pterodon.com

09.09.2010 20:00
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PTERODON - Behind the Scenes

Chapter 1 - The PTERODON office
Brno is located in the Czech Republic. A country filled with professional game developers like the Hidden and Dangerous creators, Illusion Softworks, the Operation Flashpoint creators, Bohemia Interactive and last but not least, PTERODON, the creators of the highly successful Vietcong game franchise.

The PTERODON office is located on a side street in Brno, in the Czech Republic. While entering the secured car lot, you will be checked by personnel for ID and work allowances.

The main office is divided in nine rooms. Each room has internal specialists in every part of game developing (a close description of these will be written in the upcoming chapters). The head chiefs of PTERODON (Michal Janacek and Jarek Kolar) have their own rooms. Both of them are taking care of all projects, being developed by the firm, and are extremely busy each day at work, while many of the employees come to ask questions, tell suggestions, and so on.

Two rooms that are not counted at the office description is the highly needed bathroom and the frequently used kitchen, where PTERODON employees go for a meal if they are too busy to go out and eat lunch with the rest of the team.

The office is also filled with a lot of jokes which are hung at the nearby noticeboard that is placed in the big hallway. Employees go outside the building to get a smoke or to have a chat, while not working or taking a small break.

PTERODON was founded by Jarek Kolar and Michal Janacek in 1998. The first game that was released by the Company was named Hesperian Wars, which was a strategy game based in a fantasy world. With only four developers, who had worked on the title for eight months, the game did not achieve great successes for PTERODON.

In the year of 2000, the first 3D accelerated game developed by PTERODON was released named Flying Heroes (http://flyingheroes.pterodon.cz/). Due to a bigger team and a longer production time, this was the first serious game released by the development team. Although it did not gain the players' popularity, it did learn the team general facts about game developing, which they took use of for their next project.

In June 2002, a game was announced, which, later on, achieved a great success for PTERODON. It was named Vietcong (http://www.vietcong-game.com/). Although it had been worked on shortly after the release of Flying Heroes (2000) the first demo was released at the end of 2002. A community had immediately grown to cherish the game, and several fan sites were launched on the Internet right away.
PTERODON released the game in March 2003, and received a lot of feedback by the fans. Immediate work had then started on the first of many patches that were to be released.

Since then, a couple of official multiplayer maps, new game types and also an official add-on have been released.
Vietcong and Vietcong Fist Alpha is PTERODON's newest project to date, although work has started on a new project behind closed doors.

You can see the Vietcong release party pictures by clicking here and read the second chapter named "One week visit" here.