On August 26, 2024, the Ukrainian VR shooter Z.O.N.A Origin by AGaming+ studio from Brovary, which is commonly called S.T.A.L.K.E.R. for VR, was released on Steam Early Access. We decided to talk to the developers about how their career in gaming started, why they started working on VR games, and so on. Igor Migun, one of the founders of AGaming+ studio, answers our questions.
Oleg Danylov: Good afternoon, Igor! Congratulations on the release of Z.O.N.A.: Origin in Early Access. How are the first reviews of the game, are there many bugs? As I see it, hotfixes are already out.
Igor Migun: Good afternoon, thank you for your greetings. The first feedback on the game was quite positive, although, as always, there is a fly in the ointment in every barrel of honey. On the one hand, this is due to my shortcomings, and on the other hand, to the wide variety of VR headsets.
VR headsets differ significantly from each other, both in terms of screen resolution and the way they connect to a PC. For example, younger models, such as Oculus and Pico, face the problem of video stream compression when transmitted to the helmet. This is especially noticeable when displaying fog in the game. If you don't manually raise the video bitrate to 350-400 Mbps using the Oculus Debug Tool (ODT), it leads to pixelation of the background at a distance of 30 meters. And there are quite a few such problems in VR.
So we've already released two hotfixes and more updates. And that's in 3 days :) To tell you the truth, I haven't slept for 32 hours.
Oleg Danylov: Now let's go back to the very beginning. And the question I had to ask is whether you are related to the Ukrainian eSports team A-Gaming (Amazing Gaming), which was quite famous in the Counter-Strike 1.6 discipline in the mid-2000s. Where did the name of your studio come from?
Igor Migun: No, when I was creating AGaming+, I didn't even know about the existence of this esports team. Later, I found out that there really was such a team. In fact, the name AGaming stands for Android Gaming :)
Oleg Danylov: How did it all start? Why did the Myhun brothers start making games? Why did they choose mobile platforms at first?
Igor Migun: At first, I was alone, trying my hand at the CoronaSDK engine. It was on this engine that the first games of the Z.O.N.A. series were released 12 years ago - Z. O. N.A. and Z.O.N.A: Road to Limansk. Although they belonged to a completely different genre, they were also related to the Chornobyl Zone.
It was only five years later that I involved my brother in the project. We are both self-taught. I, for example, am a junior coach by profession. I chose mobile platforms most likely because at the time they seemed to me the easiest way to enter the gaming market. Moreover, such big studios as EA Games were saying at the time: "Games for a dollar? No, of course not." It's not that the market was empty, but it was much easier to prove myself here. Besides, I've been dreaming of creating games since childhood and even then I tried to write code on the ZX Spectrum.
Oleg Danylov: I know that one of your most famous projects is the mobile shooter The Sun Origin Post Apocalypse, which was among the top paid games and has more than 1 million downloads/sales. The game was released in 2017, is still being updated, and, as I understand it, is still on sale. Tell us about working on this project. Why are you so attached to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and the post-apocalypse theme in general, because almost everyone calls The Sun Origin Post Apocalypse a mobile reimagining of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Does it have anything to do with the fact that you and your brother were born in Chernobyl and were there at the time of the disaster?
Igor Migun: The Sun: Origin is our biggest project yet. At that time, I already had a lot of experience with the Unity engine, and that's when my older brother joined the project and put most of the work into the game. We decided to create something big, something that wasn't on Google Play at the time.
Since my brother and I have both completed the entire S.T.A.L.K.E.R. trilogy and are devoted fans of the game, the choice of direction was obvious. However, we decided to change the location of the game and the cause of the disaster. Those who have played the game know that the Sun was the trigger that brought humanity to the brink of extinction. In the process of development, the project turned into a kind of mixture of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Fallout. We tried to take the best ideas from both games, and in the end, we did a pretty good job.
Unfortunately, I don't remember all the names anymore, but some quests and storylines were written by the guys who participated in the creation of scripts for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games. We had a kind of collaboration: they helped us with the plot, and we placed a banner with a link to their books in the game.
