About the Artists

Daniil Copytsko: I’m a lead 3d artist at Heyworks, the developers of Pocket Troops. Our studio is located in Minsk, Belarus.

I’ve graduated Minsk University of Management as a designer of virtal environment in 2011. I did motion graphics for TV and some web stuff for about a year. I’ve also built a team of some of my friends who did awesome art and worked with them on different projects as a matte painter. Slowly I’ve decided to get in 3D modeling because it’s much easier and faster to block the future painting in 3D and then overpaint it. That was the moment I turned on the “3D side”. Unfortunately,the Force wasn’t strong with me. There were tons of things to study, it was a whole new world for me. Fortunately, with the help of Andrew Maximov (a good friend and awesome artist at Naughty Dog who lived in the house next to me until he moved to Canada) my first steps were much easier than I could imagine.

Kirill Kravchenko: I’m the animation artist. Long ago, I graduated my local college and got a degree in architecture and then I worked as engineer for about two years. It was clear that I had much more ambition in art than I had in the construction business, so I decided to leave. I’ve spent a year being unemployed working with Maya. I also learned some basics in modeling and got my first and last (for now) work in the game development industry as an environment artist. Back then Heyworks was a small company. In a year our company needed an animator and I offered myself. With a lack of sleep and lots of fun it became my main occupation.

Building a Story for the Environment

Throne Room was our first contest actually. We took part in some other competitions, but as a whole the Heyworks team works together and never as separate artists. The contest was incredibly hard! There was so much work on our main studio project that we had to work for 12-16 hours per day, sometimes more.