HeroCraft company: a look at the development of mobile applications from the inside [interview]

"HeroCraft" is a Russian company engaged in the development and publication of games and other software products for mobile phones, which is currently collaborating with our company in the development of games for the new proprietary bada platform. Founded in 2002, today it occupies a prominent place among Russian developers of mobile applications.

Under the habracat you will find interviews with several of its leaders, telling both about the work of HeroCraft as a whole and about their work with Samsung, which provided the company with new development prospects. All questions you are interested in can be asked in the comments, Alexey Sazonov will try to answer them .

Interview participants

Alexey Sazonov - Commercial Director, 30 years.
Pavel Prokonich - CEO and co-founder, 29 years old.
Yuri Keshishev - Head of Porting, 36 years old.
Alexander Similetov - Director of HeroCraft-Ukraine, 28 years old.
Dmitry Bezugly - project manager, 25 years.

My questions will be highlighted in bold and italics , the answers will be given in plain text, and my comments on the answers in normal italics . All questions are answered by Alexey Sazonov, unless this is noted separately.

Interview

How was your company founded?

Answers Pavel Prokonich, CEO and co-founder of HeroCraft:

It happened in 2002. Five students, with minimal capital (mainly for computers), decided to organize their own business. In short, it was a rare successful case of a garage startup with an initial capital of $ 20,000. The money was made by the founder of the company Andrei Petrov, he released the game for handhelds at the right time, we spent the first year selling from this game. The office was rented in the barracks converted into an apartment, two angry Staffordshire terriers lived in the kitchen. Now Andrey is working on a new startup, has substantial funding, but staffords continue to live in his office and bring him good luck.

What do you have at the moment? What are the achievements, what are the plans?

The most recent achievement is our Android version of Farm Frenzy, which was nominated for a very prestigious award at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Mobile World Congress is the largest congress and exhibition on the topic of mobile devices, held annually.

The game is also in the TOP Android Market ( link ) and Nokia OVI.

Another achievement: Mobile game publisher # 1 in a Q1-2009 quality chart - took first place in the composite review index according to the reputable PocketGamer resource.

As for the growth of the company itself, over the past four years we have grown from about 40 people to 80, the game portfolio has increased from 30 to 100, about 20 are in development. At that time, most games were J2ME, some of the versions were already on Symbian, Windows Mobile, old Palm, a little BREW. Of course, then games for the iPhone were added. So far, we have not abandoned J2ME (although many companies have either greatly reduced their work in this direction, or altogether stopped supporting their applications on this platform), but we have strongly switched to Android - we currently have 15 games on this platform.

Of the new - 3 almost ready-made projects for Bada (two of which with Samsung’s direct participation - got into the partial financing program), and we’ll do a couple more games, as we want to try our hand at the Bada Challenge with a prize pool of $ 2.7 million :)

It is important that at that moment we established international sales - at different times we had up to hundreds of active affiliate accounts: content providers, portals and the like; now the emphasis is shifting to upshops that grow like mushrooms.

Although it is even more important that we established work with copyright holders and licensed IP (brands) - in those days it was impossible without it, and now it is also important. “Crimsonland”, “Postal: Babes”, “Majesty”, we release the first projects with “KranX” and “Alawar”, here, again, I will especially note the “Farm Frenzy”, with which the Android Marketplace and Nokia OVI TOPs were torn. In general, our company's products are officially recognized by the Top App on Nokia OVI. And this despite the fact that only one port was sold (group N97 / 5800), other devices were added recently.

They also made games under the largest Russian-language licenses - here you can note the “Field of Miracles” and “Daddy's Daughters” (they also made a PC game on it, and also occupied first places on the corresponding sites).

We already wrote about the event mentioned above: Competition for developers on the bada platform.

As far as I know, your team is dispersed in different cities. It's right? How does collaboration work?

We have units in St. Petersburg, Donetsk, Krasnodar, but most of our team is still located in Kaliningrad, which is about 40 people. But it happens that the whole project, for example, in Kaliningrad, and the artist (ours, not the outsourcer) is in St. Petersburg.

