Hypernova Studio Tour - Building Mobile GTA for India (A Game Dev Story)

he [Music] [Music] hey everybody Joseph Kim from Leela games I am here in front of hypernova interactive Studio this is a studio that has been in business for the last s years and have actually developed 52 games they are currently working on a big new GTA light game for India but we're going to go check out the studio meet the people and see what they

actually do here at hypernova come with me all right we're hey guys hello may how's it going guys doing great yeah please well these are the two co-founders this is this is May Hua from hypernova interactive how you guys doing is it okay for us to is it is it okay for us to come and check out the studio why not all right well let's uh sit down for a second first of all thanks so much for allowing me to come visit your studio it's great to be here I thought we could first start just by having you guys tell us about you've got a great Studio here but like one of the things I learned about you guys is that you guys have been in business for seven years and eight years sorry eight years and have

worked on 52 games right so that's a long time long experience if we walk back to the very beginning you don't have to go in too much super detail but like how did you guys meet and why did you guys start the studio sure take the first shot um for me it was like my father taught me how to code and when I had my own computer I started modding games on it and soon enough I realized that I was less interested in my books and more interested in making things and that's kind of how I became like a home RW coder so to speak yeah and when I was in my 10th grade I I ran into mayure at a cyber cafe and he was playing walk craft and I was playing Age of Mythology wow so this goes back to your childhood you guys met way early on okay and this is in a small town it's a tier 2 tier three city called aola and it had only one internet cafe with with with at at that time a highp speed internet of like

256 kbps right so we would all go over there after our tuitions and stuff and that's where I ran into him and I asked him hey which game are you playing and he's like hey this is this is dota and on Warcraft and that's kind of how we met okay and May and that's sort of what our starting point for hypernova also was where we first saw the iPad in 2010 2011 I think and zepa bought the first gen one and we playing around with it and he was like there should be DOTA on this and after that we went on to our professional lives I joined singer he did something else with hike and bunch of other independent stuff but in 2015 there was still no DOTA for mobile so to speak right like there's no multiplayer online battle arena games mobile games on mobile nothing existed at that point and that's when we thought

hey we can take a shot at this we were two very young very ambitious guys completely under the spell of ding Krueger effect where we don't know the scope and complexity of the problem we were undertaking uh but we have all the confidence in the world that we can solve that problem and that's how we started uh and obviously we didn't make a MOA because it would have then been built but we've found quite a few twist and turns along the way we we actually spent the first 6 months of the company's life actually trying to develop a MOA okay yeah and so you guys kept in touch and then at some point in your career when you were at Zinga you're like ah I kind of feel like doing something we also did a postgraduation together okay yeah okay in game design and games production right right so you guys were still fairly tightly connected and then at some point you both felt like this is the right time now when you guys actually got started how did you guys actually start you know this

company in terms from a funding perspective did you guys bootstrap it did you guys get like friends and family or how did you guys actually get like the money to kind of start so largely bootstrap and some from friends and family okay so we both had some savings built up from our cozy jobs for 5 years that we we we spent in corporate life and we realized hey uh we can take a shot here and that's where we started with a very small team as well we just apart from the two of us there's just three other guys in a small room that wasn't bigger than our bathroom right now right so so you started with you two guys you found three other guys you had some personal savings got friends and family a little bit and then you guys just kind of got started on this path to 52 more games in the future after you started yeah yeah that's great and then what about this office here at what point did it make sense to get this office and we're here in HSR layout for

our audience but when did this happen and then why HSR layout we were talking earlier about I I'm still questioning why we're in IND and agar when it's so expensive but like maybe you guys could talk about this studio and the decision to come here HSR layout was sort of like the starting point for both it was like a midpoint for both of us may lived somewhere and I lived towards the other side so it was a very good place for both of us and HSR is kind of like cor mangla kind of like Indra nagar but not not as expensive and another fun fact is that HSR layout has the most amount of game gaming Studios per square feet true not back in the day when we started but I think that's part of the reason why we just chose HSR it's a self- sustaining ecosystem you don't have to fight the traffic outside on the main roads or anything if you live in HSR layout your offic is in HSR layout you'll probably live most of your life over here and my we didn't interview before and we talked

