Around four in the morning on February 24, 2022, Alex Molodkin was hard at work in his Kyiv apartment. The Steam Next Festival was in full swing, and Molodkin was participating with a free demo of the cozy puzzle adventure he was developing with his partner, Puzzles for Clef. His family was asleep. It was a normal night for Molodkin, until the war began.
“I was just working on our game because I often work late into the night,” Molodkin says. “Everyone else was sleeping and I hear some distant explosions. Didn't need much time to realize what's happening. So I just had to wake everyone up and deliver the awesome news.”
Molodkin woke his family and the group moved into the hallway of the apartment, bringing necessary belongings. And that’s where Molodkin has been, for the most part, since February – sleeping in shifts with his partner to keep an eye on the news or any threats that might require them to react. He considered evacuating with his family, but with a family of four and no car, it’s a logistical nightmare. Plus, as Molodkin puts it, it’s a matter of principle. “When some bad guys show up in your country, you don't want to run the moment they show up. You want to stay put for as long as possible.”
Molodkin’s story is a familiar reality for a number of game developers from all across Ukraine, who found their lives upended unexpectedly when Russia attacked their country in late February. The invasion is still ongoing over two months later, and has resulted in (at time of writing) the deaths of over 3,000 Ukrainian civilians and the displacement of over 5.5 million.
IGN spoke to five developers and two gaming event organizers from the country about their experiences over the last several months. All of them told us that there had always been concerns about Russia’s escalating aggression since the 2014 crisis in Ukraine, and some had even made preparations in case things took a turn for the worse. But they hadn’t expected a full-scale invasion to tear their lives apart overnight.
Russia’s attack occurred as Ukrainians in the games industry were in the midst of extremely normal activities: testing new builds, plotting out levels, planning events, making budgets, hashing out publishing deals, spending time with their families, and living their lives. Now, they’re trying to get back to those same activities, but with a new motivation: a hope that by keeping the Ukrainian games industry alive, they can bring funding, awareness, and support to the country they call home.
Games Development in – and for – Ukraine
Alexey Menshikov, CEO of Ukrainian VR, porting, and publishing studio Beatshapers, was in the US for the annual DICE Summit in Las Vegas when Russia invaded his country. When he saw the news, he was in shock, unable to do much beyond scramble to get help to his 35 employees back in Kyiv. He managed to get the word out to his team to evacuate, and some did, moving to Western Ukraine amid massive traffic jams. Others didn’t want to go. Menshikov tells me his lead engineer refused to leave Kyiv, even though bombs were falling nearby, because he didn’t want to leave his cats behind.
For the first two weeks, he said, no one got any work done at all, even after those who wanted to evacuate had done so. How could they, when their homes were being destroyed, their loved ones in danger?
But Menshikov says by the third week, something had to change.
“You feel like you’re stuck watching the news,” he says. “And it's bad for your head … So after two weeks I stopped, I started filtering the news sources … And I told the team, ‘Hey guys, you have to filter what you do. And let's focus on work because this is what you can do the best … so after three weeks, we got back to work. The country needs money coming in.”
Frogwares, the Ukrainian studio behind games like the Sherlock Holmes series and The Sinking City, had an even bigger challenge, with a staff of nearly 100 remote workers scattered across Ukraine. Communications manager Sergey Oganeyan tells us that Frogwares set up dedicated Discord channels to gather information on where its members were and to help them share information to get those evacuating out of the country.
Now that its entire team is safe and accounted for, some are working on a smaller project that Oganeyan describes as “doable and manageable given the current circumstances” to help keep the studio moving forward. But others are choosing to contribute in other ways, such as volunteering to fight if they had previous military experience or working full-time to provide humanitarian aid, and Frogwares is giving them the time off and enthusiastic support to do so.
“We’ve had people who had to flee from cities that have now been nearly decimated,” Oganeyan says. “Others have lost their homes. We know people on the team that have lost friends and relatives. We’ve been living under the sound of air raid sirens and hiding in bunkers for months now so everything is just one big blur. And then there is the barrage of news coming in.
“It has brought a lot of the country together. The world – and to be honest some of us – didn’t think we’d hold out this long and fight back so well. Once we all saw there is a chance to actually win this, it galvanized so many of us to actually stand up and fight back however we could. There is a collective belief in the future of this country that hasn’t been felt for quite some time in my opinion.”
That desire to do whatever they could – military action, aid, or working hard to bring money into the country – was universally expressed across all the developers I spoke to. All of them went through a similar period of shock and horror, staring at their news feed, trying to process what was happening to their home. But eventually, they realized that level of hyperawareness -- what some might call “doomscrolling” -- was neither sustainable nor actively helpful. Many returned to making games, believing that bringing revenue to their Ukrainian companies and paying taxes on that revenue was the best way to support their nation.
Of course, they’re still working in the midst of a war. Many of the people we spoke to are either located in Kyiv, or have team members still there – either by choice because they didn’t want to leave families or homes, or because of martial law requiring most men between the ages of 18 and 60 to remain in case they are required to fight.
Vladimir Kozinyi, CEO of Desperate: Vladivostok and Redemption of the Damned creator MiroWin studio, describes what it’s been like for him and his team members who have remained in Ukraine.
“Several times a day an air alarm is activated, we hide in bomb shelters – metro stations, house basements, car parkings and other places,” he says. “Due to the curfew, we are limited in our ability to be on the street, pharmacies and grocery stores are open less hours, [and] it is now not so easy to find the right medicine or get essential groceries. Missiles, military planes are flying over us. Someone sees the explosions with their own eyes. This is a nightmare and horror.”
At the time we conducted our interviews, those we spoke to in Kyiv said that the city had become somewhat safer than at the start of the invasion, and many were able to return to their homes. But as Digital Dreams CEO Maxim Novikov explains, the war is still very much ongoing around them. When Russia invaded, Novikov was in Spain on vacation, celebrating his wife’s birthday, and he’s been stuck there since. His 15 team members working on Mutant Football League 2 are still in Kyiv, where they’re becoming so accustomed to the kind of chaos Kozinyi and others have described that they no longer react to it.
“We had guys who were sharing the time between helping the war efforts and doing some work, and they had all the sirens and they had all the explosions, and you may sit on a meeting with them and you hear the explosions,” he says. “And they're like, ‘Let's continue, let's do some work.’ So it really affected us.”
Games Gatherings Under Bombs
As Ukrainian developers adapted to their new situation while making games to support their country, another group of industry professionals were pivoting their own endeavors. Elena Lobova, co-founder of GDBAY and one of the organizers of game jam Hyper Casual Jam Com, had been prepared ahead of time, believing that something might happen to disrupt their planned late-February online event. The team, entirely based in Ukraine, was bracing for possible disruptions to power stations or the internet, and made arrangements for Lobova to fly to Bratislava so she could manage Hyper Casual Jam Com from there if things went poorly. But no one, Lobova says, expected a full-scale war.