, Carl! We started, as they say, “with what we have,” and the genre of the project was not initially obvious to us – it seems like an adventure, or maybe a quest, well, with elements of HOG-and probably also a quest (and we’ve already talked about that). After DevGAMM, it became clear that neither the quest nor HOG would shine on us – the first because there was no game designer and sufficient resources in terms of programming, and the second because I, as an artist, am against HOG. However, I will tell you more about this later.

So, we realized that what we were doing was nothing more than a visual novel, and the reaction of fellow developers to it was different in form, but the same in essence: “let me advise you a good psychoanalyst.”

At this stage, I was lucky enough to meet my future business partner. He was not involved in the gaming industry until that moment (except for driving raids of 40 people in a dungeon in WoW), but he had exactly what we lacked – business experience and high skills in analytics. He was interested – not so much in our project, but in our potential as a team. Together we created a development plan that helped solve the problems listed above.

As a base for the development of the studio and a source of resources for working on the novel, we decided to use the strongest side of our team – the art workers. The freelancing contacts and the database of artists’ contacts collected over several years of work helped here. After a while, I created a personal art page in contact – it quickly gained momentum as a training and information portal for artists. There I regularly held online seminars, wrote articles and published my own works, and over time this page became not only a good candidate base, but also created a reputation for me as an artist I want to work with. The studio’s activities were divided into two streams – work on a novel and work on outsourcing orders. By agreement with a partner, we could give exactly as many resources to work on a novel as we earned from outsourcing art. But at the same time, the novel served as a “showcase” of our studio for customers, showed what we can do, allowed us to find new connections and new contacts. This mechanism was gradually swinging: we spent almost a year on the first episode of the novel. The second episode is almost twice as long as the first – but it has already taken four months.

Above, I promised to return to the question “why not HOG” – the fact is that from an artistic point of view, HOG is not the most winning genre. This is a purely technical thing, incomprehensible to the viewer – but the essence of HOGS is that the location is littered with a huge number of small objects, which can also be in different places. Which turns the picture into a garbage heap. Firstly, if it is all evenly and finely detailed, it is not clear where to look, where is the near plan, where is the far one, what is the main thing, what is secondary. Secondly, let’s say there is a lamp on the table, and there is a jug under the lamp. The light from the lamp falls on the jug, and it casts a corresponding shadow. Let’s take the jug and put it in another place. What will become of this light and shadow? In a good way, they should change, respectively, by changing the position of the jug. But you can’t do this with 2D graphics – well, or you need to draw each case separately. In classic HOGS, this issue is solved simply – objects do not have pronounced illumination and shadow.

It would seem – what’s the difference? HOG-and exist and work, as well as a huge number of other, no less deplorable from an artistic point of view, things, and all these subtleties are understandable only to artists.

But you can’t fool the human brain. He doesn’t really believe in shitty pictures. Of course, it’s not just the picture that brings success to games – game design, programming, demand, competition, and just chance are important here. But all other things being equal, a project with a shitty picture will lose. And the further the industry develops, the more important the picture becomes – both as a showcase of the project, packaging, which is increasingly difficult to attract the attention of the buyer in the growing sea of competitors, and as a qualitative characteristic of the product.

However, it was a lyrical digression – let’s go back to our “sheep”.

So, the first two problems were solved. However, at this stage a new insight was waiting for me: people who agree to work on enthusiasm, most often do not tolerate obligations. And those who are calm about obligations rarely take up work with enthusiasm… Thus, of all those with whom we started (the second artist, programmer, screenwriter, project manager, marketer, a certain number of flickering “helpers” who joined the team from time to time), only the artist withstood the test of commitment – switching to the rate and full-time, she began to work with more more impact. The rest of the line-up had to be changed.

So, after a while, the team was formed, things in the studio began to flow, and what was once an amorphous idea on a napkin finally turned into my own business. The third problem remains – the visual novel, a niche genre, one of the most controversial in the industry.

3. Why a visual novel?

This question is asked to us so often that the idea of making corporate T-shirts with such an inscription has been wandering in the team for a long time.

A little above, I talked about where the idea of the project itself came from, and why it was exactly like that. But why are we continuing to work on it today? Why is the project growing and developing, has passed the softlonch stage, has been released on Steam with English localization, why are we planning to release three more parts?

The main problem of visual novels in Russia is their absence. Rather, the lack of a quality product in this area. This genre is generally recognized to be so unpromising that experienced developers simply do not undertake it. And most of the Russian VN, which still enter the market, support the statistics of futility. But what is essentially a visual novel? It’s a picture book. Gameplay is not important in it, even the idea in it is secondary – a good story and an attractive visual series are important in it. This is what most Russians are deprived of – which determines their fate.

However, it is now I take the liberty to reason in this way – bringing the project to release and receiving feedback from users. Starting work, I did not believe in the project and doubted that it would bring us at least something in material terms – but I believed in the team, and I understood that despite all the critical talk, I would leave it only when there was no other way out. It was possible to “fold your paws” after the first appearance on DevGAMM – say, decide that the project is hopeless, drop it and start something else. But how many resources would it take? How much longer would we be stuck at the start? I had to decide whether to stop, giving up in front of obviously significant obstacles, or take a risk, invest everything I had at that time and continue on my way. I decided to do everything possible to bring the project to an end.

And in the spring of this year we released a novel in a soft lunch on Android. There was not much traffic – we are not buying it now, everything that has been achieved to date has been done by hand. We had a group in VKontakte for several hundred users and a couple of reviews in the gaming press, but together with the pirates there were enough players – and according to the results of the softlonch, we found that about 90% of users read the novel to the end.

When my partner and I saw this figure, we oh… our view of the project has changed. As a matter of urgency, we revised some priorities in the team and accelerated the development of the second part and localization.

On August 10th, the first and second parts of the novel were released on Steam in a bilingual version. The total number of characters in the novel is about 850 thousand, up to 12 hours of game time. The second episode has three alternative endings. The shortest path of passage takes an average of 4.5 hours, the average time in the game is from 6 to 9 hours. At the moment, 30% of users have seen the end credits, 2.2% have received the “palladin” achievement – which means that they have explored all existing branches.

It is still too early to talk about the fate of the project as a whole – not much time has passed since the release date, there is still a lot of effort to be made and so far the final is unpredictable. But what I see already now is that sometimes it’s worth bringing the matter to an end, even if everyone around says that you’re doing some bullshit. Yeah, maybe you’re really doing bullshit, and they’re right. But what if it doesn’t? Once I heard a beautiful phrase, whose authorship I can no longer remember – “people who have achieved success in their enterprise differ from those who have not achieved it, only in that at some point they did not give up their occupation.”