Ukraine game studio becomes a home for the stranded

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Daniel Poluyonny never thought his Ukrainian game development company would become a place where his developers would actually live. But that is what happened with the company’s offices in Kyiv and Lviv during the Russian invasion of the country. Poluyonny is head of N-iX Game & VR Studio, a 20-year-old work-for-hire game studio (and a division of parent firm N-iX) that is representative of many game studios that employed tens of thousands of game developers in Ukraine before the war. The studio is based in Lviv, in the safer western part of Ukraine, but it has had an office in Kyiv, now the center of much of the fighting, since 2016.

The studio has continued to do work for customers like Seattle-based Irreverent Labs, maker of an upcoming mecha fighting game. Poluyonny wants to tell others that his company continues to operate and it can still get tasks done for its core clients in the U.S. and Europe. But he also wants to convey how difficult life has become during the war.

In an interview with GamesBeat, Poluyonny said that the company’s 200-plus game developers were working on around 20 different projects, including the work on Rahul Sood’s Irreverent Labs game, Mecha Fight Club. The work continues as a dozen of Poluyonny’s people were working on the game. The country has good internet access, and that has continued, he said.

But the chaos continues as well. During one meeting, a number of people were cut off from a call after a rocket evidently damaged the cables being used. The internet connection was quickly re-established. In Lviv, the office has about three different cables bringing in the internet.

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