by Ted Harrington, Best-Selling Author and Host at “Tech Done Different” podcast and Mariana Muntean, CEO Cinevva
May 2022
💡 Cinevva is no-code, Web3 platform that is turning millions of creatives into game developers.
Winner of Mozilla Builders Award 2020
Featured on Bloomberg TV and Amazon Prime on 2 Minute Drill Show
Winner of Dell Startup Competition at SXSW 2022 and a Techstars 2022 portfolio company
Audience: Leaders in technology and/or security, looking to understand how to think differently.
How you can help them? Tell how you’ve succeeded by going against the grain; help them consider how to challenge conventional wisdom.
Goal — to share, inform, find partners and to inspire game devs to work with us as evangelists, early adopters, tool developers.
What will you learn:
- Hacking and disrupting gaming monopolies comes from the desire of expression and identifying with relatable content and people. This road hasn’t been paved yet for independent game developers, but its importance is massive.
- The role of “outsiders” and the international background, combined with a challenging upbringing equips people with resilience.
- How games shape the world around us and affect jobs, collaboration, creation bridging artists with technology to serve them.
Tell us about yourself and what you do?
My name is Mariana Muntean and I’m the CEO of Cinevva — an engine and a community, turning millions of creatives into game developers.
What does Cinevva mean?
- Cinevva means “To Be Someone” in Romanian and is at the core of our culture and vision to build the technology for the ordinary to become extraordinary. Our creators are “Cinevv-ers” — they are “Someone”.
About the gaming industry
- Gaming industry is one of the largest industries of all: bigger than movies and music and it generates over $200B in revenue yearly.
- The majority of games are built by big studios using professional, complex, closed engines like Unity, UE5, or proprietary engines.
- About 75% of the most successful studios in the industry are also located in the United States.
- The world is now building metaverses around the largest players and gatekeepers in the industry. However, metaverse is not a new concept. Any closed gaming or virtual environment providing an experience be that game or events is a metaverse, like CoD, Minecraft or Fortnite.
What is it like being a creative in a world of engineers?
- Tough. There never was a time with a bigger gap between artists and tech talent. Statistically there is 1 creative to 10–12 tech employees currently in software companies.
- Creative people are abstract people, while engineers need step by step instructions. And here I speak in absolutes. In our case, we are not a typical software company, we are game developers — we consider ourselves tech creatives.
- As a creative first, I think across software, processes and limitations, I see how things should work for my friends, for my users. Then I sketch, draw, design and re-design. Then I take it to my co-founder and he kills 90% of my ideas :-) and we start again.
What suggestions you have to bridge the gap between artists and engineers?
My experience comes from the business background first, however I’m also a game designer, animator, a self-taught painter, and game developer. The easiest way is to start with the basics:
- Brainstorm on a napkin, on a white board — the quality is less important, the message is key.
- Write down specifications and visions in as much detail as possible and share it with members of your team, friends in the industry, mentors. Get feedback. Iterate. Repeat. It’s scary, but just do it.
- For startup teams, I suggest to hire a professional UI/UX Designer when the idea is more or less solidified. Most often though, just a UI/UX Designer is not going to be enough. A team will need a product manager or someone with the vision of what the product should look like. If the team is small, however, I suggest the creative to do some research, draw and sketch out as much as possible and convey the message to your tech team as visually as possible. If you’re a writer, write a step by step user journey for the main user flows
- For engineers, my advice to be more accepting and patient. I might be wrong to generalize, but most artists don’t care about processes, Agile, Scrum etc…they just want to make things (see Gumroad’s article about makers).
- If you’re a CEO, hire more artists — they bring spontaneity, challenging conventional ways of thinking. An artist will always focus on emotion, perception, on the way the product or an experience makes them feel.
What’s the biggest piece of conventional wisdoms you rejected?
- Pre-defined concepts, like “artists” have to be “poor” to preserve their freedom. Who is an artist? How can one be tech and creative at the same time?
- The process of game making as a form of art isn’t to embrace all possible consumers, but rather the artist’s personal and communal identities channeled and empowered by the available tools. Anyone can make a game about anything, and it does not need to be accepted by gamers or engineers or investors.
- Game development is a powerful way to express dreams and imagination and giving the right tools — anyone can be a designer or game developer.
Why did you reject it?
- Corporate politics and its impact onto society isn’t impartial. Like any politics, the one who holds the power can make a case about their truth in his/hers favor. The truth is relative, but what is not, is facts. 0.1% of independent game developers ever achieve success.
- I re-think and simplify everything that gets in the way of creating.
