TDC #05: From Brackeys to PanGui with Andreas Gielov

Yuri Sokolov (00:00)
Hey there. So we just met with Andreas Gilov, who you might know from a small YouTube channel that he...

Amit Netanel (00:11)
Like a small indie niche channel.

Yuri Sokolov (00:13)
Yeah, yeah, you probably never heard of it's called Brakeys. Andres was part of managing this channel. And today he's leading the marketing division of Sirenix, which you might know as developers of Odin. what have we talked with him about?

Amit Netanel (00:35)
Well, we mainly try to focus on creating content for YouTube, specifically for game devs. ⁓ How deep can you go with that content? How do you keep on the treadmill? And then we pivoted into tools for pro developers and not pro developers. And we talked quite a lot about their new product called Pangui, which aims to basically revolutionize how UI is done in the industry. so yeah yeah

Yuri Sokolov (01:04)
not only in gaming industry, but as a whole, I'm a fan even before I got my hands on it because it's still in closed alpha. We talked about YouTube, we talked about Odin, we talked about Pangui and... I genuinely enjoyed this conversation and I hope you will enjoy as well.

Amit Netanel (01:25)
Yeah, we had lots of fun enjoy it.

Yuri Sokolov (01:33)
And we're back. we took a little vacation from recordings and we're back. And today we're with Andreas Gilov, who's currently VP marketing at Sirenix, the developers of Odin and previously ex YouTuber. I don't know if you can call you an ex YouTuber if you were a YouTuber. ⁓

Andreas Gielov (01:41)
You Hello. Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (01:58)
who worked with people like Brackeys and many others. Hi, Andres.

Andreas Gielov (02:05)
Hello, thank you for having me. looking forward to this.

Yuri Sokolov (02:09)
Yeah, yeah, well, we also and so usually we start with with some, you know, some some easy stuff and we talk about games of play. So have you any of you been playing something recently?

Andreas Gielov (02:20)
Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (02:26)
I feel like we cornered you with this because we didn't talk about that in the pre-recording.

Andreas Gielov (02:29)
I did watch one of your podcasts today, your earlier ones. ⁓ So I had a feeling that this would come up. haven't been playing that many games lately, honestly. Actually, for a few, would say, well, that's a little bit of a lie. I tend to mostly play video games when it's, you know, something social, you know, on the Switch with my brother or when we're back with family, we're playing what's it called, Mario Party or like all those smaller things. My girlfriend bought a Wii two years ago because she was like, well, that's more. It was during COVID.

Yuri Sokolov (02:57)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Andreas Gielov (03:14)
⁓ Yeah, but like the old school Wii, just because she loves playing Wii sports. sometimes they pull that out and just, so like nothing new and major. They're playing some more board games though. ⁓

Yuri Sokolov (03:15)
Yeah, a little bit. We in 2026, it's interesting to say the least. Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (03:38)
⁓ that's nice.

Andreas Gielov (03:40)
used to play a lot more video games, but also back then it was like League of Legends, you know, also the kind of playing with friends social, social aspect of it, right? Also, obviously...

Amit Netanel (03:51)
You were not a try hard pusher. Jungler, believe is the term. I can smell a jungler from a continent away.

Andreas Gielov (03:56)
⁓

Yuri Sokolov (03:56)
Not on the diamond, I assume.

Andreas Gielov (03:58)
I was a jungler, actually.

Yuri Sokolov (04:05)
Gang made.

Andreas Gielov (04:05)
Yeah. But, but yeah, also, well, I've played all the classics, played a lot of CS, Sores, little bit Go, you know, Half-Life, still one of the best campaigns I've played in my life. ⁓ But, but not, not so much lately. I have to admit that.

Yuri Sokolov (04:17)
Mm-hmm. I made anything new from you?

Amit Netanel (04:27)
Well, ⁓ during the vacation we took from a recording guy. Let's see. I was sick. I tried to ship a game. I had all sorts of trouble at home, so I didn't get to play as much as I wanted. but my my awesome boss bought me ⁓ Rogue Eli X, which has become my favorite way to crash after a workday. because it comes with Game Pass. So I've been going through indie games I haven't played and I also played some new ones. So depends on the day I could try two, three games that I didn't touch. The most recent one I played yesterday with my partner is Mixtape, which is really, really good. I didn't finish it yet. It's a three hour. I mean, the memes going around this game is like that they show you a controller without

Andreas Gielov (05:14)
Stay.

