Who’s Who: Noclip

App2Top.ru : I know that you have one released project behind you right now: hardcore minimalistic Barrier. A more or less minimalistic project, the Please Stand By platformer, is also in development. In this regard, the question is: who are you, where did you come from and why did you go into game development?

Alexey: My name is Alexey. There are two of us – me and Katya.

 Katya and Alexey

I accidentally got into game dev myself, in the sense that I was always interested in games, but the development did not capture me right away.

I am, of course, a gamer. And one of my favorite parts about games is their editors. But seriously it all started with Unity.

Getting to know him was a turning point. About four years ago, I saw that there is not just an editor with disabilities, where you are doing something within a given game, a given topic and a mechanic. After all, I always wanted to change the game in which you work in the editor. Remember how they promised that you can make a strategy out of Half Life: so I wanted to do something different in each editor, different from the original version.

When I launched Unity, it turned out to be here, the place where you can sit down and start creating and inventing something from scratch and without restrictions. And if it was insanely difficult to add an automatic turret to Far Cry that shoots at opponents, then the dream came true in five minutes. I started to slowly study Unity, development. I saw that there are different contests, including Ludum Dare. This was the first time ideas were published.

App2Top.ru : Was there any training as a programmer by this time? Or as soon as I sat down at the editor, I immediately opened a programming textbook?

Alexey: Surprisingly, there were even no textbooks. I just opened Unity… Started learning to write in JavaScript, it turned out that it’s all quite transparent and easy to learn… And off it went! If there was an idea in my head and I wanted to try it, I just sat down and found out how to move objects, like how it is… It turned out that Unity help, forums and other things are enough to learn a lot from scratch. As a result, I switched to C# and, in general, now I have much fewer “white spots” in this regard.

App2Top.ru Q: Was there something between sitting down for Unity and becoming a developer who releases ready-made applications to mobile stores?

Alexey: There was an important moment in between – I started participating in contests. You can sit in your experiments for a very long time, figure out what and how, but it is the contests that help you get together, concentrate and try to do something, even if small, from beginning to end. This is the first step to understand what elements the game consists of.

App2Top.ru QUESTIONER: Well, there are contests. Roughly speaking, you can be called a self-taught developer. Did you have any desire to get a job in the company? After all, it is often advised that if you want to make games, go into development in large companies, study. Was there no such desire? Why didn’t you follow this path?

Alexey: To some extent, I followed this path. Actually, hence the story of how Katya and I met.

After studying at the university, I was looking for a job. A friend sent me some link to an indie gaming studio, which is located in Moscow. I immediately responded to it, because they promised cookies.

Before that, I didn’t have a plan as such. I didn’t think about becoming a developer in a large company, because I had few skills for a programmer, but as a game designer… I can’t imagine how you can take a game designer without a portfolio. Rather than being a “cog” somewhere, I was quite happy to do something on my knee in complete freedom, but I needed work. And, frankly, any job closer to game development seemed like a dream.

And here is the cruel truth. They usually say that if you get a job in a company, you will definitely get experience and so on. Probably, this is true in relation to large or just successful companies. But I worked for a year, and during that year I got less experience than when I worked for myself. It’s a strange feeling when doing development all day – you get the most experience at home, having managed to do something in your work before going to bed.

There was a good team. I saw that there was a good programmer, a great animator, a great artist. But because of poor leadership, we were always marking time. They broke all the mechanics, almost every week they redid the art. We, in fact, were not engaged in creating something, we were trying to guess a certain image of a brilliant game that was only in the head of our leader.

I worked there for a year for one reason only: there was a sense of responsibility for the project. I, like, was a game designer and level designer part-time, but I didn’t really make decisions. Until recently, there were hopes that we would somehow pull the project out, because sometimes something very interesting loomed out of it. But everything was constantly interrupted, and we almost started development from scratch.