- Ever since I was a child, I loved inventing games irl, bringing crowds together and play with my friends and cousins. I also like to change the rules for existing games, like chess. Have you tried playing chess moving pawns backwards, diagonally or introduce new cross genres rules? It messes with predefined ways of thinking, but it’s also entertaining.
- Do you know why the queen is the most powerful chess figure on the board? The queen is controlling 28 squares of the board and is combining the moves of the bishop, rook and the pawn, but the king holds the most value — the loss of king results in the end of game. The queen wasn’t always called the queen, but it is believed that with the rise of more powerful women in Europe in 15th century, it was re-named to Queen. I think the King is the user and startups should be Queens.
What was the result?
- Fast forward to today, I like to think that I’m still doing what I was doing in my childhood — work to me has to feel like play: experimenting, re-inventing, having fun. Today Cinevva has 5 employees, has raised $200K and is close to release its first templates to unlock games for over 30 million creatives globally,
What’s your most proud success?
Moving across the world to the United States and bringing Cinevva to life is a success.
- Having the chance to make a difference in mine and in the other people’s lives. Today game development is expensive and is designed for and by professional developers.
- Cinevva is fundamentally different from professional engines, by not looking claustrophobic and at the same time not limiting.
What did you do differently to make that happen?
Our Users — Our Devs
- Our users are like us — small and solo indie devs, level designers, tool developers, illustrators, UI/UX Designers. In game dev industry we call ourselves “Indies”.
- Our philosophy is simplicity meets power. Making games should be as easy as recording a video, inviting a team through links for collaboration in a place where publishing actually works and we make money.
Unlocking Game Development to the World
- I remember one day I asked my students from UT of Austin and their friends to download one engine of their choice and place a character in the scene. 1 out of 10 came close to the task, however unable to identify the library of assets. That says enough how confusing a professional framework can be. It can also be an intimidating space, as the majority of game devs are still dominated by white male. Less than 12% are female.
Source control and work with app versions
- Both are often linked with remote collaboration and provides a history of working projects’ versions. Today to do that you have to know where to go, what version of the application you need to download, be in sync with everyone, God forbid one member on the team is on the wrong version of the app — it becomes a problem. The entire team suffers and work becomes counterproductive. Moving forward with the project completion for “indies” becomes difficult, motivation is lost and now everyone is trying to solve the problem for the specific framework they chose.
- We aim for a a Google doc near real-time kind of experience: simple, effortless but fun!
Intuitive interaction. Clean wysiwyg interface
- When you open professional engines you don’t know what to do. You get an entire spectrum of controls and solutions and boxes in front of you. Time is the most important asset we have and not one of the tools focus on efficiency or on the user experience. Millions of creators are being intimidated by complex engines that suck the life out of us. Why would you to use a software that doesn’t care about your personal journey?
- Minimalistic design focused on one journey at a time. We reveal the controls you need, not all of them at the same time — there is a difference; smart controls to work on the character only, yet to keep you moving forward.
WebGL-Live Editing and In Web Publishing
- One of the solution to closed environments is embracing the opposite — the open standards and supporting open source, in web publishing and we are confident that we can solve this barrier as well with the better 5G connectivity.
- WebGL technology can be used across multiple platforms, including mobile devices, unlike other APIs that may be restricted to only PCs. So whether you’re in the comfort of your home or on the move, you can still create and publish.
- WebGL games use only a fraction of the CPU and GPU power that a traditional PC game would require. This means that users can multitask because WebGL games require only a browser window.
Level of polish and the ability to be less distracted
- Guided focused journey with suggestions along the way to tackle one genre at the time; for example in a narrative story-based game we will use certain sets of tech that is needed for that specific journey, like Open AI GPT3, while Dall:E — a neural language will generate custom assets for tech users focusing on building levels, logics, gameplays.
Decentralized content and the impact of content distribution
- Our target audience deals with various issues such as slow internet connection, lack of the right equipments and endless juggling of overwhelming tools. Decentralization allows users to share and collaborate on game projects online or offline within their own network.
Monétisation
- Leveraging both Web2 and Web3 technologies bridging the communities, marketplaces and opportunities together is important. Allowing our creators to take their content to and beyond PC, iOS or metaverses is our secret sauce.
Animation automation
- Background animation like parallax effects that can be applied to static images across gaming.
- Character animation and mechanics, that can animate characters in different ways like motion capture reading info from the camera
- Mirroring traditional game dev file formats, but also abstracting code locks, allowing interoperability and portability of assets across pretty much anywhere we want.
Working with Open Communities
- This industry is driven by passion and by dreamers. We understand how much work there is ahead of us and we only work with game developers from the communities who believe in this mission first. At the end of the day it is very rewarding to solve complex solutions together and take credit for it.
- We hope we can be accepted by open communities and get as much help from believers alike in a broader mission beyond proprietary, commercial solutions
- API integration in other platforms of programs.
