Hello! My name is Julia. I work as an artist in the company AYGames. Right now I’m working on the project named “Deck of Ashes”. So, I’ll tell a little about myself and about the process of creating art for the game.


I always wanted to be an illustrator, so I received a classical art education. Like any academic artist, I was taught to love details, anatomy, and the study of volume in the subject. In this project, all this knowledge was very useful to me.


I worked on the background of the camp, its characters, game locations, mobs and map illustrations.


In a very beginning, we had to find our unique style and the correct way to show the atmosphere. Our game is about the dark, cursed Middle Ages, this meant that art must be full of all sorts of monsters from ancient legends, dark forests with crooked trees, fetid swamps, ravaged villages. All our team was very enthusiastic about it because we had a lot of opportunities to create something great. It was obvious to us that the monsters must be especially vile and bloodthirsty. We drew a bunch of sketches and it was a very fun process, because, despite all its bloodthirstiness, our monsters are definitely stylized and it is really interesting to look at them. I love to invent all sorts of fantastic creatures, to develop their design, to fill their images with characteristic elements. Each monster must have its own characteristics, which from a visual point of view is expressed in the difference of silhouette, color content, the character of attack. Among all these creatures, I even have my favorites. And the "cherry on the cake" was the opportunity for me to animate our mobs. This is a separate and very interesting process through which you can reveal the character even better.


In the development of backgrounds, we also tried to convey the oppressive atmosphere we needed and, in the necessary proportion, to stylize and simplify them. At this stage, the knowledge gained from the academy about heat and cold and aerial perspective was also very useful to me. Background development is a laborious process, it requires intense concentration of attention. It is necessary to divide them the features of game backgrounds into three clear plans. In the foreground are the characters, the second sets the environment, the distant one - unites everything into a whole picture. It is important not to break down these plans too deliberately because the liveliness of the entire composition can disappear. You should also try to draw on different layers at once because this greatly simplifies the subsequent work. In the future, of the chopped backgrounds, you can make options for new locations. It simplifies and speeds up development.


I also worked on illustrations of maps. It was decided to stylize art under linocut because this technique suites greatly to the Middle Ages. We focused on the contour, clear lines and characteristic strokes of this printing technique. As a result, the cards are well read, their essence is not lost, and, I think, the choice of such graphics greatly contributed to this.





In general, on this project, I constantly solve interesting problems, pump my skills and I really hope that you will enjoy our game and you will appreciate our efforts!

Hello, my name is Yuriy.

I work in AYGames as a testing specialist. Initially, my role was to correctly plan the test coverage of the company's projects, but very soon I began to share my ideas on the development of Deck of Ashes and moved away a bit from the initial tasks. My ideas came to the team's liking, and I took on some of the responsibilities that the game designer and producer of the project perform.

For all the time that I work on Deck of Ashes, I have already managed to make many contacts, give an interview to Anton Logvinov on the version of the game that we showed at White Nights Spb 2018, participate in the showcase on VK Fest 2018 and DevGamm Moscow 2018, telling about our game as a Russian-speaking and English-speaking audience.

The most interesting thing in my work is that I solve complex problems with which I have never worked before, and do not dwell on this, setting myself more and more new goals.

A real test for me is the need to keep the entire array of necessary information in my head, distributing resources to resolve the obstacles on my way to release a product that is facing me and my colleagues. Each solution, each task requires attention, and controlling the flow of these tasks and building them as they arrive at the hierarchy from priorities, as if the orchestra conductor is both the most difficult and most exciting part of my work.

All the difficulties that I encountered in the work, I could not solve alone. I really don't have to do this. AYGames is a gallant team of experts who help each other in their work and participate in making decisions on the development of the game. I am very grateful to our guys for not being left behind.

The Deck of Ashes project began as a small game with card mechanics, and I am delighted with the fact that he grew up in a full-fledged game with hardcore battle mechanics, an original plot, a stunning and original visual style. A game that I personally find interesting to play.

Thanks to the understanding that I can make this game as high-quality as possible, every working day for me is a new opportunity, a new round in the development of the project and a new feat that is being accomplished by all our friendly team. If I were asked why I like working on this game, I would not be able to find an unequivocal answer, because the diversity of decisions and the love that we all invest in Deck of Ashes cannot be described in words - you can only feel it.

Hi! I'm Michail.

In AYGames, quite a small team, there are 4 of us, artists. And we all, of course, dream about creative freedom and unlimited resources. But these are, of course, pipe dreams. Our technical capabilities are limited, and our creative freedom exists only within the requests of a specific audience. But of what we really feel the shortage - is time.

So planning and unification are really important to us. How to deal with our uniqueness as artists, our completely different ideas, fears, and even different education? How to make us four draw in the same way? To whom and how many souls do we have to sale, so that in the end a team of strongly dissimilar people could make an almost perfect game?

Personally, I consider that the only thing that can help us is the feeling of overall inspiration, which is not so easy to catch for all of us in the same time and in the same way. We started our search with exploring the best examples of art among the already created and successful projects. We redefined them, creating something new and unique. This gave us the necessary soil on which we grew our separate art. The inspiration for us was mostly served by the illustrations of Yakub Rebelka and art for the game Darkest Dungeon.

But we had a huge fear that we could get carried away by other people’s work and lose our uniqueness, and start making the trivial copies of arts that gave us inspiration. But our background really helped us with it. All of our artists know how to make the animation. This fact allowed us to avoid turning characters into dummies with to frames, capable only to make the imitation of movements. We created full-fledged heroes and monsters, and their plastic made them truly alive.