Is it related to our place of birth? Partly yes, partly no. In our family, a lot is connected with these events. Until the age of 12, I was "glowing" on the dosimeter like the screen of the Electron 51TC TV, so I heard the sound of crackling radiation a little earlier than the players in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. My father was a liquidator at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant from the very first days, for which he was awarded various medals and certificates. Unfortunately, we received a lot of radiation back then, because at the time of the accident we lived in Pripyat, not Chernobyl.
Oleg Danylov: The Sun Origin Post Apocalypse received a sequel The Sun: Key Of Heaven Shooter (I'm a little confused when the game was released, in 2021 or later?), but it didn't have the same huge success as the original. Why did this happen?
Igor Migun: KOH, as we call it, was released in 2021. And yes, despite the huge improvements compared to TSO, the game completely failed. But it's not even about the game itself.
At that time, Google Play started changing its algorithms for promoting and ranking games. I've been following Google Play and the App Store since 2012 and I love to analyze. I have seen how both platforms have gradually made life more difficult for small studios without an advertising budget. Play Market even removed the "new games" section from the market at one point and then brought it back. But this did not save the game.
Oleg Danylov: AGaming+ is a successful mobile game development studio with a dozen completed projects, many of which have sales of 100-500 thousand copies, why did you decide to switch to creating games for VR? Isn't this niche too small? Isn't there already some stagnation in the VR segment?
Igor Migun: Sales in VR are really not as big as we would like. To be honest, we weren't going to go into VR at all at first. I once tried to port Mental Hospital 6 from Android to PCVR and was only disappointed. But I got acquainted with the SteamVR environment, which saved us from a complete collapse in the future. Initially, we had a plan to port The Sun Origin to PC. We had a large fan base, and people asked us to release the game on Steam. We had already started sketching and planning the development, but either we didn't have enough money to start, or Russian investors confused us. And then came February 24, 2022, and everything went to hell.
As for the niche, I talked to guys who are closely involved in VR games. They all say unequivocally that a game should be developed for Meta Quest first and only then for PCVR, or better yet, for both platforms at once. Then, according to them, everything is not so bad, and sometimes even very profitable. But now I'm practically working alone, and it's very difficult to create a game for two radically different VR platforms at once. To be honest, I still want to live a little. One platform squeezes all the juices out of you, so you sleep for 4 hours a day. I can't do it without a team.
Oleg Danylov: Since 2019 , AGaming+ has already released 5 games on Steam, four of which are pure VR. First of all, this is an impressive performance, how do you manage it? Secondly, how are these developments financed, because, as I see it, sales there are at the level of 2-5 thousand for each game? Do revenues from old mobile games allow you to create new VR games?
Igor Migun: All games on Steam are 80% self-made. It's better for no one to know how I made them. My health definitely didn't improve during this time, especially after the war started. Now I have two families on my shoulders: mine and my brother's. Although he is not involved in game development at the moment, he has volunteered for the Ukrainian Armed Forces since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. Mobile games are no longer as profitable as they used to be. Let's just say that before the full-scale war, 60-65% of revenues came from the Russian market.
Oleg Danylov: How much more difficult is it to develop a VR game than a project for mobile platforms? Do both have their own nuances?
Igor Migun: I would say that the difficulties are about the same. But I am glad that I have a lot of experience with mobile games. It taught me optimization tricks and interesting techniques. My brother was laughing at me when in one of the games - Z.O.N.A Project X for Android, which was released in 2014 - the cutscene showed not a train car traveling on the ground, but the ground with trees and houses moving past the stationary train. As it turned out, I'm not the only one who is so cunning. I'd like to say hello to Metro Exodus. Of course, our scales are enormously different, but the approach is sometimes the same.
In addition, in 2016-2017, I managed to make games with such graphics that, to quote one of the reviews for Reporter for Android: "I have worse graphics in my games on Sony PlayStation 4 than in this mobile game." So I think it's important to be able to work with different platforms.
