Alexey Alexeev explained how Wargaming squeezed World of Tanks from PC into mobile, and the challenges they faced, at his Casual Connect Europe lecture. “Millions of people enjoyed tank battles on PC, and mobile was like a new passport,” he said. “A lot of companies moved there, and a lot of successful titles earned a lot of money.” For a walkthrough of the game’s journey to mobile, see the video below.
Alexey Alexeev is currently the project manager on World of Tanks Blitz at Wargaming.net and has over eight years of experience in mobile development. However, he never could have predicted he’d end up in gaming years ago.
Back then, he wanted to be an engineer or archaeologist. However, after playing Warcraft II and Fallout 2 with a friend, he quickly gained an interest in coding.
He first attempted to make a program with a ship moving on a screen in BASIC, which ultimately led him to become a student at Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics, where he met Vitaliy Borodovskiy. This would be a fortuitous meeting for Alexeev because Borodovskiy is the man responsible for the DAVA Framework — the technology that World of Tanks Blitz is based on. “It’s due to (Borodovskiy’s) influence I became a game developer,” Alexeev says.
In the Industry
In addition to Borodovskiy, the industry itself also inspired Alexeev to pursue a career in gaming. “The game industry is a great place to have fun working on projects that will help a lot of others to have fun,” he says.
Alexeev started at Wargaming.net with a small team of experts four years ago. Before Wargaming, the team had achieved success in making small mobile applications for iOS and working as an outsource team on casual game projects. Although the team had released a couple of mobile games, at Wargaming the team helped in the success of World of Tanks Blitz and truly realized their ability to tackle big gaming projects.
This past experience has helped Alexeev immensely in his current position as project manager. “As a mobile developer, I have gained a lot of technical experience that allows me to talk the same language with our developer team,” he says. “I also know a lot about how to make a release both on iOS and Android platforms. Organizing work on small projects with a team of five allowed me to get my first experience in process creation and management.”
Minefield
That’s not to say that everything has been a walk in the park for Alexeev. He admits that there’s a challenge in finding the fun in your game and figuring out what people will like about it. There’s also the challenge in making complicated conceptions easy to understand and making controls easy to use.
One of the most painful experiences during the creation of World of Tanks Blitz for Alexeev dealt with controls such as turret rotation, tank movement, zooming, sniper mode and shooting. “There is no problem with this on a PC with a keyboard and a mouse — but a player holding a tablet is able to do only two actions in parallel,” he explains.
The team spent several months developing and testing different ideas. “We added auto-aim in order to make it easier for a player to follow enemy tanks with your gun. We automated zoom, (making it) a one-button action that only works when your gun points at an enemy. Our team created several control schemes that we ran through UX tests.” The end result: Two fire buttons, a smart zoom, auto aim, a joypad and more.
Proud Moments
Overcoming these challenges is a reward in its own right, but for Alexeev there’s something even more satisfying about game creation. “The most rewarding part is feedback from community.”
One of his proudest career moments so far, along with the release of World of Tanks Blitz, is the game becoming one of the best games of 2014 in the App Store — a clear sign of approval from the gaming community.
Now Alexeev is looking forward, toward things such as the use of mobile devices as a game streaming platform and the use of virtual reality devices in gaming.
For those also looking at their own futures and seeking to break into the industry, Alexeev has some very simple advice: “Follow your dream.”
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