Amit Netanel (05:25)
any buttons because it's really, really light on gameplay. It's more of a interactive cut scene thingy, but it works. It simply works. It draws you in. The music is excellent. It's really sending around that the protagonist is really into making mixtapes. So it talks directly to the camera, breaks the fourth wall, says this song is this and that in it's supposed to give you the creeps and then a creepy scene starts.

Yuri Sokolov (05:31)
Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (05:55)
So it's really up my alley, it's really good.

Yuri Sokolov (05:57)
Yeah, you're kind of a magnet for all the weird stuff, at least in gaming.

Amit Netanel (06:01)
Yeah,

Andreas Gielov (06:01)
You

Amit Netanel (06:02)
I I mean, I also still play the gacha games, but it's more of a daily grind thing. Like I need to think about something might as well farm in the zone zero for five minutes, shut the game. ⁓

Yuri Sokolov (06:16)
I love how you started with, I don't have enough time. And then you say, ⁓ I play two, three games a day. Really nice.

Andreas Gielov (06:23)
Yeah, it was like...

Amit Netanel (06:24)
I mean, yeah, but not it's it's it's all shallow. OK, it's all shallow gameplay. ⁓ I've been watching ⁓ streams from there were a couple of new fighting games released lately. The Invisi Invincible versus one. Yeah. And new characters for Street Fighter and Guilty Gear and games that I like, but I suck at and I look at the amount of investment people.

Yuri Sokolov (06:38)
The invincible verses.

Amit Netanel (06:53)
put into those games. Like they know all the combos, they have everything memorized and that takes like a solid three hours of grind each day. In three hours, I could get all my gaming across like eight games in three hours.

Yuri Sokolov (07:06)
Yeah,

Andreas Gielov (07:06)
Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (07:08)
I'll be shorter than this. ⁓ I actually waited for Spider-Man 2 to become free. So now I finished Spider-Man 2 on my PlayStation and it was fun. It was better than Miles Morales one. And I think it was better than the first one. Have you played it?

Andreas Gielov (07:16)
Mmm.

Amit Netanel (07:31)
I did I even got a platinum trophy and I said

Andreas Gielov (07:31)
No, I am not.

Yuri Sokolov (07:34)
No, I'm never finishing ⁓ New Game Plus, never. And we can...

Amit Netanel (07:41)
Like the second I got the trophy, I said, what a colossal waste of time never doing this again.

Yuri Sokolov (07:46)
Ha Yeah, yeah, that's about it. So back to you, Andres. The big thing, I want to start with the big thing. So you were a part of Brekkies, right? Of the channel, not from the beginning, but ⁓ you were...

Andreas Gielov (08:01)
Yes. the past three years before we stopped producing ⁓ Unity content.

Yuri Sokolov (08:10)
Which was, how long was Brekkie's channel alive before you joined?

Andreas Gielov (08:16)
⁓ but before, don't know, maybe five, five years, something like that. yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (08:23)
five years. So, and I, I read that you and Asbjorn, ⁓ I hope I pronounced it correctly, ⁓ Asbjorn.

Andreas Gielov (08:31)
A lot better than a lot of foreigners.

Amit Netanel (08:34)
The most.

Yuri Sokolov (08:36)
Okay, because I have Russian roots, so I can't say things like yo. ⁓ So ⁓ you were familiar with Asbjorn from the age of one? You knew him from...

Andreas Gielov (08:43)
Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep. Yes, well, you've done your research. I don't know how you know that, but that's true.

Amit Netanel (08:54)
You dead? You dead?

Yuri Sokolov (08:56)
It's something you spoke about in one of the podcasts you and him went a couple of years back.

Andreas Gielov (09:02)
That's many years ago. Yes, kudos to your research there. But that's absolutely true.

Yuri Sokolov (09:08)
Actually, it was pretty easy because not a lot of things come up online when you when I search you so I can.