Oleg Danylov: Z.O.N.A Project X VR and Z.O.N.A: Origin really look like a mix of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Metro in VR. One of the commenters on Steam even wrote that you use models from S.T.A.L.K.E.R., which is obviously stupid. But have you had any questions from GSC Game World or 4A Games, have their lawyers come to you yet?
Igor Migun: No... ugh, ugh, ugh. Although, if they want to, they will always find a reason. I partially understand this. But we don't quite overlap. I don't use their concept as they have it. I have my own concept, and it's even closer to the Strugatsky's Picnic by the Side of the Road. The same Z.O.N.A. Project X and Origin tell the story not so much about the Chernobyl disaster, which happened a long time ago, but it was a nuclear war between the US and Russia, allegedly because of Ukraine.
I even made a slight mistake with the date of the invasion in one of the endings of Z.O.N.A Project X - there are two of them. In one of them, by the way, Yanukovych resigned, and everyone lived happily ever after. It was interesting to look at the reviews of the mobile version back in 2014, where at the end there was a note from the Russians: "Oh, this is like a greeting for our Crimea!". This, by the way, is one of the reasons why Steam censors checked Z.O.N.A Project X VR for almost two months and removed it from sale in the ru-region.
As for the models, all the models in the game were made by our two fashion designers. One was killed in 2022 near Vuhledar, and the other, thank God, is alive and well, but he left us in 2021. We even have archive videos showing how the buildings used in both VR games are modeled. We used a lot of references back then: both S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Fallout 4. There was also a website with photos, which I didn't really delve into at the time. I liked their work. However, when I started adapting it all for VR, I faced a problem: most of the models were designed for a mobile platform. The textures in the atlas have a resolution of 2048×2048, which is very, very small for a PC. I had to re-texture some of them on my own. Although, without modeling experience, I would say it was not very good.
Oleg Danylov: Z.O.N.A.: Origin has just been released in the Early Access, which, as you say, will last for about a year. What are your plans for the game's development? Currently, Z.O.N.A.: Origin has about 10 hours of gameplay, will there be more? Is this too much for a VR game that is difficult to play in long sessions?
Igor Migun: For example, Z.O.N.A Project X VR is a linear game, and if you don't get too distracted by raids, the time to complete it is about 14 hours. And this was not enough for people. So, in fact, as I say to my team, if we survive this war and I manage to bring the game to a conclusion, the time to complete it will be much longer - 25-30 hours. This is not so much for VR. Some people find it hard to play for a long time in a headset, others don't. I, for example, can stay in VR for hours, and I have no problems... or rather, almost no problems, except for neck problems. Therefore, if the player likes the game, there are never too many of them.
Oleg Danylov: How many people are working at AGaming+ now, because your posts on Steam give the impression that you are alone?
Igor Migun: Now I am the only one in the team. My brother is at war, one of the fashion designers was killed, and the other "learned to swim well," which I found out after the fact. One of the programmers mastered the Carpathian forests, and I also found out about it after the fact, and I no longer have contact with him. There is another programmer with whom, let's just say, we keep in touch. That's why I always write that I make the game 80-90% by myself.
Oleg Danylov: I know that your brother Nikolay Migun, the second lead developer of AGaming+, is currently on a business trip abroad in the Kursk region of the temporarily existing Russia. If Mykola's unit is raising money for some kind of need, this is the right time to provide a link to such a collection.
Igor Migun: Yes, we collected for the REB for his group. Thank God, we raised almost 100,000 in a day. But this was our second attempt. It was the video from the business trip and the overseas prizes for the largest donations that played a role here. Plus, I always help as much as I can. The equipment is mostly all bought by us.
Now Mykola's unit is raising funds for 3rd generation night vision devices. They are needed to move around at night without headlights. The goal is 400,000 UAH.
Bank card number – 5375 4112 2172 9614
Below is the most famous, let's say, video of my brother. He's the one in the car driving and answering questions about how to get to the Sudzha.
Oleg Danylov: Thank you for your answers, Igor. I wish you inspiration in game development and your brother in destroying enemies. And of course, victory to all of us. Glory to Ukraine!
Igor Migun: Glory to the heroes! Thank you for your wishes! And victory to all of us!