about mayanagri and I'm wondering if you guys could give us a quick update in terms of where we are or where you are as far as a launch in in the current status update for for the game right so the game's not out yet obviously but we are doing some more previews with our community where they get their hands on the game give us feedback and we improve on it the game will come out when it's ready and we are working very hard on that so we don't have a date we are announcing on that yet but we releasing our first song of the game this week it's going to come out on more than 200 different music streaming platforms as well as we are releasing I think we are one of the first studios in the country to release an actual music video for a game that they are releasing uh and especially with the fact that the game is in Hindi the song's going to be in Hindi um so we're bringing a little bit of the

Bollywood Glamour and Magic to the games industry as well great so the current Studio could you for the people in our audience who are curious about the kind of roles and the way that studios are generally set up tell me about the organization how is it structured in terms of whether it's art design engineering all that kind of stuff it'd be great to hear from you how you guys are structured so right now our team is built largely as a development team rather than a full stack game Studio where we have like a publishing QA custom support bunch of bits that we need around distribution so some of those pieces are missing we've just trying to we've just started to hire on that front 6 months back we did our first product hire we did our first Community hire but we're still largely structured as development team because our games a very long gestation cycle game game and we need to spend more time

developing and resources developing the game right now rather than putting it out there but as we are ramping up talking about the game more publicly we thinking more and more about distribution right now uh but the way it's split up is that we have roughly about six Engineers about 13 artists including 2D 3D animation concept all that and we have about nine game design designers most of them can write code themselves oh wow so they are half Engineers half designers and everybody's works on the game engine directly M and rest of the folks then are split into QA project management operations and obviously then there's the two of us great I'd love to go and talk to some of those folks but before we jump over there the one other question I wanted to ask you guys is in terms of company culture and how you guys have established your studio here Myer coming

from Zinga Anda you Haven come from hike could you like talk about your company culture here and then maybe you can compare and contrast to your previous experience right so the Zinga that I used to work in back in the day was largely an operational unit rather than an IP creation unit where a game gets created elsewhere and then is handed over to the studio that I used to work at to operate I I'm being told today's Zing is very different they're building a whole bunch of new IP stuff so so that's great for them but at that point when you're looking at just running a game versus building a game from the ground up you have to think very differently because you're facing a blank page you're not you don't already have color by numbers and the numbers are written for you and you just have to color them so it's been a very different mindset and one of of the key things

that we've thought about from Day Zero is that we need to be driven like a knowledge driven knowledge economy company right where our factories are our minds and we need to nurture and grow them and that's the most important thing for us so we have three things that we try and follow at you know very broad level one is we don't hire anybody who is not a gaming consumer thems eles and a consumate consumer at that um so that's the first step in our hiring process you can't talk about your favorite game for at least a couple of hours we won't even interview you okay that's like you want to work in the movies and you don't know who Martin coresi or Raja Moi or anura Kap is so we try and follow that and then we pair it up with a thought process that what we are building is a marathon uh it's not a Sprint that you are going to build a game in 3

months or 6 months or 9 months it's going to take years for you to be built an open world game so you can't treat it like a Sprint you have to treat it like a marathon so we try to say yes wherever we can and we try to be human as much as we can because we're still a pretty small team I'm sensing work life balance is part sure okay because our whole thing is that work life balance is important yes output is also important yes but when you're working on one project for 5 years and carrying the context from the first year to the fourth year and the fifth year the value of us being able to retain that context is much higher than that extra 10 15% productivity okay so that's how we think about it as for us like people from hike I think hike was pretty much Zinga 2.0 because most of the founding members were from Zinga the only difference was unlike an operational unit we had to do a lot of Ip creation and uh not just any