Generative art, leveraging Open AI technology
- For our platform to work flawlessly we use open source game tools, but also develop our own technology using Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, and Open AI solutions, such as GPT3 for dialogues and DALL:E for text to image generation (btw, DALL:E is inspired from Salvador Dali’s way to create art)
What’s a failure you learned from? What went wrong? What do you do differently now as a result?
The sooner one realizes that building a company is a long journey, the easier one will make life for everyone including themselves. Facing my own fears along with Radical Truth & Acceptance was an important thing for letting my ego go. I learned that rather late. There is no ego in growth, but there’s continuous learning, certain humbleness and trust in the team and mentors supporting me.
If you could travel back 10 years, what would you do differently? What advice would you give a younger you?
- Carefree, but focused. I would’ve worried less about deadlines, races and corporate politics, learned hard core programming, genetics and more foreign languages.
- Automation that empowers meaning. 10 years ago, I was studying human psychology and behaviors. I knew the world is growing more and more tired of the repetitive things they’re doing because of the lack of passion in their lives, as well as maybe lack of aptitudes.
- I would’ve started Cinevva earlier.
What’s the biggest misconception about security in your company? How do you overcome it?
Cryptography, math and use of Web3. We use encryption in our infrastructure, for 2 reasons:
- P2P distributed content for online and offline team work and collaboration.
- Encryption. Beyond Bitcoin and crypto currencies, there is the science of cryptography. It allows to store data and keep it secure and private without revealing everything about a person’s identity. It is grounded in zero knowledge proof — a way to prove and convince that the statement is true without revealing any additional information about that statement.
Tell us about your team and how you met?
- It was in Spring 2020 when I met Oleg Sidorkin, Cinevva’s Co-Founder and CTO. We met at a networking event at a local accelerator in Austin. Oleg’s one of the rarest engineers you’ll meet — one who builds state-of-the-art technology, works with artists, leads talented tech teams, inspiring people to become better versions of themselves. Prior to his career at IBM Oleg used to be a game developer in the past has built engines and games before UE5 was an engine.
- We had long discussions about how the platform should look like — should it be for game devs or should it be for complete noobs. We believe in WebGL, but in the end, our Go-To-Market strategy and our users will tell us if we are on the right path.
- So far, we went through Mozilla Builders Incubator, Winning Mozilla Builders Award, featured on Bloomberg TV and Amazon Prime, Won Dell Startup Competition at SXSW in March and became a Techstars portfolio company in April 2022!
Do you think being an outsider in this industry helped you visualizing a better user experience for game devs?
- Yes, and no
- Yes, because I just focus on what makes sense and what doesn’t. I am the customer of the product Cinevva is building.
- No, because I don’t belong to corporate environments and can’t leverage that kind of support: monetary, networks’ or otherwise, which makes our journey more challenging
What is the future for gaming? How will people make money in this future ?
10 years ago I moved to the United States thinking I will become a game developer. I knew that the future is games. However, back then and even today making games is only for chosen ones. I believe the number of people that want to build games is bigger than we realize and game development for creatives without tech skills or code experience will change how we build and interact game content online and offline.
- First, creatives who were not able to build game content will be able to do so. And I’m not talking just any random content, we’re talking startup products, brands, using mechanics like simple parallax or other special effects, skins and mechanics to their content. This will result in a new type of worlds, simulations, characters and its applications — this will result into an explosion of meta game worlds!
- Second, when given that power we will discover abundant new ways of how people perceive and express creativity.
- Third, interoperability. We believe we’ll create new markets of absolutely new creatives to use the freedom of open networks to create their own Roblox or Minecraft going beyond closed, complex frameworks, engines or marketplaces. Our users own their content, be that art, game design, ideas, will have more monetizations avenues and hopefully will become more successful than the majority of existing indie game devs before them.
This time the process will not be controlled by corporations or big AAA studios only. The future is “indie”.
I’ve seen this quote somewhere and I wanted to end it on this note, hopefully to invite people to support us and collaborate with us:
“Game making is a personal matter, a communal symphony, or a chaotic rumble. Make a game, not for consumers or gamers, but your friends, family, colonized and oppressed communities, or just as your personal emotional dump. But it should always be more about the process than the results. Some use the process to address queerness, some address socio-economic issues, some are just having fun. Anyone can make a game about anything, and it does not need to be accepted by critics or professionals. Distribute it to your friends online or offline, display it through independent websites, anywhere can be your gallery if you want it to be.”
Listen to the episode on artists, building software here:
Thank you for your time!
Join Cinevva Discord Dev Community to interact, ask questions and build cool things to inspire others.
www.cinevva.com
