When Club Life reached 500,000 daily players, we were unexpectedly visited by the guys from "Radio Record" who said "We're holding a festival called "Transmission", let's collaborate on it". For us it was pretty unbelievable! the very same "Radio Record" that we'd listened to as kids had turned up on our doorstep to meet us!

Naturally, we agreed. We held a competition in the game: we awarded free tickets and offered a big prize for the top 3 winners - the chance to have their photo taken with DJ Paul Van Dyk. We organized the event very well. Our players liked it and during the competition we had a large influx of visits and a lot of new installations.

As art-director I had much more influence over our product. My efforts and initiatives had already been aimed at the maximum general result but it was this role that let me feel that everything I or my colleagues did had a real purpose. Any idea could pass a feasibility test and be made a reality if it was good enough.

Over time, the culture of our company began to take a form that closely resembled my world view: to be heard, it isn't absolutely necessary to be the art-director or a lead, being part of the team gave you a voice.

My vision of my own role changed too. Now my function is to strengthen the project teams at important moments by solving tasks alongside them, not passing down solutions from above and also to eliminate those factors that stop our creative colleagues from realizing their own visions.

We really tried to keep SuperCity a nice, kind game with interesting stories and a dash of magic. This was to keep our players coming back to spend time and make new achievements. What's the essence of the game, what's it about? About life, about kindness. About being able to do anything and get everything you want: all you need is patience, a wish and to never give up too soon.

This was one of the experiments we did at that time. We released small games onto what was then a new platform and watched to see the reaction from users. All the other mobile games from that time have folded but Farkle still gets 10,000-15,000 daily users.

I was really worried when we were starting to work together. Back then, neither Alexander, Oleg nor I had any idea of what needed doing. To be more accurate, they expected me to cover recruitment and that this was the main priority. I, however, had the nagging thought that I should be performing the whole range of HR tasks.

After almost a year we all came to the decision that our main concern should be internal processes. That experience provided the understanding that the easiest way to "get into" the company in terms of HR was by doing recruitment: that way you can get to know the processes, the teams and better understand the needs of your colleagues as well as learning about the product and the market.

Now my focus is spread all round the company, including recruitment. We got the added bonus of finding out that HR isn't only about posting vacancies.

At first the game was called "Reign" and was a military strategy game about a post-apocalyptic future. But then at some point Dima Novikov, our future creative director, joined a project meeting and said "it'd be cool to do a game about giant robots". Everybody thought for a while and agreed: "Yeah, huge robots, that's really awesome!" After some time we changed the name to Titans and everything fell into place.

This time for our new game we decided to use tried and tested mechanics. Our team, which had gained experience from making "Warzone" focused on doing everything correctly and not missing anything out. We had the possibility to choose the right instruments beforehand. And we, with our love for programming and system engineering, used this opportunity by implementing many ground-breaking solutions during the game's development. In this way, TropicStorm became a long-standing source of technical innovation for the other projects.

"Аge of Magic” took a long time to become a fully-fledged project. The game’s universe with its heroes and a world shattered into shards by a magic catastrophe had long been brewing in Roma’s imagination. There was a definite feeling it had the potential to be a hit but there was no clear concept of how to realize the idea.

Bearing in mind that the life cycle of a successful project is at least five years, we wanted to increase the probability of the game becoming a hit.

The greenlight concept aims to help with this process. If an idea has potential and can attract people, then they form a team and work with the greenlight committee (currently consisting of 5 members) to discover potential problems that can arise and block the road to success. After this, they propose possible solutions. If the greenlight process is successful, the project gets the “green light” and moves on to the next stage of development.

There were a great deal of ideas for how to realize the game, which is now known as Age of Magic. It took quite a long time for these ideas to coalesce into a single vision. While searching for a solution, Roma chose the mobile RPG genre and the mechanics of card battler games. During the first greenlight a complete vision of the project was formed which was then expanded during development.

The well-defined timeframe, the various opinions of the team members and their close cooperation helped the ideas to crystallize and fully take shape. The game passed all the greenlight stages and went into production.

Our first aim was to transfer our web version to mobile in 9 months.

We put together a programming team, divided the tasks into separate stages and got to work. Half a year later there was a worrying feeling we were doing something wrong. When this feeling reached a peak, we halted work.

We had wanted to get into the top-50 grossing games but saw that the quality of all aspects of our product was not meeting the necessary standards. It became clear that a direct port was not appropriate for a mobile game and we would have to alter a lot of the game mechanics.

It was daunting to consider altering anything. After all, the social version was successful and if it ain’t broke - don’t fix it. What if we ended up making it worse?

Nevertheless, we took a step into the unknown: We brought a game designer to the team and began assembling a complete game using elements taken from the web version. We wrote a list of tasks and tinkered around with it until we fit it into the half-year deadline we had set. For the next six months we buckled down and worked even faster than before.

As is ever the case, the game was released at 02:00 am, right on the very last day of the deadline. We have a selfie of a dishevelled, tired but happy team, satisfied with the fruits of their labours.

The comments and ratings left at the AppStore showed us that players were enjoying the updated SuperCity and the game’s user statistics (primarily retention) were on par with other games on the market. We had actually made an interesting game with great business metrics.

We could breathe a sigh of relief. After half a year of frenzied development, we had created a product we could develop further, relying not only on our instincts but also on feedback from players. This was a crucial moment for the team.

We took a moment to catch our breath, then began further development of features which had not been included in the initial release, aiming to turn a good game into a great game.

11 months after the soft launch, we were ready to make our first major release onto mobile platforms.

It was during that time that the game began looking more and more like a finished product and had gained considerably more content.

We made separate releases onto both platforms a week apart to be sure we could manage the server load. Later on, we were glad we had! When we launched, we were given a ton of support from the platforms and were even awarded “Editor’s Choice” in several categories simultaneously.