IP creation we were the first studio in the country that was making something specifically for India so a lot of that knowledge research and context is what is helping us build myre today but and on on the point of work life balance I would actually want to correct it in a way that we are more about work life counterbalance there's nothing called a work life balance there's work life counterbalance so there will be a few days where you have very strong intense bursts of work but there might be some really slow days so it has to level out an average that's kind of how we look at it so you never want to burn out your team and as far as hiring is concerned we we really believe that uh a lot of companies have very very different cultures and something that is that I have seen when I interview people is a lot of people actually end up getting scarred by the practices of some some employe who was a little bit too

harsh with them maybe or expected too much and that ends up as baggage and that ends up lead being bad for productivity for them so what has worked best for us is actually hiring people for whom it is their first job with us we get to Define what is a job to them right and that has that has worked wonders so what the way we have structured our team is that we have some really really experienced senior people who are like the Shepherds and then we have people who are extremely talented these are young young men and women who are very very talented who want to make a difference right but they're Guided by the people who are who are senior to them and I think that is a model that has worked extremely well for us our average age is around 24 25 oo that's a young company wow all right can we meet some of these guys yeah all right let's go right

thanks all right should we start with design yeah ler all right so you have nine designers who's your best designer no I'm just kidding should we talk to so this is our design me okay as you can see a lot of them on are on the leave today with the long weekend um this is Rik um nimish Anushka okay um and they're all part of our Design Team all right so can one of you guys speak into this mic and maybe just talk about as a design team what do you guys do what's your day-to-day what kind of tools do you use this is basically for the audience who wants to understand what does a designer do here at hypernova you're not a designer okay one of you guys you yes come up come up okay so what are you doing on a daily basis what does it mean to be a game designer here at hypernova I been m it's first thing is understanding the

requirement for the game okay and which takes a lot of research so primary goal as a designer is to be well vered with the industry and yeah and the requirements that as in the researching what is exactly required for what we are building the product that we are building basically yeah and what are you guys doing on a day-to-day basis what does that look like for our audience who wants who who maybe considering being a game designer but they want to know more about it on a day-to-day basis what are you doing so we do have like our feature board and everything so we kind of like brainstorm with each other and see what the game really requires what features do we require and we have like a brainstorm session where everyone discusses about the topic and we create like documents like a one page designs yes like design specs gdds one pages and then we start building it up with our developers so we start implementing it actually in the game okay so yeah great

what do you like about game design why should someone become a game designer I mean for me it's mostly I like problem solving okay so like logic puzzles and all and design if you see is kind of like problem solving where okay you have a problem now and you need to solve because designing is not about like getting ideas like anyone can get ideas but filtering through ideas and seeing what works and what doesn't cu the job of a designer basically all right great thank you very much let's move on to Art yeah maybe artist in the house hello hey how's it going and what's up guys who can tell me what do you guys do on a day-to-day basis what what what is what is it like to be an artist here at hypernova right go for it talking to this mic all right cool so being an artist is we have different departments

over here we have concept art right here and a 3D team and there's an animation team right down there so day today we have inter departmental communication finding out what needs to be done what goes into the game all of us are well versed in each other's departments and so the concept team gives Concepts to the 3D team 3D team gives it to the animation goes into the game and by the end of the day or end of the week we can see what's going on right so and maybe can you touch upon so for the people in the audience who are thinking about becoming potentially an artist you mention different kinds of artists right concept 3D can can you kind of break down like the high level of what what what the different kinds of artists are all right so so when a project starts if you're starting like a action game or MMO or whatever it starts off with an idea that goes to the concept artist who who drafts out uh these concept art pieces or ideas and designs that gives

the project Vision so that everyone can come together in the same space and once that's done a lot of different things come out of it like how the animations look like how the how the 3D art how the environment looks like so the 3D team takes all of those and creates the actual assets that go inside the game and finally the designers and the programmers they they combine everything to see the game that you see in front of you great what about you guys what are you guys doing day-to-day why do you like being an artist here at hypernova yeah first thing is like I am creative uh right from my childhood so like this is how like I realize like I'm I'll be a good artist actually okay so yeah I joined Zinga then I joined hike then I came here actually working here is like a freedom uh like you don't have you don't hold any barrier it's like no you you go uh as as creative as you are