Amit Netanel (09:12)
you

Andreas Gielov (09:14)
That's yeah, I've tended to keep more in the shadows actually. So that would make sense. But yes, that's true. He was my old first friend ever. And the other way around as well. We lived in the same street. And then, ⁓ yeah, that's kind of the story of how we knew each other. ⁓

Yuri Sokolov (09:36)
Interesting. how did you end up being part of the channel? So he was doing it for five years you say and then out of the bloom you join. How this happened?

Andreas Gielov (09:49)
Well, the channel scaled and grew a lot in the maybe like year before I joined and he wanted someone to basically, it can be, you're a YouTuber, it can be a lot of pressure to run a YouTube channel, but still. So he wanted someone to actually come and help run it.

Yuri Sokolov (10:07)
a small fish.

Amit Netanel (10:10)
For now. For now.

Andreas Gielov (10:16)
with them and kind of share some of that, you know, I guess.

Yuri Sokolov (10:20)
Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (10:23)
could go into details like what goes into maintaining a YouTube channel because the way I see it Yuri just sits around all day you know playing Baldur's Gate and occasionally says ⁓ wait maybe I should do a video about reflection turns on the camera talks uploads I'm exaggerating of course but that's the process basically

Andreas Gielov (10:27)
Ugh.

Yuri Sokolov (10:40)
Yeah, that's exactly how I do it.

Andreas Gielov (10:44)
Yeah. so quickly finish on why, why I joined, he needed basically someone to, ⁓ also run the business side of the things. Cause he, he loved doing tutorials and everything. ⁓ so, so I came in and did all the communications, sponsorships, partnerships. ⁓ also a lot of the, the, ⁓ content creation, ⁓ fun story. We, used to do film back when we were, you know, eight years old and stuff like that, bought a small green screen. And so we all just been playing around with that. Right.

Yuri Sokolov (11:10)
Mm-hmm.

Andreas Gielov (11:14)
⁓ But what goes into that was a question, right? What goes into content creation and being a YouTuber? ⁓ A lot. A lot. It's a lot of people think that, you know, it's just well, you you create some content here and there, then you upload and if you do a right, then you're gonna, you know, just blow up and become this big channel that's Unfortunately, that's not how it goes. Well, yes, that's true, because otherwise everyone would and then that wouldn't make sense, you know.

Yuri Sokolov (11:45)
Unfortunately, that's not how it goes. I would say Currently YouTube is over saturated with AI and it's already making things a lot harder to climb ⁓ and also I see on Reddit, on subreddits for new YouTubers and stuff like that there is not a single day going by where ⁓ some kid that plays video games and he'd record on his OBS during the play

Andreas Gielov (12:14)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (12:26)
complains that he doesn't have enough viewers. So basically every kid today trying to go to YouTube and there's not a lot of ⁓ space on the homepage anymore, thanks to short. So it's all became a lot harder. So thankfully it's not like you're dropping a video and it blows up.

Andreas Gielov (12:48)
No, that is true. ⁓ And that kind of, I guess, takes me into the next thing I was going to say. think at least what I have kind of found as a success is always, well, it's more than one thing, but quality over quantity. Definitely. I think that goes recognized. I'm not saying that you should only post once a year and polish a video for a year.

Amit Netanel (12:48)
Hmm.

Andreas Gielov (13:16)
Because the second most important pillar, would say, is consistency, right? Your viewers need to know what they can expect from you. And it's that second pillar that also makes it so, I would say daunting sometime to run a successful channel. Because you have, I don't know how much we have, like ⁓ a couple of, back when we, ⁓ I didn't, I left Brackeys when we stopped producing Unity content.

Yuri Sokolov (13:22)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Andreas Gielov (13:45)
We had a little over a million subscribers. That's over a million, maybe even more people every single week ⁓ sitting there expecting you to deliver. It's not like you're down with the flu. A million people aren't going to know that you're down with the flu. They're going to expect that videos to come out. That's also why it can be stressful at times. ⁓ Also, why I think it's ⁓

Amit Netanel (13:51)
That's a crazy reach.

Yuri Sokolov (13:58)
Yep.

Andreas Gielov (14:14)
It can be very important to bring other people into to kind of share that experience and that workload that I'd say pressure with, right? So that you're in the same boat with someone.

Yuri Sokolov (14:28)
There are people like Codemonkey that do everything themselves.

Andreas Gielov (14:31)
Yes, and

Amit Netanel (14:32)
Yeah.