Or, for example, it’s a common thing - some small remote team programs, draws, and after that porting to a large number of devices, with localization and other functionality, is done here in Kaliningrad. Well, if the team is remote, and some kind of interaction is required (for example, the game designer is here, and the rest are there), then overlays may occur if there is no constant contact, active work of the project manager and so on. These are all working moments, we try to solve them as problems arise.

Many companies, for example, outsource testing or even testing along with porting. In fact, not even a month passes so that we do not receive an offer from any developers in porting or testing our product :)

But the key to quality and successful work, when you can quickly respond to bug reports from partners, is still your own porting / testing department.

How, with what is the remote work of offices? What own know-how, what software?

Answers Dmitry Bezugly, project manager:

A lot of communication on projects (icq, skype), during which certain issues are clarified. We drop everything into a common pile. Then we work iterations. We select pieces of projects with which we will work in a short period of time (about 2 weeks), and implement them. Previously used for this Mantis, but now we plan to abandon it and switch to a bunch of Jira + GreenHopper (it seems more user friendly to us). Ah, yes, every office has its own lead, we communicate mostly with it, so as not to be torn.

How are things with hiring employees? I think, users of Habr will be especially interested in this question.

Answers Pavel Prokonich, CEO and co-founder of HeroCraft:

We work with a large number of small teams, finance promising projects. Everyone is always welcome. As for full-time employees - nothing special, we are looking for familiar, local bulletin boards, vshtate.ru. Freelancers and remote employees - sometimes it happens.

Thanks, thanks. What about outsourcing?

Outsourcing minimum. It happens, for example, the posters for the game (aka splash) are drawn by the outsourcer. In addition to its own developments, over the years it has also formed a pool of developers close to us. As a publisher, we sometimes help to prepare a game for foreign sales (by the way, games are now released with at least 8 localization languages), we often port them, and so on. We can say that we help domestic talents to meet a foreign player.

Wow, great. Can you give me more details?

There are no special developments in this kind of work, although there are plenty of volumes in this direction. Imagine that some young successful team with a project comes to us. If the game is worthwhile, then we help them refine the game to the foreign market, in one direction or another: make a “story” (campaign), balance gameplay, in general, as I said above - help domestic talents show themselves in the best possible way in the world the market.

How wide is the support of devices at the moment, because you are a player in the global market?

Well, that would be too bold a statement. Yes, we are a major player in this market, but no more.

Yuri Keshishev, Head of Porting:

Our database contains information about almost 3000 phones, among them there are phones that we never supported, but, nevertheless, we know about their existence. In active support, we have a little less than 1,500 phones grouped into 75 groups. We constantly monitor the emergence of new models and the departure of models from sales, which leads to the emergence of new groups and the removal of obsolete ones.

We try to buy key, group-forming devices, so that each of our group has at least one telephone available. Most often we buy in our city, sometimes you have to order phones abroad. As a result, we have about 150 telephones available, the oldest telephones have been torn to pieces by the younger generation. In active use, we have about 70 phones.

In addition, we use the services of paid remote access to DeviceAnywhere phones, as well as free remote access to phones from Nokia.

What about platforms?

Now the main platforms are J2ME (including Blackberry) and Android, from which we expect that it will naturally gradually supplant Java. This is what we are witnessing now, as many J2ME partners include Android in support one by one. probably, the platform from Google will save the withering business of traditional content providers, operator portals and the like.

Plus, we port our best games to iPhone (and also announced one game on iPad), bada, Symbian and Windows Mobile. The last two are currently losing points, but this is rather a natural process, due to the expansion of the market.

Are developers somehow divided into teams, according to one or another sign?

No, Android is the same people as J2ME.

What is the current situation with Andorid?