We made characters created by different artists similar with the unification of style. It means a specific color scheme, and the thickness and plasticity of the line, and the use of certain textures and brushes in Photoshop. Every stage of creating was controlled by the art director.

Yes, at the first glance, there is not much creativity in this kind of job, but, in fact, the restrictions only helped me personally to concentrate on the details that make us unique and special both in the picture and in life.

Hello, world!

My name is Katerina. Here, in the AY Games team, I’m responsible for everything that’s related to a visual component of the project. Also, I manage the artists' team.

Today, in this post I’d like to tell you a little about the process of designing the visual style of our last game, named “Deck of Ashes”.

First of all, we needed to choose the general style of arts for the whole game. We were guided by the general mood of narrative - the disquiet landscapes afflicted by evil. Abandoned villages, misty swamps, and dark caves.

Characters look battered as they’ve passed through lots of life difficulties. Surely, they can’t sparkle with polished armor.

To create the tightness in the air we used ragged and quivering contours of our arts and muted colors. With the help of dark musical accompaniment, we created the necessary sense of anxiety and circumspection.

Also, it was important for us to keep the adventurous spirit of the game and not to turn “Deck of Ashes” into horror with gloomy backgrounds and depressive characters. So, we’ve chosen a worm spectrum of colors for everything that is related to mane characters, friendly NPCs and safe locations also supporting this in the UI in fair tones.

As the work was progressing, it became important for us to coordinate artists’ work in order to control that some personal style features won’t spoil the general style of the game. We regularly checked with already drown arts, consulted with other team members. Also, we used to focus on each others’ most well-drawn arts.

All these made to distribute various blocks of tasks among all artists, and not to entrust one certain person one type of tasks, which helped us to do the work faster. To say more, during the prosses all our artists learned how to make layered animation for the characters, which significantly accelerated and simplified the work we needed to do. In the result, the details for the animation and the animation itself were created by one person, which made easier for them to plan the characters’ movements and make it according to their idea.

Well-coordinated work of the team in general and the enthusiasm of each artist made it possible to create an entirely separate and diverse world, where many exciting adventures are waiting for the user))

“So many bugs!”, PM says. “Here’s a bug list”, GD says. “Bugs. Bugs. Bugs”, says everyone. Every time I hear something like this I feel shocked and really confused. I run my build, check it out and find nothing in it. Everything works as it has to. I open the bug list that GM sent to me just to find out that it contains only a few real bugs and everything else is…

Anyway, let’s start with the definition of the “bug”. “Bug” means that there is a game error. The one which is accompanied by a red log is undoubtedly the bug: it causes a critical error. But not every bug can be the cause of this kind of error or even comes with a log. There is another kind of bugs which happen more often than the first ones. Here “bug” means that the game doesn’t work as the programmer expected.

Now let’s speak about the bug list. Here are some simple examples:

1) Damage the card deals depends on how much cards you hold in hand and "it doesn’t have to count itself". Is that a bug, when it's a pure lack of information at the time of its implementation? о_о

2) A card decreases 3 from effect timer N and “when you use this card it doesn’t trigger a passive effect which depends on activation of effect N”. Dude, it’s not meant to trigger. Decrease timer to 3 is not the same as activating it 3 times. О_о

3) Some mechanics work incorrectly. Wow. Hold on. When I was testing it, it worked perfectly right. And I tested it a few months ago. During this time no one asked me to fix it and SUDDENLY it becomes a bug? О_о

4) “Events should give not cards but recipes”. So, we are about to introduce such an entity as a"recipe" and implemented it as a reward for the fight and craft. Does it mean I had to redo the events? How is this related to the events? How months ago was I supposed to know that the reward for the events would become a recipe? But it is also added in a bug list as a “bug”... X_____x

To sum up, to make fewer bugs I need to delve not into the code but into esotericism. Start studying predictions, thought-reading, divination, which seems to be the basic set of skills necessary for every programmer who wants to hear less nasty words like “bug”. Gone to pray Cthulhu. Have a productive week. (с) me

Well, since my initiative to lead a blog of developers was accepted with such joy and received the support of each team member, it would probably be correct if I start first.

My name is Martin Skorubskiy, I am the marketing director of AYGames. Together with Oleg Vasilyev (CEO), we have founded AYGames in October 2016. In this first message, I going to write about the history of studio history in short.

On April 11, 2017- the birthday of the studio - we hired the first employee – a game designer. One year and six months later we are a solid team of product manager, game designer, QA, artists, programmers, and community manager.

During this time we have tried several game directions and currently, are working on Deck of Ashes. It is an open-world deck-builder with roguelike elements. In Deck of Ashes, one embarks on a journey through the dark fantasy world, hunting down powerful cards for their battle deck and fighting the hordes of foes.

Now Deck of Ashes is in early Alpha stage, and it is gaining momentum. With the major part of the game’s content ready for Steam Early Access.

Here we go to the stage when our team and our game will become public, soon we will start to reveal more about the project. I also think it would be fun to let you in on our internal process of the game’s development, so stay tuned for our Deck of Ashes development blog series.

Besides my posts, you will be able to read posts our other team members.

So, here I’m going to finish my post. See you next time!

Well, it is great moment i hope, it is first post in blog :) This blog will be about game we heve been developing about 1.5 year. This game in TCG janre roguelike based and with pve mechanic.

We named game Dack of Ashes.

well, i wish us good luck 💪💪💪