At some point we lost the artist. And this was the main event for the whole year, because thanks to this, Katya got a job with us. I already knew that the project was at a dead end, but her arrival seemed to be a salvation. The game has a gorgeous art, the work has begun to boil. But everything quickly returned to the original. And then we escaped from the sinking ship.

App2Top.ru : Did that team eventually release the game, or is it still being sawed?

Alexey: It was released without us, it has less than ten ratings on the App Store. That’s all we know about her.

App2Top.ru Questioner: Who did you mean by the management whose thoughts you guessed: the investor or the manager who took the investor’s money and tried to express something?

Alexey: The second option.

App2Top.ru : And Katya – what is her role in Noclip?

Katya: I’m an artist. I was also invited to that studio, and the most positive thing was that Lesha and I got to know each other and, in fact, learned not from our own, but from other people’s mistakes, which is also very valuable. Then we started having different ideas and our own projects in our heads, we quit from there and happily went to the first GamesJam contest, the very first one that we arranged.

It was there that we came up with our game Yo Ho Rum, which we are doing together. Since then, our cooperation has begun.

Alexey: And Barrier was just somewhere between Yo Ho Rum and Please Stand By. He first appeared at the St. Petersburg festival NextCastle Party. The very idea of a dynamic, minimalistic “flying” was born there. Later it changed a lot and became the first game we launched.

App2Top.ru Questioner: Maybe it’s not a very decent question: you left the company that we don’t name about a year and a half ago. And since that time, roughly speaking, you have been sawing your projects. Already now the third project, it turns out, is being sawn. Do you work somewhere else in parallel, or do you saw in the evenings, or do you have a pillow that was left after work, and now it is used? Or in some other way. How do “indica” work in Russia today?

Katya: We had savings. Initially, we did not plan to fully devote ourselves to our projects. It so happened that we began to actively participate in GamesJam contests. With each contest, we received the support of the jury and the community, and over time we felt confident in our ideas and abilities. We realized that the projects should be completed. And so we were “carried away by the current.” Now we live on our savings and slowly make our games.

Alexey: I keep repeating that we were incredibly lucky to be at the very beginning of this GamesJam machine. Each contest was a motivating event for us. For which special thanks to the organizer – Oleg Chumakov. That’s how we got right into the heart of indie development life.

App2Top.ru : Has Barrier paid for itself? It came out as a paid application, it costs 66 rubles. Did he help somehow or did he just go to zero?

Alexey: It depends on where to estimate the cost of Barrier development. [Laughs] Because it’s your savings and stuff. I just can’t tell if it paid off or not.

App2Top.ru Are you satisfied with the sales or not? Did you promote it in any way or not? I actually discovered Barrier for myself before meeting you. Unfortunately, I haven’t heard of him before. I really liked him. Such a hallucinogenic project, disco music. He made a very pleasant impression on me. So I’m also wondering what happened to it, did it help you in any way to continue developing further?

Alexey: Thank you for your kind words! I think that financially it is difficult to call it something successful. The important thing is that this was the first attempt to create something from beginning to end, and put it in the store. Go through all the stages of development yourself to imagine what you will have to face. Barrier just had such a task to see how it is and what. And we… as if without everyone… they posted it themselves, without a publisher. In fact, they were released into a vacuum – there was no information support. He lasted for the first month in the top of the new paid ones, somewhere around 10-15 places. During this time, he brought some kind of profit, until he disappeared from all radars, because a month later he ceased to be a novelty.

Barrier

App2Top.ru : Once Barrier became the first such project that was not just completed to the end, but also released… Probably, when developing it, when launching it to the market, there were certain “rakes” that you encountered. And, probably, these rakes were taken into account. And, accordingly, what kind of “rake”, roughly speaking, would you note?

Alexey: “Rake” in terms of development or directly output?

App2Top.ru Questioner: I think in general. Maybe there were some specific very big mistakes that could have been avoided?