This is a rather voluminous question. At the moment, not everyone understands that, firstly, the light did not meet on the Android Marketplace - there were a lot of channels for implementing Android games. Unlike Apple's app, sales are not held there by any means. And android games are already sold on the same channels as J2ME (i.e., Andorid will gradually supplant J2ME), that is, right now so that an independent developer can properly sell the game for this platform - he can’t do without a publisher or intermediaries. Of course, you can still make a brilliant game, promote it at all angles - and get into the TOP10 - then there will also be great money, but this is until the big publishers fully occupy the top. And all of them have already announced an increase in the number of developments for this platform.

What are your plans for our bada platform?

Two or three games under Bad should be released this summer. These are our “Farm”, already mentioned above, “Field of miracles and together with the Korean partner - futuristic races with“ Mochilov ”.

What can you say good and bad about us? Only honestly :)

In general, we are very grateful to Samsung, they are really very attentive to the developers, and let us into very interesting projects. There are no negative impressions. The only thing I want is more openness and flexibility in the ups, but this is such a claim to everyone. Some manufacturers do not even do this, and so - a parody of some kind on upshops. Samsung themselves found us at one time, offered to participate in all kinds of programs, helped with contacts, and most importantly, made it possible to earn money. But sometimes such companies breed wild activity, but somehow forget about the most important thing - we really want to be able to make money.

Also, such opportunities as preloading games and demos, meetings and seminars around the world are encouraging - all this is welcome, the company really tries to attract developers and give them the opportunity to earn money.

As for development tools by platform - is there any specifics? What kind of SDK, what is it like?

Answers Yuri Keshishev, head of the porting department:

With its current success, the company owes a lot to the right decisions in choosing the tools and technology development directions adopted at the very beginning of its development. As a result, the company currently has a set of tools that includes both publicly available applications and proprietary programs integrated into a single software package.

The games are developed and ported using the Eclipse IDE, the ProGuard obfuscator and the SDK provided by phone manufacturers. Additional plugins have been developed for Eclipse that speed up and facilitate the development and porting of games and applications. Graphics are created in Adobe Photoshop. HeroTool, a proprietary program, is used to create animations, maps, and font sets.

To control source and resource versions, SVN is used, which has recently begun to be gradually replaced by Mercurial and Git. To configure and store information about projects, partners and groups of phones HeroBase is used, a database based on MS Access, which allows the entire team involved in the project to work simultaneously on the project: programmers, testers, managers.

Integration with Microsoft Word / Excel and OpenOffice Writer / Calc allows you to create various reporting documentation for working with external development teams and customers. The database includes tools to accompany the game throughout its entire life cycle - export / import of game texts to add localizations, add new ports, customization according to customers' requirements, test results, etc.

The subject of our special pride is the JMBuilder program, which allows you to make a commercial product from a ported game - a game in a specific localization, customized to the requirements of a specific content provider. The program has its own scripting language that allows you to write almost complete programs with loops and conditional statements, has a friendly user interface and the ability to interact with databases and spreadsheets. In the HeroBase database, it has the ability to call JMBuilder directly on the forms of working with projects, content providers and groups of phones, JMBuilder, in turn, collects games by reading data from the HeroBase database.

The company pays great attention to the development of tools, so all of the listed programs and plugins continue to develop, new features and functions are added, support for new platforms.

Answers Alexander Similetov, Director of HeroCraft-Ukraine:

For smarts, we have developed our own SDK - it works on Symbian, Windows Mobile, iPhone, Bada, mobile Linux (previously Palm OS was supported), Windows XP / Vista / 7. There is a version in both C ++ and C # for microsoft XNA.

We transfer it to everything where you can write in C ++. Our SDK is written so as to significantly simplify the transfer of games from Java to C ++ in semi-automatic mode. Of the chips - sound with 3D effects, graphics output both in compatible software mode and through the accelerator. Own 3d engine, 2d, GUI engine.

Post scriptum

We will end here today, but soon one of the company's specialists expressed a desire to write a separate article on Samsung bada - we hope that this material will find its reader.

I would also like to express my gratitude to Alexei and his colleagues for their help in proofreading the article for factual and other errors - the topic for me personally is new.