Interview with domestic indie game studio Baba Yaga Games

It is always interesting to look behind the scenes of the theater, on the set or to get into the game development studio in the midst of creating the next computer game. I accidentally came across news about the development of a new game by a Russian studio Baba Yaga Games prompted me to think: why not talk to its developers?

Computer games for me have always been divided into two large types: where the gameplay prevails, and where the plot prevails. There are, of course, masterpieces in which these two categories are mixed together. But there are only a few such games, in my opinion.

This can be seen especially well in the indie segment, but in the AA and AAA segments there are very interesting, almost “masterpiece” games. Although most of the products in these segments are toothless monotonous games, more like fast food, which you snack on the run without appetite, just to satisfy your hunger.

But back to the indie segment. One of the most revolutionary games of 2022 is Vampire Survivors, made by one person. It has very little plot, but a lot of simple and at the same time enticing gameplay. Here is an example of how the gameplay becomes fundamental to the game, and the story fades into the background or there is almost none at all.

There are other examples as well. Let’s take the long-term construction of Scorn. The story itself is much more interesting than the gameplay. Yes, he is, not the most outstanding, but not the worst either. But more important is the plot and what the authors wanted to convey, well, in addition to the entourage of the world of paintings by Giger and Beksinsky.

Or another example is The Dark Pictures Anthology series of games. In general, the gameplay is not in the first place in it, but the player is given a complete immersion in the story, and with the help of some actions, the user is more deeply imbued with it.

Or another example – Dwarf Fortress, in this game the player himself writes the history of his world, and in fact the game plays itself, but due to the user’s decisions, his actions, a complete impression is created and participation in the game and the world being created.

And so, when I caught the eye of the trailer for the game “Vasilisa and Baba Yaga” from the Baba Yaga Games studio, I thought: after all, the game will most likely focus on history rather than gameplay. Yes, and the drawing was reminiscent of classic Soviet cartoons such as “Mountains of Gems” or “Two Maples”. Looking at other works of the studio, I saw a drawing similar to the cartoon magazine “Carousel”. As a result, I had a feeling that these indie projects are more about the story than about the gameplay. It is, but it is present more for immersion in history.

A little about the Baba Yaga Games studio: this is a team of independent developers from St. Petersburg, consisting of several people. There are those who help them in creating games, but there are still two main developers. Studio for more than 8 years, behind her shoulders two games: “And again spring” and “One-eyed Kutkh”. Now the third game is approaching – “Vasilisa and Baba Yaga”. The most interesting thing is that the second field of activity of the developers is the puppet theater, so when I found out about this, the idea of ​​​​a story or a story that is the main one in the game put everything in its place.

And so I thought: why not interview the Baba Yaga Games studio, because there are not so many games now that focus on the multinational flavor of the myths of our country. Therefore, here is our conversation with the main developers and inspirers of the studio Asya Yurina and Lyuba Nurmukhambetova.

How did you start your career in game design?

We are artists of the puppet theater, we got our education at RGISI (former SPbGATI). In 2014, we decided to try to make our first game, since the possibility of direct interaction with the player had intrigued us for a long time. Unlike the performance, the game allows the player to take a direct part in what is happening. To begin with, we decided to make something as simple as possible and chose “And Again Spring” as the basis for our first game, a play about the change of seasons, which we staged at the Murmansk Puppet Theater. We liked the experience of working on a game project so much that we decided to seriously continue to engage in game development.

Tell us a little about your Baba Yaga Games studio.

Our studio lives a peculiar life. We are not all the time engaged in the direct development of games. Quite often, we only do preliminary work for a game project, and the theater takes up most of our time.

Before serious work with a programmer and sound designer, in addition to two released games and “Vasilisa”, only the project about the Japanese medieval poet and monk Saigyo “Mountain Hut” got to. We started small – the mechanics of writing poetry, but gradually the game grew. There were battles with demons, helping ghosts and a full-fledged story. We realized that we still do not have enough resources, and decided to postpone it until better times.

Is game development your main occupation or more of a hobby, and other work brings income?

We have two main activities: game development and work for the theater. When we get tired of one thing, we do another. In addition, working in two different creative fields helps to find unexpected solutions and moves in both of them.

Why are several of your games dedicated to folk tales and epics?

