How do you feel like what you’ve experienced and what your friends and relatives are experiencing in Ukraine has impacted the game’s look and feel?Pimenov:

The war has not affected the way the game feels and looks in any way. We are completing all of the goals that lie before us. Perhaps everything would have been different if there was no war, but we will never ever find this out now.

Have you ever thought about stopping work on the game when so much else is going on around you?

Pimenov: To be honest, nobody was even thinking of the project in the first weeks of the war. Speaking for myself, all of my goals and dreams were erased in an instant starting from February 24 and were replaced with the simple principles of making sure that my family and I were safe. Any material things had lost their value. Everything seemed like a dream made real, literally. It was only possible to fall asleep when my body was completely exhausted, and when I woke up, I wanted to believe that none of this was real.

A month later, the realization came that putting life on pause was no solution and we had to continue working on the project. The team consists of very good people right now who support each other and who are all united by the single goal of making a great project, which is what we are doing now.

What are your future hopes for the studio?

Pimenov: We are planning to continue to expand and grow as a studio, creating cool new projects and making Ukrainian game development stand out and develop. We want to show the world that Ukrainian developers can be trusted with complex projects that have high budgets even in wartime conditions. Ukraine has a very rich culture which has a style all of its own when creating media.

Back in 2021, after a trailer for Level Zero hit, the studio decided to postpone an alpha release for the game because of publisher interest. Can you walk us through what happened and how that will impact the game’s final look and features?

Pimenov: The publisher gave us the opportunity to make the project better even in wartime conditions and this support is priceless to us. We have completely reworked the entire game environment as well as the characters because 80 percent of it had been made using assets from the Unreal Marketplace before. I am really happy with the new characters and it’s one of the strong sides to our game.

We have also moved the game to dedicated servers to create a matchmaking system for player selection. We literally had to rewrite the entire code in a way that would allow for the game to be expanded and for new functionalities to be easily added for its development, such as character customization, perks, and game progression. The whole animation system has also undergone changes and we made our own locomotion so that the movements of the characters would feel realistic. We are also working on new maps which will feel different both visually and in terms of gameplay. The lore of the game is written in such a way that it covers both a space setting and an Earth-bound one for those who don’t like sci-fi.

Why are you using Unreal Engine to create the game?

Pimenov: We love Unreal Engine. It is absolutely fantastic. There are many reasons why we chose UE, but one of the main ones is the visual part of the game and the possibility of quickly prototyping projects. UE allows us to do cool graphics without having too many tools for it. When you have a vision of how to create a great picture, you will definitely be able to do it in Unreal Engine. I can’t wait for us to have the chance to move onto Unreal Engine 5 and use the new tools.

As a small independent game development studio, how did Unreal Engine help you achieve the goals you were hoping to achieve with Level Zero?

Pimenov: The fact that Unreal Engine is free is important to indie developers. It’s also important that there are so many materials available about Unreal Engine on the Internet to study. Blueprint Visual Scripting allows for the first project to be easily created. The use of Marketplace assets and Megascans allow for the visual part to be sketched out at the starting stage without having a big budget for it.

Source: Unreal Engine Blog