Oleg Pridyuk: "Defold makes sense to try if you are not satisfied with Unity"

Mobio Talks within the framework of White Nights Moscow 2016, which took place on October 11-12, took several interviews with the speakers of the conference. Today we are publishing a conversation between Mobio Executive Director Sergey Konovalov and Oleg Pridyuk, the chief evangelist of the international company King, which is now engaged not only in the development and publication of games, but also in the development of its Defold engine.

How do you like the White Nights conference? Have you already managed to communicate with some new people or studios?

A lot of new people and old acquaintances. Everyone wants to communicate and do something together. There are a lot of guys here who put the idea and concepts of “giving” and “sharing” into their work, and not “taking”. It inspires me very much.

Judging by your Facebook profile, you are a very active person. What is your personal record for the number of flights per month?

I didn’t even count: my minimum is two flights a week, not counting business trips, because I live in Stockholm and Vilnius at the same time. I recently had my first trip around the world: Stockholm, Barcelona, Vilnius, Istanbul, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, San Francisco, Seattle, Frankfurt, Stockholm, all cities in 21 days. Don’t repeat it.

I don’t feel very much squeezed out from traveling, I rather get tired of the huge amount of work that needs to be done. When I fly somewhere for work, I want to bring maximum benefit to my company, I was hired for this. It turns out that I no longer have an eight-hour working day: I wake up, work, and then go to bed.

Turning to the main topic of our conversation today, tell us what is the Defold Game Engine?

This is the internal technology that King uses for the latest portfolio of its games. For two years it was developed internally, then we decided to share our product with the world absolutely for free, without royalties and any monetization model.

You need to invest in the industry, you need to help both developers and players grow. We instill in the indie community the need to make games that load quickly and run on weak devices, so we increase the audience of users of our products in a natural way. Our games are becoming more competitive compared to the games of other companies that use slower engines, or that are not used to making games according to our philosophy.

You have very well outlined King’s mission to promote Defold.

In fact, we are not moving a game engine, but a certain idea or technology. If you use our technology and you like it, we are ready to encourage, we have certain resources. For example, at the White Nights conference, King does not have a separate stand, but a small King logo is on the stands of indie teams with games that are developed on our engine. We have budgets in marketing and instead of throwing King or Defold logos everywhere, we show everyone games that are made on this engine.
Roughly speaking, we invest marketing budgets in these indie teams, which most often have no money, but only ideas and creativity. If these teams suddenly sign a contract today and earn a million tomorrow, I will shake their hand, we will not ask them for anything from this million.

I fully share the strategy of sharing. When you share, you get a lot more back. Is there any potential benefit? The developers are improving the engine itself, which allows you to make games better.

Yes, there is: I spent September with students in Stockholm, at the computer games school Future Games. For three weeks, 16 game design students made games. Then they demonstrated their games in front of King employees of various levels, including quite high ones. In fact, these students are already solid junior employees, they can be safely connected to work on the company’s projects, they already know our internal technology, and this is a huge competitive advantage and benefit.

And what else are you doing to promote the engine?

According to our philosophy — we do not promote the engine, it should promote itself. Our maximum task is to help games on this engine to be as successful as possible, and this marketing tool seems right to us now.

Can you share how many games have been developed based on Defold this year?

We released Defold to the world in March, that is, seven months have passed, and more than twenty games have been released during this time. Of course, these are small projects, but still the figure shows that people have taken, tried on something small and decided whether they like it or not.

The development of a game, even a very small one, really takes from six to nine months. Immediately seven have passed, and there are already games. But actually, the quantity is not so important. Let it be better to have three or four projects, but which will have a couple, even better, tens of millions of users. The number of players in indie games is the main indicator of the popularity of the engine or technology.

Is it possible to develop games on Defold VR?

What if we talk not about VR, but about augmented reality: the same helmet from Microsoft, for example, you need to make applications on something, some games that interact with the environment, and in this situation, perhaps, the 2D engine will be very in the subject. As soon as it becomes relevant in the market.

Even if we talk about VR, there are a huge number of enthusiasts who are interested in VR in one way or another. If you know how and want to work with this audience, then everything will work out. If you are a small indie team with the appropriate audience, then it is very difficult to do something in VR with Defold or with another engine – the tool is not important, the platform and users themselves are important. Remember the first iPhones, and how, instead of making games that are based on touch and swipe, there were games with buttons, and how uncomfortable it was to use the iphone as a joystick. Then everyone learned, but it took a long time.

You’ve been a tech evangelist for almost four years now: first in Unity, then in Game Insight, now in King. What is your advice to an indie developer? In which case do I need to go and develop a game on Defold? What are the key differences from Unity?

I would like to tell all developers – if you like Unity and everything is fine with you, then don’t look anywhere. So if you look at your game and think you want to try Cocos2d or maybe build your engine on libGDX, then look at Defold, compare performance with Unity and make an informed decision from the point of view of performance and the team. Maybe your team wants to write in C++. It makes sense to try Defold if you are not satisfied with Unity or some other engine for some reason.

Coming from the other side, our engine should be ideal for those who use their engines today. Defold is suitable for teams that know what performance is; they want the game to work quickly and run; they clearly understand what is loaded in memory, how to unload and load, and if cross-platform and HTML5 are important to them. I am not sure that there is a more complete framework for HTML5 today than Defold. If there is, correct me.

I am very impressed with your expert position when you compare your product with competitors and at the same time give their advantages.

In the modern world, when everyone knows everything anyway, any lies and even some omissions can pop up at any moment. If something doesn’t work very well, you need to say that it doesn’t work, or very clearly say that it almost works, but now you don’t need to use it. That is, you need to be as open and honest as possible, because for an indie developer who has the last thousand dollars left, three hungry programmers and an unfinished game, every day of downtime is important. These teams haven’t made their first hit yet, but they’re in the process.

Do you already have ideas for some new large-scale projects?

I believe that the next product with which small and talented teams without strong and deep connections in the industry will be able to earn is micro-games, although there is no accepted name for this in the industry yet. Micro-games are essentially the same little portals, only they work in a chat. People constantly communicate in messengers, if you need to discuss something, you quickly do a chat and that’s it. Now imagine how great it would be to play some toy with your friends right in the chat or in some pop-up window. That is, multiplayer is within walking distance: there is no problem of determining, recognizing where, how and what — players find players themselves and play multiplayer. Micro-games can become an interesting interactivity in the work environment, when you can play in a chat with colleagues, let it be chess or checkers.