Fairy tales are an incredibly rich material, it is a pleasure to work with it. When you start reading a fairy tale, interesting gameplay solutions and concepts come to mind on their own. Plus, the theatrical background taught us how to work with ready-made material. The very process of interpreting something that already exists and is well known can be extremely exciting. In the game about One-Eyed Kutkh, we have gone very far from the original fairy tale, but we think we managed to keep its main idea.

Do you create a game engine yourself or use ready-made assets?

Our programmers work on Unity, because this engine is quite suitable for our modest tasks and allows us to easily port the game to any platform.

How difficult was it to switch from your line of work to game design?

At first glance, theater and video games seem quite different, but they actually have a lot in common. The artist in the puppet theater not only invents all the characters (how the puppet is made will determine how it will act), but the whole world around. Not only the visual style, but also the laws of its existence: what is possible and what is not possible in this world. In fact, the director in the theater creates the world from scratch and sets the rules of the game, within which the director and actors will operate. We do the same thing in game development: we create the world, we define the rules.

Do you use third party developers to help you create games?

We come up with an idea for a project, develop its concept, visual style, gameplay, and then look for a team to work on it. We are joined by programmers and sound designers. Everything, except for the code and sound, we do ourselves. The team changes from project to project. We would like to have a permanent team, but life circumstances often interfere with our plans, especially lately.

To work on Vasilisa, we already have a permanent team of 6 people. We were joined by Ksyusha Ponomareva and Alexander Yukhnovets – sound designers, Ekaterina Ryazhskikh – vocalist and narrator, Ilya Filippov – programmer, works with us on part time, his main place of work is LazyBearGames.

Who is designing?

We do almost everything in the project together.

Have there been offers from big studios to sell your intellectual property? Or orders for the creation of games?

We haven’t reached that level yet. All our games are small and, one might say, experimental. And we don’t make custom games.

How much does development cost? Where do you get funds from?

We develop our games on our own, often with funds that theatrical productions bring.

Will you port Vasilisa and Baba Yaga to consoles and smartphones?

Our two previous games were released on consoles, and we hope that everything will work out with Vasilisa as well.

Were you inspired by foreign games? For example, the trailer for Vasilisa and Baba Yaga is similar to the Creepy Tale series.

When we started the development of Vasilisa, we were more inspired by Russian author’s animation, in particular by the Mountain of Gems series. If we talk about games, then it’s more like Valiant Hearts or Machinarium. Games in which the main thing is the atmosphere and the continuous flow of history. We are not very interested in complex gameplay that requires tension from the player, as it can interfere with immersion in the story.

Do you know about Black Book game? It is with a similar theme, only in the RPG genre.

Yes, we know about the Black Book game. We have been following the work of Mortyoshka since the time of the development of the game “Man”. We generally try to follow the indie scene, especially in our country. It is always a pleasure to discover non-trivial author’s projects that differ from the dominant mobile games in Russian game development.

Now we are completely and completely engaged only in Vasilisa. We have periods when we work on several projects at the same time, but this is only at the stage of their pre-production, when we have not yet finally decided how the game will look like, what its gameplay will be based on. There have been too many such periods in recent years, now we have four games at different stages of development. Therefore, we decided to focus on one of the projects and bring it to release.

Will the next game after Vasilisa and Baba Yaga be a game based on Japanese mythology? If not, what will be the next game (if it can be voiced)?

We do not yet know what the next project will be, but if everything works out with Vasilisa, we would like to continue the story with small games based on the scary tales of the indigenous peoples of Russia: the Yakuts, Chuvashs, Komi, and so on. There are so many interesting things, both from the point of view of traditional style and from the point of view of cultural features!

Here is a conversation we had with the developers. I hope that at least a little it was possible to open the curtain of the scenes and show how an interesting story is created within the framework of an indie game. Therefore, I will wait for the release of the game “Vasilisa and Baba Yaga” and play it myself, if possible, even make a review on it. I don’t know how exactly to support the studio’s projects, I didn’t find either Boosty or Patreon in it, even in VK there is no don function, but I suggest supporting by buying two of their released games, or at least watching and liking the trailer for the Vasilisa and Baba game Yaga”. Unless, of course, you are interested in the work of the studio.

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