like and uh the concept team like he said uh it's some more of like brainstorming here but a creative brainstorming we have a like very happy debate over here over the art game art and everything and my particular role is like what each individual artist has to do the task and like we discuss over there in a broad plan like we set up production Pipeline and we like know this these are the art requirement and like now who's going to be doing what and what is the timeline need to be set up mainly like production think I look into it okay anything to add Akash is our newest member to the newest member yeah so hi I'm a 3D artist like for production art in the studio so for me my situation is kind of unique I'm not a formally trained artist okay like everything I've done is self-studied so what I do what I love doing when I come

here is basically the freedom I get in the sense where my day starts with opening up art station talking to the other artists and actually getting Insight on things which are happening in the industry what makes a good 3D artist what is it take to be good at 3D [Music] art being what's the word like now that you said it I can't think of the word but like regularly every hour every day giving at least 2 three hours being regular being punctual with practice practice okay got it all right thank you very much guys art team at hypernova and moving on to the engineers the guys that get it done they get the stuff into the build who do we have here all right okay can one of you guys tell me engineering here at hypernova what are you guys doing on on a day-to-day basis what does it look

like to be an engineer here anyone want to take a crack at explaining what you guys do yeah sure so we go please talk into the mic yes so on a day-to-day basis we generally keep it like a team activity okay whenever it's a new feature we generally first assign it to one person to take in charge of that feature that person comes up with the architecture on how it has to be set up and it is shared with the whole Dev team and we get feedback from everyone on how it can be improved and uh then the development on that feature begins okay how much time are you spending coding versus meetings versus talking to other people stuff like that so yeah generally it's more of a collaborative process with the design team okay but yeah most of our time is spent on the actual coding some of us get engaged in meetings on and off okay and can someone maybe someone else can talk about how is the engineering team structured is it all client side do you guys have a certain specialization or is it are you

guys all just kind of full stack or how how does that work do you want to talk okay here you go well we do everyone brings in some specialization or the other but the project or whatever the task we have at hand yeah it either comes in two form factors it comes with the requirement of that specialized hand right in which case we would probably try to delegate that task on that one individual or he or she can lead the the the the production part yeah and then there are times when it's a learning curve like we all also try to learn at the same time there'll be new challenges there'll be unknown or unexpected ways mhm so that's I believe that's where we as as he said it's a collaborative effort okay when you come together as a team one person's learning is equal to everyone's learning I see great well and maybe you can tell me who is the best engineer at hypernova if I were to say I'll say is the best

okay who's the best looking engineer ever that's difficult to say okay that you'll have to decide okay and what do you think what does it take to become a good engineer if somebody wanted to become an engineer at a games company what would they have to do what should they be doing now to prepare to come to a company like hypernova uh so first you'll have to very good at basics in programming without basics you will get lost what do you mean by Basics you mean like math you mean like understanding language yes you have to have some understanding of uh math like vectors and all and like programming Concepts like objectoriented programming right and the language which you want to be a proficient so we here mostly use C but if you want to check out other languages C++ is also a really great language to learn yeah so you have to be at least proficient in the languages which you want to work with

okay great all right well thank you and maybe what what do you like best about being an engineer here at hypernova I get to break things get to break things okay okay at the end of the day it's that right they give us a and b as a feature and then we realize it breaks C okay at which point it's back to the drawing board part at the end of the day we are like learning it like okay that doesn't work okay with what we have in mind it it works on paper but it does not work in real time where you get to see the stuff only when it's working okay so actually breaking stuff is a proper great so yeah that's realistic all right great thank you very much guys all right who is oh Mr Producer how's it going it's going good can you tell us what do you do as a producer what does it mean to be a producer because this this has a lot in a lot of different game studios a producer has different responsibilities or scope of work so what does that mean at hypernova what do you do what does scope of responsibility yeah I mean the

way I look at it is product process people and the players MH so like my a producers role the way I Envision it is how do you get the best out of all of these and because it's a team that's growing and like you saw there are different teams working on different things to get the communication to get the to make it like a team work instead of people working in an isolated manner within themselves mhm and in the end it becomes a great product and it becomes something that players have fun fun with so my role is to channelize this in through processes and through team building activities or working with the team coaching retrospectives and all of that what is the most difficult part of being a producer I mean largely it's about I guess working with change on a day-to-day basis okay and figuring what's the the best way to respond to something that happens on a day-to-day

