So You Want To Make Games? Advice From: Beatshapers

It’s been a while, so how about some more advice from someone in the know? Today I’ve got an interview with Alexey Menshikov, Founder and CEO of Beatshapers, a development studio based in Ukraine. Alexey has worked on multiple titles in various roles in the past, including the likes of IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey for PSP, and more recently on BreakQuest and NormalTanks for PlayStation Minis.

So without further ado I’ll hand you over to Alexey!

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Q: Did you study at University and which course did you take? Has it helped you?

Alexey: I attended Kiev Polytechnic Institute, circa 1993, but during my study it became the National Technical University of Ukraine. My faculty was Aerospace Systems and Metrology (I got a Masters degree and I now can measure anything with 0.0000000001 precision!) but to be honest it wasn’t my dream activity So in the first year I, with a friend, was involved in demoscene and created a coders group called Virtual Illusions and made several products which were quite popular in the Russian charts. It started as hobby – we made Mandelbrot fractal rendering on Turbo Pascal and it was the beginning of a big journey. So yes it was useful but university itself didn’t help a lot in terms of knowledge – but you definitely study how to browse and process information fast.

Q: What inspired you to take the plunge and start making games?

Alexey: Can’t say exactly why I started looking for a job in game industry. I always liked games and I think that the first Ukrainian development company at that moment, called Action Forms (who created Chasm: The Rift) inspired. If they can, so can I, it was like a challenge for me.

Q: Before starting on your own projects would you advise getting experience in the industry first, such as working with an established studio?

Alexey: At that moment, Action Forms worked on the first Carnivores dino hunting game. I was an experienced visual effects programmer but also I had a special interest into audio. So when I tried to get a job there, I had a choice of becoming a programmer or audio designer – so i choose to become an audio guy simply because there were not many of them around. As I had programming skills I started to code audio engines as well and worked closely with Aureal, Creative Labs and Sensaura, and implemented some 3D audio technologies, but also had my own pet-project (http://delaydots.com), special audio software for the sound designers to make new way of mangling sounds (That was one of my most successful projects, I sold this company to Little Endian in 2009). After that I worked in other companies as a game producer – the most known were Rhythm of War (IGF Mobile 2009 Finalist) and IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey for PSP platform. And I felt that being only the audio guy or games producer was not enough for me, so I started my own company.

This is what was my way – I definitely advise working in an established studio, understand the market, see how it all works and then see whether you can run the studio at all. It took 10 years for me.

Q: Are there any core skills which need to be learnt, such as a particular programming language?

Alexey: Learn everything that you can reach. Being an oldschool demoscener and programmer I took all other “jobs” as well: drawing, converting, music writing, sound editing and so on. This was an opportunity to learn software like: Photoshop, 3D Studio, Sound Forge, etc etc. This helps me a lot nowadays and helps me work optimally – for example preparing the press kit and converting art work. I know my artist is very busy with drawing for new games, so for me it is not a problem to load Photoshop and do the job. Also I believe every programmer has to know Photoshop and any 3D modelling software in order to load/quick draft/convert assets – this helps to understand how software works and optimize the development process.

Q: How much planning and preparation would you advise before getting stuck in with development?

Alexey: We are constantly optimizing our planning process and are very close to an optimal now: while the engineers are working on first playable demo, the art and design team and I work on the game’s look and feel, and then we start full scale development. If the prototype is not working, we close the project; we had a couple of games canned last year.

It’s never enough, you can’t foresee everything but this process should be done with iterations. The main thing – you have to understand what you’re doing, and what it should look like at the end. This is complicated but possible. How to do this is a second question.

I have had bad experiences in the past and participated in several game developments which took 3-4 years and when the game was finally released, they were outdated, so it is very important to think ahead.

Q: What are the main challenges that you face during development, and how do you overcome them?

Alexey: We have several challenges. One of the main ones is memory limitations and we always invent ways to fit it all into 24Mb of PSP memory (Big thanks for our lead engineer Vadim for handling this).

Second issue is a controls approach: games we bring to PlayStations mini come from PC, so are controlled by the mouse, and its quite complicated to adapt to gamepad controls; this takes several interactions until we find a compromise variant for the game. But the main challenge is not in development but in marketing and selling the game, but I believe this is a different topic.

Q: You currently have multiple games in the works. Have these been influenced by previous experiences, and have you tackled them differently?

Alexey: As I said, our team was responsible for the Rhythm of War, a music strategy game for PSP which hasn’t been released yet, and this experience helped us to work on MelodyBloxx (IGF 2010 Honorable Mention Audio Achievement), our own music-puzzle game. So yes, previous experience helps alot. Another title which is not yet announced (coming in July) is actually a port of game I worked on a while ago, and remembering the secrets aids a lot in current development.

Q: Any last freestyle advice you would like to give?

Alexey: Be hungry for the new knowledge, you’ll never know where you need it later.

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I’d like to thank Alexey hugely once again for taking the time to answer our questions, and we wish the guys at Beatshapers luck with their current projects!