Interview with Alexander Demidov, General Producer of Black Caviar Games, a mobile game development studio
I contacted the press service of the studio, and she helped to talk with the general producer of Black Caviar Games, Alexander Demidov. Alexander has been working in the company as a producer for 2 years. According to him, he has been in the game development industry since 2008, worked as a game designer at IT Territory, Game Insight, Crazy Bit (Nexters) and BP Mobile studios. He worked as a project manager at Glera Games. Later he was a project manager at Game Insight and AppQuantum Studio. For all the time he participated in the development and release of 24 game projects.
The studio has at least three games under its belt: Samedi Manor: Idle Simulator, Eco Tycoon: Idle Water Cleaner and Jumpurr Cat. I played Samedi Manor: Idle Simulator. In it, the player must restore the estate of Baron Saturday (Samedi) and collect an army of the undead for him. That’s what it says in the introductory text. This game is similar to games where you have to keep an eye on the farm, but here it is with the undead, as Alexander Demidov described it in one of the questions – “a fun clicker to stick around”. I got a little stuck, but in general, I don’t really play on a smartphone, so I can’t really say anything about the game, so the project seemed to me like a regular game on a mobile phone with some donation (like many games).
Tell us a little about the studio.
Black Caviar Games is a domestic game development studio founded in Krasnodar in 2019. Our company specializes in games for mobile devices. We have already released four projects and are now working on new ones. For 3 years, we have grown and strengthened significantly, at the moment we have a team of more than a hundred specialists.
The studio works with young people, cooperates with the Prikubansky Center for Children’s Creativity, conducts excursions, lectures and master classes for children, and helps with early career guidance.
Since last year, we have been partners with the ANO “Russia – a Land of Opportunities”, helping them with the federal project “Start the Game”. I am a member of the expert council of this competition, and I will also evaluate the finalists in the direction of game design. Our art director Olga Drebas will be among the jury members in the finals of the art competition.
Our company has a developed mentoring system, as well as an internship program for young professionals. Many graduates and even students of educational institutions work or do internships in our company. At the moment, we are forming a corporate university. In general, we grow and develop.
Tell me, have you always been developing only mobile games?
If the question is about my experience, then I started my development path with browser games, but later I went to work in mobile games. As far as our studio is concerned, Black Caviar Games has been engaged in mobile games since its inception, but in the future we really want (and will definitely do it) to try our hand at PC and consoles.
If you were involved in the development of PC games, then which ones (if you can talk about it)?
Personally, I did not play PC games, I mostly play them. Purely PC development is not so interesting anymore, at least for me. I would really like to have a hand in the development of a multi-platform game.
Each platform has its own nuances. For example, mobile devices have a limited build size (no one will download a game on a mobile phone with a size of 50 gigabytes), a limited rendering range, due to the limit on the number of tris simultaneously displayed on the screen and the occupied RAM. For PC games, there are no such restrictions, the detailed study of the world and great attention to detail are very important here, because the players, for the most part, look at the picture first of all.
Can you be called an indie studio?
Rather no than yes… We already have a fairly large staff: more than 100 specialists. We have two internal studios. We have a systematic approach to the development, publishing and promotion of our games. We are developing several projects at the same time. We try to make not only an interesting product for players, but also a competitive product. At the same time, we value creative freedom and are open to new non-standard ideas. In general, it seems to me that we have already outgrown indie, but have not yet become a large company, we have room to strive. Everything is ahead!
On your site and social networks have articles about the development. So you want to help other developers avoid your mistakes?
Including! We want more gamedev teams to appear in Russia that will make more cool games: from casual projects for mobile platforms to large computer RPGs and strategies. We ourselves read articles from our colleagues from other companies with great interest: the exchange of experience ultimately benefits the entire industry. Our employees have a lot to tell about ASO, game design, computer graphics and more. We also believe that many gamers are potential employees of game development or related industries. They already have a pretense and a great interest in the field, and we are trying to warm up this interest.
