Decisions and war stories
Short notes on problems I hit and how I solved them. More notes in Russian on my Telegram channel Kindexation.
- 2019
Game balance when you can't patch the items
In a blockchain game, released assets are permanent. Our first season flooded the economy — and fixing it took a new mechanic, not a patch.
- 2017
Platform risk: when free traffic ends overnight
Our publisher lived on free Google Play traffic. Then Google changed the rules.
- 2015
From days to one second: cloning a game skin in Unity
A small editor script that turned reskinning a match-3 game from days of manual work into a button.
- 2015
Hiring juniors through a meetup and an office tour
How a game-dev college group became a hiring pipeline for our content team.
- 2015
An onboarding checklist where every line has an owner
Two new hires with the same name on the same day — and the checklist that made onboarding boring, in a good way.
- 2014
One engine, many games: how a small studio shipped 160+ titles
Seven genre engines, one shared core, and a new game in two weeks.
- 2014
The $100 asset that we rewrote completely — and that paid off
A match-3 template from the Unity Asset Store, a full rewrite, and a game that outperformed our $150k flagship.
- 2013
Designer-first configs: a month that turned a tester into a level designer
Rebuilding Steam Defense's configs for the game designer, with scenarios as real code.
- 2013
Shut up and write down the criticism
Independent testers tore our tutorial apart. We stopped defending it and rebuilt it.
- 2006
muo.lv: twelve years of running a game I didn't have the source code for
A private MuOnline server turned into a full product: market, economy, payments, my own anti-cheat, a packet-filtering proxy, ops automation and a bot that ran events.
- 2003
I listened to the champion's lecture — and won with a 2 MB bitmask
A tournament where programs play each other, a lecture on minimax, and a precomputed table of 16 million positions.
- 2001
Doom RF: a birthday present that took two weeks — and a year
A 4-player hot-seat deathmatch in Pascal, a bank-switching trick to beat the 64 KB video window, and the reason I like starting projects on February 28.
- 2000
Space War 2K: one engine, three games — in the year 2000
A single executable that became a space shooter, a top-down tank game or a Worms clone depending on the folder you pointed it at — and a video player written in Pascal.
- 1999
Where “KindeX” comes from
A Pascal compiler error that turned into a nickname for the next 27 years.
- 1999
Space War: how two little ships taught me trigonometry
Reading someone else's source code, discovering sine and cosine on my own, and the first game people actually liked.