After that, we needed some time to get accustomed to the different tempo of development. Unlike with Facebook, where updates can be made regularly without players even noticing, on mobile, just preparing a version for release takes a week at least. That’s why both our approach and the quality requirements for each build were so different there.

SuperCity mobile helped us hone our strategy for entering what was a new market for us as well as inspiring the creation of an effective marketing model. It was also the first time we completed the full production cycle and blazed the trail for Playkot’s future mobile games.

To check on a project, we used to need to open our statistics system and make sense of what we were looking at, bug the producer for help, or wait for the monthly performance results.

But it reached a point where we’d had enough. So we bought a TV, set it up in the SuperCity space and streamed all the game’s key metrics to it. Team goals, current store rank, traffic, support rundowns, recent update reports, forecasts and more.

Then our other game teams started asking for their own screen. Dashboards turned into monitoring stations, and staff started slowing down as they walked by. How’s that update doing? Are our players happy? Are we growing or shrinking?

Now it’s all right there.

Launching a new game is hectic. Arguments around here can get heated: will people even play it? Should we go through with it? How? Why this game and not another? Everyone on the team has their own ideas.

So we figured some facts wouldn’t hurt. Our first major research effort focused on chart-topping games in various genres, how fast they turned a profit (and how much they earned), as well as market volumes, competitors…

Then monitoring the market turned into an everyday thing. Now we keep a constant eye on new/successful games in our genres, and stay on top of which trends are coming and going. This helps us estimate where we can win, and what we need to work on.

Does this guarantee a new game is going to be a hit? Can we make decisions on research data alone? Of course not. A new game’s success also depends on if we believe in it. But now the way we talk about it and make decisions is a whole lot more transparent.

When quarantine came thudding down around us, we took our meetings from the conference room to streams on YouTube. We added a Slack chat for any questions arising during the stream. But soon we realized we’d unleashed the Kraken and the questions would not all be on-topic.

This flood swept aside the efforts of those trying to hold back the deluge of questions. Oksana asked everybody to keep it in the thread. Leonid tried appealing to rationality “guys, just give a like. NO FLOODING”. But fully unleashed were we and not to be stopped.

The first goose was sent by our Delivery Lead Ilya. Everybody was constantly reacting to what was going on in the stream, applauding, and trolling the speakers. Our CMO, Basil, was practically glowing, I couldn’t breathe from laughing.

We had tried all kinds of ways to make up for the lack of human contact during quarantine: online tea-party rooms on Google Meet, mini report meetings, streams for animators and snoring pug dogs. But in the end, the best way happened naturally without any planning. It brought us closer and we ended up with around 80 in-jokes that all 200 of us knew and loved.

Over the last few years, it seemed the game was pretty much doomed. Adobe stopped supporting Flash Player—the technology all our social games were built on. Knights, Titans, Tropic Storm were all closed down. SuperCity’s player base has been decreasing.

For our citybuilder to survive, we had to port the game from the now-obsolete Flash to HTML5. We weren’t at all sure it would be worth it, it was clear it would be neither quick nor easy to achieve. But we took a risk and SuperCity was kept alive. The costs of moving to HTML5 were recouped in a couple of months and that summer we celebrated the project’s 10th anniversary.

So the game lives on. Its creators invested so much potential into it that it may well live a second decade. When we had dealt with the technical limitations, we started expanding it to other platforms, so we could reduce our dependency on social networks.

We’d made the first step: in 2021, we launched a games portal version. Now we’re going past dashboards in the office and getting a view of the graphics—oh, and how many new players have joined the fun today?

…we couldn't help but throw around ideas for a brand new game during our lunch breaks with Igor, the Art Director, and Iana, the Game Designer.

One idea stood out—a free-to-play mobile farm game with relationships at its core. Igor and Iana were all for it, but I had my doubts. There was no clear reference for such a game, and honestly, it felt like uncharted territory.

However, during a road trip to GDC in 2018, surrounded by the breathtaking diversity of the American landscape, a vision crystalized. It struck us like lightning: our next big thing should be a farm game with expeditions. The market for casual gaming was on the rise, and it felt like the perfect moment to dive in.

We'd already gathered a wealth of experience with SuperCity, and it felt right to channel it into something new. We wanted to create a game that embodied kindness, a sanctuary for players to escape and relax, where they could be whoever they wanted to be.

Every game we've made has been better than the last. With Spring Valley, we created a unique blend of relationships, farming, and expeditions, all set in stunning landscapes. It was a bold move, especially since it was initially the idea I had been sceptical about.

But as it turns out, sometimes, the road less traveled leads to the most rewarding adventures. And on April 26th of 2022, we’ve invited the world to join the adventure of Spring Valley.

That's what making games looks like: one side is knowing your players, the other side is learning by doing. And here’s the kicker, to make sure we get that feedback from players fast enough, we have to put more products out there in the wild, and pronto.

In the past, our process was pretty much straightforward: design a game, polish it until it shines, and then let it loose on the world. Then it was a wait-and-see-and-adjust game, as the market weighed in on whether it was a hit or a miss. We've seen both sides of that coin, but over 50% of our projects have been successful. That's something we take pride in.

But we've got to keep up — it's all about staying light on our feet, and being ready to pivot.

So, in 2023, we took a bold step. We launched our R&D department. A crew of go-getters, ready to dive into rapid hypothesis testing and iterative development. Meanwhile, we see synchronous real-time gameplay as a promising direction—and we focus heavily on this area while also improving our proprietary game engine and shared solutions. And as we forge ahead into the realm of real-time gaming, one can’t help but wonder: What new worlds will we explore next?

The game, as they say, is afoot.