Vladoft

Hello there!

This is Vlad from Vladoft. Vladoft is a small indie game development studio, which currently employs one person - me. I always liked games and gaming, I played PC games my whole childhood. Then something happened...I lost a portion of the interest in the games! I said to myself: "This is not possible! It cant be real!" It was real. But I am not the kind of person, who gives up easily. I investigated, what should be the problem. Then I found it. I simply evolved. Achieved another level. New rank. My role changed from player to developer.As I was gaining more and more experience, the "quests" started to be sort of boring. I needed new challenges. Gaming was simply not enough, but nothing else could satisfy my needs. I wanted to create my first game. I wanted it so much... But ideas do not come every day. So I waited and waited... Then finally, the idea suddenly struck me. Actually I was sitting on the toiled, when the picture of a small game came out (beside other things).

This was the birth of the Apocalys - my very first game (not very noble, but it was something). I was inspired from small flash game, where the player had to launch the rocket, which flew between planets with the gravity fields and the goal was to hit the astronaut. I liked the idea and it seemed very easy to implement it in Unity. So I started the development. It was very slow, since I had to learn to work with Unity first. So it took me more than month to make the first game prototype. When it was ready, I added more game mechanisms, that weren't included in the original flash game. After adding the textures, tweaking the graphics and a lot of experimenting with the physics, the game was almost ready. It looked beautiful. I only needed to design the levels. This was the hardest part. Actually this was the part, which almost frustrated me enough to give up the development. I had a lot of game mechanisms, but the fact that every level must be won by one shot was very limiting. It seemed that my inspiration in the simple flash game was too deep. I hardly managed to finish 20 levels and released the game on Google Play. On my surprise, the game did quite well. It had a lot of haters but bigger number of fans, which praised me for the game and demanded more levels. I had to disappoint them, because I was already working on my next game.

The second one is called Onager (not the donkey, but the Romanian siege weapon). This game is more complex, longer and more fun. Despite that, it took me half the time to finish it than the Apocalys. The limiting factor of this game is the poor performance of the android devices. I had to make compromises. Better physics means worse graphics. I chose better physics, because it was the key of a whole game play. The graphics had to be made minimalistic. So I created some shapes, paint them with some colors and it was done. I wrapped this style into short story about the planet of cubes and evil alien cones. I also managed to direct a small rendered intro. I am still very proud of it.

And again – the game had a lot of downloads, good reviews and the most important – fewer haters. This is the most beautiful thing that can game developer experience (beside the millions of dollars earned, which is not my case). I encourage everyone from you, who is developing his first game – finish it and release it. It will be almost like having a newborn baby (since I have no children, let’s say a new kitten). I also experimented with ports to the other platforms. Actually I am experimenting till now.





So this is the beginning of my story. I will write more about my current work in the future and I promise that it will be more fun. Let it be the inspiration for other players, which achieved the new rank - game developers.

PS: sorry for my funny English. I presume, it will get better in some time :)