Alexey: There were quite a lot of mistakes, as expected. But this was due to the fact that the project was still the first and, indeed, the learning process took place on it. I rewrote Barrier about three times almost from scratch, because at first it was just a competitive work and I didn’t think it would have any future yet. The first build turned out to be quite crooked and did not run at all on a tablet. After that, the problems were rather related to various nuances of development on Unity in terms of optimization. It was necessary to study the engine and understand what and how to do… Because sometimes problems arose in the most unexpected places, like text rendering. That is, the game itself works fine, but everything is sagging due to the fact that somehow a single inscription is displayed incorrectly. And these are probably the most problematic moments, because otherwise… now I would have written it in two weeks and would have laid it out calmly. It was a matter of experience.

Katya: We don’t have a point with Barrier. We haven’t ported it to iOS yet, so we’ll probably keep going. You can consider Google Play such a trial balloon. And now we will think. What would we do with iOS? We would have created more information background to attract attention, because Rock, Paper, Shotgun once wrote about Barrier. But at that time the game was posted for free in the web version on itch.io and it turned out that the jump in interest in the game did not affect its launch, which took place later. Such a hurtful moment.

Alexey: So the fact that interest in Barrier appeared before it began to be sold is perhaps the biggest “grab”.

Katya: Yes, the biggest omission.

Alexey: Yes, it is information. Before launching, it is necessary to somehow create a stir around the project.

App2Top.ru : As I understand it, Please Stand By, roughly speaking, was created according to the same model. There is a competition, the game is laid out for the competition, the reaction looks, and then a decision is made – to expand or not to expand the project. So?

Alexey: Yes.

App2Top.ru Questioner: Then the question is, what is going on with Please Stand By now? As I understand it, he received a good response, now he is texting. And as far as I understand, as Seryozha [Babayev] told me, are they going to publish a project, or are they giving investments for it? What is going on with it, how is its development going, please tell us?

Alexey: The project appeared spontaneously. At that time we were doing Yo Ho Rum, and Please Stand By was supposed to be essentially an alternative to it. I wanted to take a break for a week and do something crazy, dynamic, minimalistic – mostly with such tags. [Laughs]. In general, that’s how it started..

Katya: We won a couple of contests with him, we realized that people really like him. Everyone asked us – why won’t you let him out? We are so surprised: “Why, should it be released?”. He was very well received, and we received an offer.

Alexey: Sergey Babayev, whom you know, helped us a lot in this. We began to pay attention more and more often, they say, guys, the game is almost ready here, there is potential in it. Actually, why not. Now we are cooperating with the PinkApp investor.

Initial Art to Please Stand By

App2Top.ru : And how much will you expand the project? Because now it’s such a minimalistic, very cool runner, but… it’s so, roughly speaking, unicellular. What will you expand?

Katya: We plan to go to Steam and mobile phones.

App2Top.ru : I mean, will there be new content, will it be seriously different from what you presented at the contests?

Alexey: It will be seriously different, and, of course, there will be much more content. Actually, we will develop the topics that were set in the competition work. I think everything will change in it, right down to the visual style. Not quite in the cardinal direction – that is, the principles will remain the same.

Katya: Speed and minimalism.

Alexey: Yes. It’s difficult to talk about the content, in the sense that literally now we are starting the design stage, and we are just dealing with this. And we want to add new passing modes there, and, of course, new elements in terms of opponents, and better management. All that was set in the competition paper, only multiplied by ten.

App2Top.ru Questioner: So, as far as I understand, the project is in the initial phase of development?

Alexey: Yes.

App2Top.ru : And when to wait?

Alexey: We have optimistic forecasts. In autumn. Such a shock development is planned to be done quickly and efficiently.

App2Top.ru Q: Considering that you have made your first investments, will you expand the team? Or are you comfortable working together?

Alexey: We won’t be looking for anyone else to join the team, because we have…

Katya: A well-coordinated process.

Alexey: Yes, a well-coordinated process. A mini-totalitarian regime – in the sense that it is easier to keep everything under control yourself. Sometimes connecting a new person is just a complication.