basis all right great thank you very much should we product manager product manager okay now this is the other big issue that comes up what is the difference between a product manager and a producer now that has a lot of different variations at different game studios but can you tell us what you do as a product manager versus a producer I think I mean obviously this varies from company to company but broadly I think the producer role is one that involves more execution instead of planning right so while here you have the like of course given that we are pre-product we not released something yet the function of a product manager here is to perform all sorts of tasks so essentially the job here for us is to Rally the teams functions around and give them a plan for what features to build and like the kind of to to basically serve as a planning tool for the kind of numbers and the kind of goals that we want to achieve with the product and the product manager needs to keep that in mind all the time and then sort of work to create

economy systems and then Implement economy ideas and like discuss with the design team on what exactly needs to go inside the game and plan everything around the deadlines that we have so in that sense the product manager is much more of a planning role right than a produc and you mentioned economy and systems design are are you doing that or are you working with one of the designers on that I am doing that right now at the studio I'm heading most of that given that it's still at a relatively earlier stage right but yeah and who's more valuable the producer or the product that's a very difficult question I would like to prefer not to answer that right now all right well thank you very much Oz we are told that you are a programmer worth speaking to what makes you special here at hypernova I mean that would be the me being an intern who newly joined the company okay and yeah been here for 1 month and a half okay where where did you come from I've been were studying my doing my

postgraduation in IAT okay after that I got an offer over here and I joined nice and so I think a lot of people that may be watching this video and and and paying attention may be people who want to break into the games industry how did you convince jusa and mayor to have have you join this company what was it about you that made them give you an internship here okay I think that would be the portfolio I was creating while I was studying doing my PG and ug ah nice so I was mainly focusing on trying to create different kind of games and some prototypes and stuff yes so that I could show that as the stuff I was able to create during a particular time limit so that would give me an edge over other people who are not ready with the portfolio yeah I think that's a really important point for our audience like one of the things I think it's important to do just like in this case where if you are able to build your own portfolio

like besides a resume everyone has a resume but not everyone may have a portfolio that shows demonstrated work and capability and clearly in this case I guess that made a difference for you yeah great thank you very much oo nice check this out this is your motion capture studio right so for our audience josea can you explain what is a motion capture kind of like what is it what are you using this studio for motion capture is a technology that is used to make sure that the actors are able to act inside of the game so whatever they speak or however they move their body all of that gets captured and we can show it inside the game so all the cuts scenes in myy that you see an actor actually did that right so that's really the main goal of a motion capture studio right and basically when you're doing animations for your characters by using using motion capture you'll be able to kind of automate that rather

than having to manually come up with the animation okay can we actually see something work or how you actually do this is that possible or not not right now okay it needs a whole setup oh I see I see I send you some footage that we have from before okay well let's talk to some of the motion capture guys here what's up guys can you guys tell me what do you guys do on a day-to-day basis here how's the studio being used and yeah tell us more about yourselves so so this is the Cinematic and animation team for the game we capture the performance here y on this floor and we transfer those animation in the character characters we need in the game right yeah so we edit them and make them game ready okay and how many people do you need three people are you guys just sitting here just cuz you're your friends we're like so he's Jan okay he's imrose and I'm couple Jan is the art director here and he

takes care of all the cinematics and the shoot and everything ah I see and we to do the after workor like the animation thing and like making the animation game ready or making cinematic and all right and so as art director you're overseeing the art team and all the animations and things like that yeah okay so could you maybe you can speak into into here but art director could you talk to us about what does an art director do what what's your general day today uh first of all we work in a team of five here we have two animators we have uh another director working with me and a producer working with me we all uh work closely with the team above which is the development team and the engineering team we get the specifications and we kind of try to accommodate that for the game and how we can do it more smoothly as smoothly as possible okay and we figur out our technique we figure out way to execute

it and way to deliver it as soon as possible okay great all right well thank you very much and there you have it we have covered most of the main departments at here at hypernova May josea thank you so much for letting us speak to your crew here and I can't wait for updates on May angry thanks guys