Do you use the Unity engine because it is more convenient to create games for mobile platforms or make cross-platform games on it?
Your question already contains the answer. Indeed, we use Unity for exactly these reasons. I can only add that Unreal is more focused on PC and consoles.
Have you worked with Unreal Engine of any version? Will you switch to it?
Yes, we tried Unreal, but the problem is that out of the box the engine only works well for small games. If you want something more, then you have to “file” quite a lot in Unreal, adding the missing functionality. This requires a considerable staff, which is now quite difficult to find on the market.
In comparison, which engine is harder to work with?
Everything depends on the tasks. Like I said before, if you want a PC game, it’s easier to make it on Unreal. If you want to make a good and beautiful game for a mobile platform or for several at once, then it will be easier to implement using Unity.
Is your company completely Russian? If not, why not?
Yes, we are a fully domestic company.
Under the sanctions, how much more difficult is it for you to work and withdraw money from your accounts?
We hold on. There were and are difficulties, but they are solvable. Again, recently the state has paid attention to the game development industry, there are quite interesting initiatives – let’s see what this will lead to. At the moment, game development and software development are on the same level, we have been equated with IT in terms of benefits, this is a big plus. If you remember the times before the sanctions, then there were also difficulties, for example, in order to get access to Facebook ** Ads (the most earning tool on advertising in games), you had to keep DAU (Daily Active Users is the number of unique users per day) at least 5000 users (and this is 150,000 unique users per month, which in itself is quite difficult), there were no such restrictions for European or American companies. That is why many companies that published Russian games were from Cyprus or the Baltics.
Your game Samedi Manor contains references to popular characters from games, books and movies. Is it more fan service or easter eggs for the attentive?
Good question… I wouldn’t say it’s easter eggs or fan service. Rather, there is a certain associative series. In general, in our game, we first of all tried to move away from the well-worn theme of the undead in its classical presentation, and reveal it from a different, humorous perspective. We tried to make people understand that this game is not so much about the “great and terrible” Baron Samdi, who many, if not all, associate with death and the afterlife, but first of all about a funny and funny character with a specific sense of humor (sometimes quite black) that accompanies the player throughout the story. As the game progresses, we help the Baron raise an army to help him return home to the afterlife, from which he was kicked out by his evil “relatives” for inappropriate jokes and constant revelry. In general, in my opinion, a rather entertaining and fun clicker came out, in which you can “stick” for a long time.
Your games have a monetization system. What approach did you use to create it? What are the principles of the system?
We usually think about monetization in the early stages of development. If you add it late, you will have to change and edit a lot. The main principle that we adhere to when developing our games is that monetization should not be intrusive and prevent the player from enjoying the game. We try to strike a balance between fun and encouragement to make in-app purchases. In addition to inaps, the game has the ability to view ads, we made it unobtrusive and optional so that the player can only do this when he wants to. Watching ads allows you to get bonuses, such as extra money or marigolds (soft currency in Samedi Manor). We deliberately did not make the so-called paywalls (impassable levels), so that even without viewing ads and in-game purchases, game progress would be possible, it would just be a little slower.
Here is a conversation with the general producer of Black Caviar Games Alexander Demidov. I wanted to look a little behind the curtain of mobile development. I hope it worked out at least a little bit. Of course, I was most interested in the training materials at the studio on the website. Perhaps they are simple for developers, but it seems to me that there are not very many game development studios in principle that share their developments with the community.
As already mentioned, I played one studio game – Samedi Manor: Idle Simulator -. However, I will not write a review of it, since this material is more about questions for the studio, I was not going to analyze the games in it. It was more interesting to learn about the studio itself and compare the work of an indie PC game studio and a mobile game developer studio.
I hope to be able to interview a large PC games studio, so that later we can compare both the answers and the principles of work. And then to summarize: what are the pitfalls of various developers in a certain direction.
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