Katya: So far we are comfortable together.

Alexey: Other people may be needed for one-time work – for example, a composer for music, something like that. Not directly connected to development.

App2Top.ru Q: Did you also invent the music yourself? Or was your music outsourced?

Alexey: In the same Barrier, I used tracks – only six compositions – from two musicians. I chose the simplest option – search on sites with free music. I contacted the composers and asked, “do you really have such a license here that it’s enough just to mention you?”

Katya: I had to make sure, just in case, that they wouldn’t mind using their music in a paid game.

Alexey: This, again, is one of the discoveries on the topic “why is indie good now?”. Because, in addition to the fact that there are convenient and good engines, in principle, you can find everything. You can find both sounds and music. Of course, it’s always better to work with exclusive materials, but first, it seems to me, it’s worth learning how to use all available means. We are in touch with one of the composers whose music is used in Barrier. Perhaps in the future we will turn to him for exclusive compositions. So such a search is also a connection with interesting and talented people.

App2Top.ru : Listen, we have just touched on such a topic that the cost of some things can be reduced. Those of your games that I have seen, they are created in a relatively uniform style: such minimalism. Is this a conscious choice? Do you like working with him, or is a certain [visual] austerity cheaper?

Alexey: Again, the second option. It’s cheaper. Although you don’t think about the cost, but about what you can do at a good level. It makes no sense for me to sit down in 3DMax right now and try to make models at the Crysis 3 level, because I won’t be able to. And if I try, I’ll do it badly. Rather, it is to find the style, the visual range that you can implement at a decent level. Someone makes pixel-art games because it’s fashionable now, and most do it because it’s easier. You can make a beautiful picture, and not very expensive. Why not? Win-win.

App2Top.ru : And the last question: now we are waiting for Please Stand By.  And there are already some ideas, what’s next?

Alexey: Barrier is getting ready to launch on iOS, Please Stand By is in active development, and so far in the background of Yo Ho Rum. We started this project a long time ago, back at the first GamesJam, and this is our “graduation” work, our big project, which is no longer in a minimalist style, but just fully involves Katya as an artist. We are inspired by the reissue of Rayman – Origins, Legends and madly want to create something in this spirit.

Yo Ho Rum

This is close to a family game for everyone – a colorful platformer with an interesting plot. This is our main project, which is also being rewritten, and everything-everything-everything in the world. Which we learn the most from. So we are now switching to Please Stand By in order to release another project on a smaller scale, and then calmly continue working on Yo Ho Rum, which Microsoft has already become interested in.

App2Top.ru : I do not know how secret it is, but Seryozha said that the project is being created almost under [guarantee] Microsoft.

Alexey: Thanks to Sergey, we met Andrey Ivashentsev from Microsoft, who supported our project and invited us to the first ID@Xbox event in Russia dedicated to helping indie developers create and launch games on consoles. And already there Andrey introduced us to Agostino (Agostino Simonetta is the main one for the ID@Xbox program in Europe). We showed him Yo Ho Rum and heard the approval – to be honest, it’s incredible that our game has a chance to be on consoles! We are already waiting for the cherished devkits.

App2Top.ru : I also really love Rayman reissued. When to wait for your Rayman?

Alexey: We are talking about next year.

Katya: Yes.

Alexey: Deadlines are constantly changing. This is the peculiarity of working at your own expense – our plans are constantly being adjusted. There are some events happening all the time and you need to adjust. At first, with Yo Ho Rum, it was difficult to estimate how long we would be doing it – we gained experience and the game grew. Our modest attempt is gradually turning into a serious game. But we are still beginners, that’s why I like to compare Yo Ho Rum with a thesis – we really learn from it. Now the game is looming more and more and I hope next year we will finish it.

App2Top.ru : Thank you for devoting your time to us! It was nice to meet you, I hope that everything will be fine with you!

Interviewed by: Alexander Semenov

Transcribed by: Irina Smirnova