The Saga Begins
The history of Burny Games commenced before March 2022. Since 2015, I have led many companies to success in the market, and now my challenge is to create another product that I can be proud of. I wanted to show this to my kids so they could understand it and be proud of me, and this chance came to me with Burny Games.
At that moment, I met a small group of enthusiasts passionately striving to create exciting games. I saw the potential in their ideas and capabilities. And so, Burny Games began to take shape. One of the key moments was the emergence of our CEO, Anatolii Henis. He was starting a new stage in his career, seeking new opportunities and challenges. We met, and I told him about my ideas and opportunities that, together with Anatolii, could create stunning products. It turned out to be exactly what we all needed. That's how the story of Burny Games began.
The Genesis
The full-scale invasion of Russia into Ukraine coincided with our official launch preparations and the core team formation at Burny Games. Through hard times, we found purpose and solace in our work and goals. Hence, notwithstanding the adversities, we stabilized ourselves in the market, adjusted plans, ensured a degree of security for our employees, and fine-tuned a myriad of operational processes.
We unveiled our maiden project, Super Cooker, which proved to be a significant milestone on multiple fronts. Firstly, it fostered cohesion within our team. We gained a profound understanding of what we desired from the product, what we were capable of, and how we could surpass others. During the development process, we coined the fundamental principle of "top-notch daily" in our work.” It became our standard for everything we did. The team began to expand, welcoming new highly skilled professionals who progressively made Burny Games a more technologically advanced, innovative, and self-assured company.
We forged our mission, established personal work standards, and cultivated a unique internal culture of which we are proud. The experience gained from working on our initial game, which is no longer in development, transformed into processes and standards. Most importantly, we focused on creating high-quality puzzle games that "stimulate" players' minds. Thus was born the game Playdoku, and along with it, our mission — to create top-notch innovative games to challenge players' minds daily.
What We've Accomplished Together:
In the two years of our existence, we managed to reconstruct numerous technical processes and implement our unique approach to work. For instance, with the arrival of new technical specialists, we significantly enhanced our technical foundation for live operations without the need to release new builds each time. This mechanism operates much more efficiently, faster, and reliably than in many major gaming companies, a fact of which we are immensely proud.
We devised our unique dashboard, akin to that of a pilot, where we monitor our work efficiency and market status, and conclude how we can excel tomorrow compared to today. This data-oriented approach is founded on constant research, analytics, and delving into details, yet we manage to balance it with quick decision-making and dynamism.
During this time, we also diversified our strengths and focused on projects whose value exceeded, launching them to help us achieve our significant business goals. By the way, we've already surpassed our previous business goals for these two years.
We've become more open-minded. Many companies make decisions based solely on their expertise. We view this differently. We're not afraid to collaborate. If we can't solve a problem ourselves, we work with external consultants to find the best solution. Likewise, we're open to collaboration, sharing our perspectives, and exchanging knowledge.
We've assembled a unique team of top-notch specialists. What was once a tiny team has burgeoned into a rapidly growing company. We provide the team with everything necessary for effective work while expecting the same top-notch results from them that will propel us to the forefront.
Of course, the true ambassadors of Burny Games' success are the people within our team who have devoted their all to this endeavor and continue to do so daily.
Roman Gerasimenko
Lead Game Designer | Producer Colorwood Sort
My proudest achievement at Burny Games is our approach to game configuration. We created a robust user-friendly configuration structure that remains integral to our process. It incorporates my prior experience and addresses previous shortcomings.
Playdoku was both an experiment and a challenge. We applied our expertise within this new genre, innovating to create a level design that remains compelling today.
This project became a testbed for our best ideas. Experiments conducted on Playdoku led to the development of our "coloring with figures" feature, inspiring the concept for Block Brush.
We implemented this project, but it did not achieve the financial goals we had set for it. Block Brush pushed boundaries as a genre-bending concept. The core lesson was finding a clear genre identity, as it straddled "coloring" and "block puzzle" without fully committing to either. We then ventured into Sort games. Existing titles lacked inspiration and playability, often using indistinguishable colors that posed issues even for those without vision impairments. It led to Colorwood Sort. We chose a warm wooden aesthetic and special symbols to make the genre accessible for those with color determination challenges.
