Login to IT and what’s next?

Login to IT and what's next?
Login to IT and what’s next?

Good afternoon, my name is Alexey, I am developing games and applications.

I’ll tell you about myself and gradually try to bring to the final thought.

Back in school, I loved to tinker with pieces of iron, solder and program. Due to the fact that in the late 80s and early 90s there were practically no computer games, we wrote games in order to play them ourselves. We made games with my cousin on basic under PC-01-Lviv. In total, we made about 15 pieces, cassettes with them, unfortunately, have not been preserved. In the future, I wanted to make more advanced games, so I had to start learning assembler.

The Internet has not yet appeared in Russia, and it was almost impossible to buy a book on programming in the regional city of the Rostov region. Therefore, after a long search, we were able to write out a brochure on assembler by mail. It contained a description of some system subroutines of the processor. After studying it, it turned out to independently write a simple game with graphics and a static level in assembler. Next, I wanted to do something more serious, with moving levels. Unfortunately, not having sufficient knowledge and speed of the machine, the level moved very slowly. Back then we were moving every picture on the screen instead of moving data inside the graphics memory, we didn’t know how to do it better, because we were only 12-13 years old.

The disappointment from the result knew no bounds. Later I found out that there is a more powerful machine Vector, which theoretically could solve our problems with the movement of the level. In one of the commercial stalls in our city, this device was just being sold, which it was decided to buy. Having begged money from my parents and sold my old computer, I joyfully rushed to the trailer to buy a new one. But the plans were not destined to come true, the nineties were on. Last night, the stall was blown up with a live grenade, along with a computer that I wanted to buy.

nineties
nineties

The lack of an opportunity to buy a computer somewhere else and hyperinflation led to the fact that I was left without a computer at all. I often reassured myself with the phrase: “It’s okay, you don’t need to write anything anyway, everything is written. There are graphic and music editors, there are text editors. And only schoolchildren play games.”

After some time, I went to a technical school to become an electrician, since it was not interesting to study at school. In the new educational institution there were computers at the lessons of informatics BC with disk drive! You could program something on these computers if you asked very well. At that time, the computer science teacher could not teach me anything, but on the contrary, she studied with me. But her life experience allowed her to involve the student in automation. I wrote a program for passing tests on a PC with printing results on dot matrix printer. On this, my programming stopped until the end of the technical school, and some students began to hate me for this program.

The lack of desire to go as cannon fodder to the “Chechen” war pushed me to the railway institute (RGUPS), where there was a 100% opportunity to study for all five years, since there was a military department. He entered the faculty where the level of training of a guy from the province allowed.

For all the time of training, I returned to programming only a couple of times, to calculate term papers for ZX Spectrum for all options to help friends.

Further, graduation from the institute, work related to the railway rolling stock, family, child. The craving for computers and programming still remained. Soon, at work, I met an artist who really wanted to make games. He could draw well, but he couldn’t program. So I decided to allocate money from the family budget to buy a computer and start making a game with it. But where to begin was not clear. Progress has gone ahead. So I started learning Pascal and C++.

Then I got the first Siemens SX1 smartphone, for which I began to try to write various programs: firmware and software for a computer on Delphi, programs under Symbian OS in C++.

More and more, I realized that I was doing the wrong thing at my main job. I tried to get a second higher economic education in order to keep my brains in good shape. And in addition, he was engaged in a small scientific activity. The realization that the specialties I have chosen are erroneous, do not bring me satisfaction and I need to somehow “enter IT”, came only after the end of the second higher education. As a result, I entered the third, already connected with IT. After that, I began timid attempts to completely change my specialty. Ultimately, the attempts were successful. However, there was one big minus, I had to curtail all my projects, because after moving to the “non-rubber” one, there was absolutely no time left for them.

Since then I have been working in IT for more than 10 years. It would seem, what else do you need?

what else do you need?
what else do you need?

However, as many often write, I did not have euphoria about this. Even after entering IT, after a couple of years, the idea that I was doing “mouse fuss” began to peck at me. And my own projects, which I stopped supporting, died completely. All this led to great annoyance. I often thought: “So I entered IT, what’s next? Looking for a dream job?” I did not understand what it was like, a dream job and where to work. In addition, the mortgage and the family do not encourage you to search for yourself and change jobs frequently.

In 2012, having received a Dev Alpha A device at BlackBerry 10 Jam Moscow, I again tried to write something for mobile devices. For me it turned out to be quite interesting. This was the beginning of my new hobby – creating applications for Blackberry 10.

