Winner’s Circle

This week’s Flash Game Friday winner is Ivan Vs. Mutants by 3d4udovishe!

Ivan Vs. Mutants is a super-cool shooter (emphasis on the cool)!

You are Ivan, and you are surrounded by wintery mutant creatures. You have to take them out to pass each stage. As you progress, new gun types and baddies are introduced. They also get a little harder to kill.

As if blasting mutants weren’t enough, there is also a weapons store. You collect in-game currency and upgrade your weapons and armor so you can survive the stronger enemies.

Ivan Vs. Mutants is a great shooter with good polish, nice physics, deep gameplay, and good weapon variety. Congratulations 3d4udovishe!

Get To Know 3d4udovishe

Tell me about yourself- how many people are on your team? Where are you based?

We are based in the Ukraine, in the city of Kharkov. We are two brothers Denis and Silvester (Vyacheslav in russian) and we make up a developer team named 3d4udovishe. We also run a couple of portals: funnymonster.net & 3D4udovishe.com.

How long have you been making games? What did you do before?

We started developing games when we were in school. At 14 years old I (Denis) wrote code (asm) for a Mortal Kombat clone game for 8-bit zx-spectrum computer. Since it was a clone our only intention was to play it, but not one my friends had a computer better than zx-specturm :(

It was a good experience, though. I finished it with my brother in 1996. After that we tried many times to make something with directx for windows, but we haven’t yet finished a good project.

We used to make video ads and 3d animations for TV to help pay the bills, as well as help us create a little studio in the Ukraine. But game development still had a grip on us and we got back into making games through a referral where we made 3d buildings for a fly simulator game.

In 2007 we got the idea to try Flash, and our first game was “Bubuka vs Grizle: Ice Cream Wars”, which was a fail. :(

But we didn’t stop, and eventually made Armored Fighter. The inspiration for this game came from “Walker”, an old game on Amiga. We decided to make something like this game, but try to somehow make it better- I can’t say whether we accomplished that, but the game continues to be popular today. That was our first successful game. Since then we haven’t had another “fail”. :).

As of today we about 5 years total experience in Flash game development and 4 years experience as game portal owners.

Our developer home page is 3d4udovishe.info, which has all of our fresh projects and announcements. Also all our games possible to download right there.

What was your inspiration for “Ivan vs. Mutants”?

Ivan vs Mutants was powered by the IsoLand engine. The engine was originally made for the game Inglourious Soldiers, which is currently in beta and playable on our portal funnymonster.net.

The idea of the Ivan vs Mutants project was try to make a game very fast and release it in time for the xmas holidays. The basic idea was to just create an arena game that used our IsoLand engine, and has wave-based gameplay with only a few varieties of locations and monsters, but with a premium for Mochi Coins. But as usual our appetite came while we were eating. We ended up being too fancy with this game and development took about 4 months. In the end we created: 16 monsters, 8 locations, and about 24 hours of gameplay. Now we are still thinking about making a premium version.

We wanted to make an animation intro with a story, but our file got too big so maybe we’ll release it on youtube at some point in the future.

Base story is: Ivan is an ex russian army soldier, living in Siberia. One day he sees a very strong light in the sky, and his building is engulfed by a ray of light. After that he woke up on a chair near his table with a bottle of russian drink (siberian hot water ;) . He thinks it was just a dream. When he comes outside he finds alien monsters made from snow, stones, and branches. That is where the gameplay starts.

Did you encounter any major challenges or hurdles during development?

Sometimes we see how groups of people are cheating ratings on big portals, which is disappointing.

Another problem we have is finding good sponsors for our projects. Sometimes we don’t make “typical games” and sponsors don’t understand how the game will play. Distribution is also not a simple thing. But I think these are the same problems as the majority of game developers out there…

What types of games do you like to create the most? What types of games do you like to play the most?

We always make games that we would like to play. Sometimes this is a game from our childhood, but with our vision. We like to experiment with different types of gameplay and game mechanics. Most our games are action games or shooters, but we are open to trying to make a puzzle or something else. All of our games have 3d animated graphics, though sometimes we do pencil art for the game menus.

We are playing almost all new hits on PC, because don’t have Xbox or PS3. Sometimes we play Flash game hits and try to gain some experience from it. As publishers / portal owners we are monitoring all released games every day (30-60 sec per game).

These are some games we particularly enjoy: Witcher 2, NFS – the RUN, Warhammer 40000: March of Chaos, Stronghold 2, Battle Field 2-3, Call of Duty MW2-3, Dead Space 1-2….

How long is your game creation cycle? What is your process?

This always varies, because we work without any bosses so everything is up to us. When we don’t have any problems that take our attention away from game development we can make a good game in about 2-3 months. Usually we make a game skeleton with gameplay and the engine in about 1 month. After that we are just growing details and features to make it playable and polish it up. From idea to a completed game, for example, for Ivan vs Mutants development took about 4 months. The basic engine was done before we got the idea to make this game, but the engine kept growing as we built out more features and optimizations.

We plan to have the next installation of Ivan done in about 1-1.5 months, because we have finished the engine for this game. We don’t need to write additional fundamental code, maybe just simple modifications. We plan to make new monsters, make new weapons, change location to tropics, etc…

Our process of creation is parallel work. We are making code and graphics in parallel processes.

Are there any game developers that you admire or consider “rock stars”?

Of course, first of all Badim, Elite-games.net, gamenode.com (this is good portal and sponsor), armorgames.com (this might be the top level where we want to be, but it is a long way away…). Also many many developers from Russia and Ukraine who are making good games and were at Flashgamm 2011 in Kiev…

What is it about making a new game that you enjoy most?

We want to try our skill in games like: tycoon, many tower defense, good RPG like Diablo, 2.5D Fighting like a Final Fight,  racing, shooter etc…

Do you have any hot projects you’re working on right now?

Our hottest project right now is “Inglourious Soldiers”. This game is finished and has been posted on funnymonster.net (site-locked version). But this game is not released and the future of this game is not clear. Before we were thinking about launching this game to iOS and Android, but we haven’t found a good sponsor for it.

Originally, we wanted to launch a series of these games with one sponsor for Flash. We thought that once we created 6 or more versions, we could make one big game with 100+ levels for mobile. Now we are just making new levels for this game and have 35+ levels. We will decide what to do with it in near future.

Now in progress: Jungle Treasures 3, new Armored Fighter.

Thanks 3d4udovishe, and congratulations again on winning Flash Game Friday!