The St. Petersburg team IzHard after the victory of their OVIVO project at the Microsoft championship received an offer to publish the game from the authors of Shadow Fight.
At the end of July, an independent team of game developers from St. Petersburg, IzHard, within the framework of the world technology competition among Microsoft Imagine Cup 2015 students, received the first place in the “Games” category.
This provided a team consisting of three people (Alexander Vilasak, who was responsible for the design, as well as Daria Kruzhinskaya and Daria Chernova, who were responsible for graphics and art) with a prize of $ 50 thousand.
Alexander and Daria
Also, as it became known App2Top.ru , the studio signed a contract with the Moscow company Nekki for the publication of OVIVO.
“The project is quite unusual, very creative, clearly intended for a paid distribution model and connoisseurs of, let’s say, puzzles. We are sure that the team understands better than us how such a game should look like, so we agreed to cooperate on very confidential terms – we do not get into the concept until the team asks for advice and in case of a dispute, we leave the last word to the team,” commented Sergey Babaev, Director of Business Development at Nekki.
Sergey Babaev
“For our part, we help with the preparation of the product as a whole, launches and subsequent marketing, thus continuing to search for interesting projects and talented teams on the market for our initiative,” Sergey also noted.
OVIVO is a black and white two-dimensional puzzle platformer. In the game, the user controls a circle that must get from point “A” to point “B”. But it is possible to do this only by moving from one space to another (from white to black and vice versa). The main feature of the gameplay is that the spaces differ not only in color, but also in gravity.