After releasing a few simple applications, the understanding came that doing something well alone would not work. You need to divide the work and do what you can do a little better than the rest. So I managed to find a person who can draw, and then who can write music. We came up with a name for ourselves and started working together. Having released our first game, we were very proud of the work done, but, unfortunately, we could not show it to almost anyone. There were very few users of devices with Blackberry 10 in Russia, and the foreign audience did not particularly worry us at that time.

Then one member of our team was unable to work on projects anymore. Left alone, we decided that we would make the next game for several platforms at once. So we began to study how to achieve the goal. At that time, the choice was from two game engines known to us cocos2d-x and unity. For some reason, then we decided that we would not pull the creation of three-dimensional games and opted for coconut.

Thus began work on our new project. It went on for about 9 months. The game was made for the “fan”, so that it would be interesting to play it for us and other players. There are absolutely no ads or in-app purchases.

Blackberry users and administration reacted positively to our game. We got into a feature with her several times. Several overseas Blackberry bloggers have asked for permission to do reviews. Everything went very well. And then we published it for Android and iOS….

Then, we realized with horror that without promotion, hardly anyone would see the game. To do this, they took part in several competitions and conferences, ordered several articles and reviews.

it never happened
it never happened

All this did not bring the desired result in terms of downloads. To our regret, we had to spend our own funds in order for our game to be simply seen by mobile device players. And it was a disaster. We didn’t plan to make money from it.

Then we had to accept the conditions of the market, and release several games and applications with ads inside. We didn’t have budgets, so we tried to make small games to raise some funds. We created small projects and hyper casual games. It wasn’t a trend back then.

We had a goal to release a collectible card game, for the graphics for which we planned to spend the money we earned. However, the funds were not enough, and it was decided to do all the content on their own. We spent four years on this project, only occasionally giving ourselves a break by releasing a small game or application. During the work on the project, we independently wrote a multiplayer for it, a backup server, a statistics server and a store with the ability to pay with bank cards through the service Robokassa. This had to be done because at that time, the Blackberry payment service no longer existed. And the platform itself was preparing to close. We needed monetization in order to pay for the hosting on which the server parts of the game are located.

The game is currently available in the Blackberry, Amazon, Apple and Huawei app stores. At the end of this project, I began to gradually form an understanding regarding the phrase “enter IT and what’s next?”.

The quality of our projects was increasing, so there was no doubt that we needed to continue to deal with games, the existing team. Moreover, this must be done on an ongoing basis, and not on weekends and in the evenings. As a casual game developer, we can’t compete with full-time game developers. So we came to the conclusion that we need to further develop our startup.

We thought how to break even?

Experience has shown that making small games with ads inside, in our case, is futile. In addition, we did not want to go over to the dark side of the force and constantly slip ads to players.

We decided that we should try to make a business solution focused on organizations. This will help us earn money for a living in order to make more serious game projects in the future.

Thanks to the use of cocos2d-x, we can create not only games, but also client-server applications for various platforms. So one developer, as they wrote here, “grandfather 40+” and an artist, created two years ago meeting room booking system. The system has been registered register of Russian software and is used by several companies. It was a little unpleasant for me to read an article about “grandfathers”. I am sure that in 20 years time will put everything in its place. Therefore, I just want to draw your attention to the fact that the necessary documentation for registering the system and selling licenses (user and administrator manuals, contracts, invoices, business correspondence, etc., etc.) was done by the developer – “grandfather 40+” in the evenings, in breaks between the finalization of the system and the development of a new game.

grandfather 40 years old
grandfather 40 years old

Of course, the created product is highly specialized, so it is difficult to find new customers for it. But in any case, we made the right decision. At this stage, the sale of licenses allowed my colleague Andrey to leave his main job and devote more time to creativity and our projects.

Despite the fact that our startup has created more than 20 games and applications, we are still at the very beginning of the journey. We cannot compete with major game developers in terms of the scale and quality of content. We will not be able to do this in the next few years. We still have not reached a level of income sufficient for a full-fledged work.

For the last year and a half, we have been developing a game project for PC. In this article I wrote about our experience of working on the game. I am sure that the project will allow us to solve the problem of financing a startup.

In conclusion, summing up the article, I want to note. In my opinion, absolutely anyone can get into IT, the main thing is to set a goal. The only difference will be how long it will take to achieve this goal.

However, then a question arises. What’s next?

On my personal example, it turns out that “not only everyone” knows this. It took me quite a long time to realize that my high school passion for creating games is what I need to strive for and develop. I absolutely love making games, even though I’ve grown out of my school age a long time ago. When I write code for the next game, I get great pleasure from the process and can forget that I want to eat, sleep or go to the toilet.

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