Andreas Gielov (14:33)
I know CodeMonkey very well ⁓ and how he does it. ⁓ He's an absolute machine. He just pumps content out there and yeah, he's a great guy.

Amit Netanel (14:46)
Me and Yuri watched his Day in a Life video and first of all the guy is like as you said a machine like in the most like visceral sense he's powerlifting and walking a huge amount of dogs every day just to be pumped and yeah.

Andreas Gielov (14:50)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I didn't know that.

Yuri Sokolov (15:06)
No, working in a dog shelter or something, goes to clean in a dog shelter, that's what it was.

Andreas Gielov (15:09)
okay.

Amit Netanel (15:12)
He also owns a dog so I think he needs to walk him around like twice a day at least so it's a literal treadmill like to make the content to answer all the questions he comments like on individual comments and ⁓ yeah, full time job.

Yuri Sokolov (15:16)
Yeah.

Andreas Gielov (15:18)
Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (15:29)
Well, it's a job. The moment it becomes

Andreas Gielov (15:29)
No, I don't.

Yuri Sokolov (15:32)
a job, you have to maintain it. It's not there for me. I'm not sure I can get there anytime. Today it's really hard for tech guys. Basically all tutorials ended. Programming tutorials, there's no programming tutorials on YouTube anymore.

Andreas Gielov (15:52)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (15:59)
Even the new guys are not starting or not blowing up and then quitting. And the guys that did that before they stopped doing tutorials. kind of like doing asset reviews and maybe news breakdown and stuff like that. So unless I'm willing to go there, probably I'll stay with a small, a small amount of followers, but I'm fine with that for now.

Andreas Gielov (16:15)
Yeah. Yeah, I've seen that shift. Well, you've been doing pretty well, Juri. So you've done quite good. ⁓ How long have you had the channel?

Yuri Sokolov (16:38)
I had the channel since September, so a little bit over half a year.

Andreas Gielov (16:41)
then you've done amazing. It's, don't know how many subscribers you're at right now. can't. Yeah, that's that's really good. In what eight months. That's

Yuri Sokolov (16:45)
13,000

Amit Netanel (16:47)
No.

Yuri Sokolov (16:55)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But but I'll tell you I'll tell you the truth that I, I come from a mobile game development. So marketing is not something strange to me. So when I started, I, I'm not doing it for money. the moment I started doing YouTube channel, I didn't plan on making revenue from it. I just kind of wanted to do it. And as a hobby, I also wanted to do it for someone so

Andreas Gielov (17:03)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (17:25)
I decided that I'm willing to pay some amount of money to advertise. Not buy bots or something. YouTube have the promotion button, which is an awful, awful thing. think you know, Andreas firsthand, how awful the internal YouTube promotion because it doesn't let you target the correct audience. It just kind of...

Andreas Gielov (17:29)
Yeah. It's. It's actually after my time as a full-time YouTuber. It didn't exist back then. So I haven't, I don't have too much experience with it.

Yuri Sokolov (17:58)
So basically it's a stripped down version of Google Ads, which I assume you're familiar with, but in Google Ads you can actually fine tune the audience you're targeting. there you kind of, now you want people who interested in web development and games? Sure. That's basically the, you select the language, a country and couple of categories. So not granular. And

Andreas Gielov (18:02)
Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (18:28)
I kind of went with, they show you the numbers. So you pay a hundred bucks, you will get roughly this amount of views and subscribers. And then you see, okay. In mobile ⁓ game development, when you market things, you kind of usually go first to cheap markets. You test there and then you move to US, Canada.

Andreas Gielov (18:52)
Yeah.

Amit Netanel (18:53)
Mm-hmm. where the CPI is above 30 in some genres nowadays.

Yuri Sokolov (18:58)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I experimented

Andreas Gielov (19:01)
Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (19:04)
in India, ⁓ Brazil and Mexico and got a lot of subscribers from there. So I advertised there and then I learned, I'm not a marketing person, I'm a developer. Then I learned kind of the culture in those countries regarding, so if you take a Western, ⁓ If you take Western people, they treat subscription like, like, I don't know, like something serious, like a commitment. Yeah, I commit if I press on a subscribe button, I commit to it in ⁓ India, Brazil, Mexico, maybe other countries. ⁓ It's they press it lightheartedly. Just OK. It's it's a nice video. It's an I don't know. It's a nice five seconds of the of the video. I'll subscribe.

