Stepico Games

07/21/2026

🎙️ How do you go from outsourcing to building your first original game?

Our Creative Director, Roman Yermakov, spoke with GameDev DOU about the making of Discovery: Rogue Planet — from the project’s early third-person concept to standalone VR development with Meta’s support.

The interview covers the realities of VR production, brutal optimization, unusual QA stories, cut mechanics, Ukrainian details, and what it takes to turn a small internal demo into a full game.

🇺🇦 Read the original interview on GameDev DOU: https://gamedev.dou.ua/articles/discovery-rogue-planet-interview/

🌍 Or read the English version on our blog: https://stepico.com/blog/space-western-in-vr-how-ukrainian-developers-are-building-a-sci-fi-game-with-metas-support/

07/17/2026

📅 Mark your calendars: Discovery: Rogue Planet lands on August 6 🥳

Yes, that's a few weeks later than planned. We took the extra time to make sure Rogax feels the way a hostile frontier planet should — dangerous, alive, and worth every minute of the wait.

What you're getting on day one: a full single-player sci-fi VR FPS campaign. A story-driven journey through abandoned settlements, guarded cities, forgotten mines, and swamps you'll wish you'd skipped — where distance matters, pressure is real, and every mission can turn into a fight for survival.

Coming to Meta Quest and SteamVR.

And between now and launch? Let's just say Rogax has more stories to tell — and some of them won't be told by us. Keep an eye out 👀

🔗 Wishlist on Meta Quest Store: meta.com/en-gb/experiences/discovery-rogue-planet/7786285568057652/
👾 Join the journey on Discord: https://discord.com/invite/btwyXTBFah

07/14/2026

Late summary for our webinar with IGEA 🇦🇺

Last Thursday, Andrii Titov and Evgenii Loginov spent an hour with the Australian games industry talking serious games — and the conversation went places we didn't expect.

The Q&A ran long, in the best way — questions came in from as far as Brussels. What got people talking:

🎯 How game studios team up with industries outside entertainment
🛰️ Why defence simulation is one of the fastest-moving areas for game tech right now
🤖 AI, XR, and data in adaptive training
🎮 Why game mechanics beat traditional instruction at teaching
🌏 What governments and universities can do to back gamedev innovation
💬 And what single-player reveals that multiplayer can't. (Hint: it's the same reason horror games die in co-op.)

One idea kept coming back through all of it — and it wasn't the tech. We turned the best moments from the talk into an article: why games are the most honest feedback instrument ever built, and what that means for training, simulation, and design: tinyurl.com/ytacb2vx

Or watch the talk in recoding to get a better grasp of the atmosphere: tinyurl.com/msnzxe7d

Thanks to Interactive Games & Entertainment Association (IGEA) for hosting, and to everyone who came with sharp questions. If serious games, simulation, or defence tech is your field — our inbox is open.

07/09/2026

🤔 Ever wondered why Spider-Man's Spectacular feels like Cyberpunk's Normal?

Difficulty labels are marketing. Difficulty design is math, psychology, and a lot of watching playtesters suffer ☠️

✍️ We just published a deep dive into how challenge actually gets built and unbuilt, when it goes wrong, and threw in the books worth reading — including the Witcher 3 team going door to door removing sausages from famine-stricken Velen: stepico.com/blog/video-game-level-design-and-difficulty-how-to-challenge-players-without-losing-them/

What's the game that made you swallow your pride and switch to Easy? No judgment. (Some judgment 🌚)

07/03/2026

🚀 June 2026 in Gamedev – What Moved the Industry

🎮 Summer Game Fest Takes Center Stage
June once again belonged to Summer Game Fest, now firmly established as gaming's biggest showcase season. The event featured dozens of world premieres, major franchise updates and new IP reveals, attracting a record audience and proving that June remains the industry's biggest stage for announcements.