This project exemplifies the top-notch contributions of each team member. We continue to pursue ambitious projects, and you'll soon have the chance to experience them!
Kristina Larionova
Creative Director
It's challenging to encapsulate everything that's happened in the past two years, but I want to say that I'm proud of every specialist in the company. Every day, I feel everyone moving forward and, significantly, as a single mechanism. The creative department is one of the largest in the company. Over the past two years, we have almost doubled the number of specialists, but several times in efficiency and productivity. During this time, five full-fledged teams have gradually formed: UX/UI Design, Art, Animation, Integration, and Promo. Over time, we realized that it would be more productive and efficient to unite the Animation and Integration departments into one unit, where each specialist mastered both areas. This allowed us to improve the quality and speed of product asset preparation and animation.
To date, we have made six games of varying complexity and almost finished the seventh, two of which are the company's flagships. One of the successful games, Colorwood Sort, was made in the shortest time for the team. We made it in about two months without compromising on quality, but on the contrary. Quality is always the priority.
How did we achieve this? Constant, careful monitoring of performance by the leads of each team (not tracking working hours, this is important, but the development pipeline), series of optimization and automation implementations, additional software, own scripts development, and improvement of current processes both from a technical and management point of view. Thanks to these approaches, we have significantly reduced the production time in each team. Designers and Artists are gradually abandoning 2D in favor of 3D. The Animation and Integration team made the Shader Graph for Canvas UI faster than the Unity release. They also optimized graphics collection and animation development, which doubled the speed. In the game Colorwood Sort, we switched to a new animation development pipeline based on video concepts in Unity without need to implement game mechanics. The Promo team optimized video production in all necessary areas, which increased capacity sometimes up to 1 hour per video. All specialists are eager to learn the essential or new technologies, use AI, and write scripts - all this is implemented in the workflow, and each time, they review their performance to improve it even more. We have a lot of goals and plans that we will definitely achieve with such a team. I am very proud of each specialist and congratulate everyone on the second year of successful development!
Andrii Bohatyi
Head of UA
Over the past year, the User Acquisition team has increased the volume of traffic acquisition, building a solid foundation for further scaling. We have successfully diversified and expanded traffic sources, ensuring stable growth of our market presence. A striking example is our game Playdoku's entry into the top 10 in terms of volume in the sub-genre in key geos. In some geos, we outperformed major competitors who had dominated the market for years. We unseated long-established competitors in some geos, taking over our top spots. It allowed us to optimize our strategies and improve overall productivity. We're tackling two key challenges: automating processes and building our ad tech capabilities within the marketing team.
Kostya Litvinenko
Lead QA
Our main achievement was building team cohesion, which helped us do what we all love despite the full-scale war. We expanded our pool of high-class specialists and generated ideas for new projects. Not all of us saw the light of day, but that's also a result - we learned to reject what is ineffective and will not be successful.
We figured out the skills we need in a QA specialist. These aren't just experts in theory and practice — they dig deep to understand the product's heart. We're expanding our horizons — learning, growing, and finding new ways to apply technology.
For the past two years, the factors of successful teamwork have been well-established communication and mutual respect. We have created our own rules and stick to them:
There are no stupid questions — if you don't understand something, ask/clarify.
Is everything clear after the explanation? Great, ask and clarify it again.
Don't like something, criticize — offer a solution (preferably more than one).
Oleksandra Ros
HR People Partner
We've been obsessed with finding the best of the best in the gaming world, creating an environment that makes them want to stay. This focus has transformed our team growth into a well-oiled machine, welcoming new talent who hit the ground running. We're expanding like crazy – about five new faces per quarter, but it's not about the numbers; it's about finding the right ones. Our personalized recruiting approach helped us reduce layoffs. We prioritize getting to know potential candidates. This approach has kept those awkward 'breakups' to a minimum.
Our team size increased significantly in Q4, reaching 53 people! We're streamlining and simplifying things behind the scenes – you know, the boring-but-necessary stuff. It's all about making this machine of ours run even smoother.