🕹️ PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Bring Out the Big Guns
The showcase season didn't stop with SGF. Sony's State of Play, the Xbox Games Showcase, and Nintendo's June Direct all delivered major reveals, gameplay premieres and release dates. The packed schedule reinforced one thing: studios continue to rely on June to shape the conversation for the rest of the year.

📣 Big Franchises Steal the Spotlight
Among the biggest announcements were Final Fantasy VII: Revelation, Resident Evil: Code Veronica Remake, fresh gameplay from Marvel's Wolverine, and a release date for Gears of War: E-Day. Established IP continues to dominate showcase season, with publishers betting on recognizable franchises to drive excitement.

🎯 Indie Games Keep Their Seat at the Table
Alongside the AAA reveals, events like Day of the Devs, Wholesome Direct, and the Future Games Show highlighted hundreds of indie and AA titles. The variety of dedicated showcases shows that June isn't just for blockbuster announcements anymore; it's now an opportunity for studios of every size to find their audience.

💬 Which June reveal got you most excited — a blockbuster sequel, a brand-new IP, or an indie surprise? 👇

06/25/2026

Stepico is proud to be building Mane City on mobile together with the Loaded Lions 🦁🍾

Meet tycoon where every city block is an opportunity. Build businesses, upgrade properties, manage resources, and grow your empire from a single plot into a thriving metropolis 🏙️📈

📱 Mane City Mobile pre-registration is LIVE! Sign up now on iOS or Android and be ready to jump in the moment the game launches.

🍎 App Store: apps.apple.com/app/id6768579581
🤖 Google Play: play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.loadedlions.manecity

06/22/2026

🧠 What happens when game development meets real-world training?

On a webinar with IGEA — Australia's peak body for the games industry — Stepico's Andrii Titov (CEO) and Evgenii Loginov (Head of Production) will elaborate on the answer. Our teammates will walk through how game development expertise translates into real-world training tools, be it interactive simulations and XR environments or defence tech and drone operator education, especially:

🕹️ where serious games are already in use,
🇺🇦 what the Ukraine context brings to defence simulation,
🚁 and what opportunities exist for studios looking to move beyond entertainment.

If you work in gamedev, training, defence tech, or just want to understand where the industry is heading — this one's worth an hour of your time.

Serious Games in Practice: Turning Simulation into Training Impact
📅 July 2, 9–10 AM EEST/4–5 PM AEST | Online
🔗 Register on Eventbrite: https://tinyurl.com/238kzu39

06/18/2026

🌏 Building a planet from scratch is a strange job.

You start with a question: what happened here? And then you work backwards — geology, ecology, economy, crime. Who came to Rogax and why. What they found. What found them.

Today, you can see it for yourself.

We're sharing our new gameplay trailer for Discovery: Rogue Planet — a VR sci-fi story-driven shooter for Meta Quest 3, built together with Immersmind Studio

This is Rogax. This is what we've been building.

💻 Watch the trailer: youtube.com/watch?v=w5DS0e-ifWQ

📅 Coming July 9 on Meta Quest. Save the date!

👾 Want to follow the journey from the inside? Join our Discord: discord.com/invite/btwyXTBFah

An immersive, story-driven single-player VR shooter that blends intense gunplay with a deep story campaign and infinite weapon modifications. https://immersmind.com/ | 44 members

06/16/2026

Some places aren't meant to be found.
Some are.

👁 Coming soon.

06/11/2026

🌴 Summer Game Fest dropped 60+ announcements last week. Most coverage focused on the titles.

We looked at the patterns underneath — how studios are building, what engine choices are actually saying about platform strategy, and why Guild Wars 3 refusing a battle pass is a more interesting signal than it sounds 👀

In our new piece on the Stepico blog, we read through the lens of what SGF and Future Games Show actually revealed: https://tinyurl.com/2sbhz2df

❓ What was your biggest takeaway from this year's showcase season?

Summer Game Fest 2026 had the trailers and the hype. But watch the patterns across 40+ announcements and something more interesting shows up — here's what the showcase season actually tells us about where game development is going.