Andreas Gielov (19:37)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (19:58)
And that's it. And then you get huge audience that does not engage with your content. And it also triggers the YouTube algorithm telling me his subscribers are not interested in his content. Probably he's doing something wrong. So it kind of the amount of subscribers took me back. It's not given me a bonus. So I stopped. I stopped promoting. I think.

Andreas Gielov (20:02)
Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (20:03)
Hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (20:27)
in the end of December, January, something like that. And since then, the growth was really slow but steady. And I see I developed an extension that shows me not only the total amount of subscribers gained, but also how much subscribers, how much people unsubscribed and how much subscribe. And I'm looking at the data and I see that every day people, every time I release a video,

Andreas Gielov (20:36)
Yes.

Yuri Sokolov (20:57)
ton of people unsubscribe because it's kind of reminding them, ⁓ there's this guy and you don't know who he is and... yeah.

Amit Netanel (21:03)
I got tired of this notification. Yeah.

Andreas Gielov (21:06)
Yeah. And I would argue that it's actually somewhat ⁓ worse to have, let's say 10,000 subscribers or half of them aren't really interested than having 3000 very interested subscribers because then your viewer retention goes way down. And that at least for many years, I feel like it's changing all of the time right now with the algorithm and all that.

Yuri Sokolov (21:19)
Mm-hmm.

Andreas Gielov (21:35)
But viewer retention has been one of the very important ones, right? So if you have a high viewer retention, then that's quality stamp from YouTube saying, OK, this must be a good video. Let's throw it out to more people. That can be very hard to do if you have a watered down subscriber base, for sure. I know other large.

Yuri Sokolov (21:40)
Mm-hmm. That's

Andreas Gielov (22:05)
creators in the space who did collaborations with some gamers or whatnot that played their indie games. I don't know if they doubled their subscribers, but they gained maybe like 100,000 subscribers from it. And they're like, ⁓ that's amazing. And they're like, nope, nope, it's not. You think it's amazing right at the beginning, but it is the wrong audience. And that's also very important. Also, let's talk about sponsorship deals, right? ⁓

Yuri Sokolov (22:12)
Mm-hmm. No, that's not.

Amit Netanel (22:25)
It's the wrong audience.

Andreas Gielov (22:34)
If let's say you go, I don't know, Mr. Beast, whatever, that's a bad example because he's, know, he has a lot. that like kind of a general, what do you say? He caters to the general public, I would say, basically. If entertainment, exactly. And if you're a product.

Yuri Sokolov (22:55)
Yeah, yeah, Entertainment, it's...

Andreas Gielov (23:01)
And you go on there, you get a sponsored slot or whatever. It might be 1 % that's actually interested in your product, probably even less. if, let's say, a game development tool or something like that went to promote on one of these general public channels. But if you go and promote on your channel, it might be 90 % who are actually interested. So suddenly, you're also probably

Yuri Sokolov (23:21)
Mm-hmm.

Andreas Gielov (23:31)
paying a good bit less here because less subscribers. Well, this is another point to argue because I would actually argue that if you have a niche audience, your sponsorships are worth a lot more. So you can't really compare numbers there. But yeah, I could go on forever.

Yuri Sokolov (23:37)
Right. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's why we're here.

Amit Netanel (23:55)
So I have a question for you both, actually, regarding this. The issue ⁓ for me is I'm also coming from a mobile development background. And my understanding around marketing is that there is a machine that you put money into, and it advertises your game to other gamers that like the genre that your game belongs to. And they come and they play your game. So how do you do that with? human beings that are not in the platform like they do in mobile game ads. How do you reach that audience that you really want as specifically game, someone that caters to game developers, which is not gamers?

Andreas Gielov (24:42)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (24:42)
So you're jumping to to Sirenix work, I assume.

Amit Netanel (24:46)
Actually no, I'm still on YouTube but it's also relevant for Sirenix

Yuri Sokolov (24:47)
No?

Andreas Gielov (24:51)
⁓ I would say... So you're talking more specifically about paid advertising, right? Or no?

Amit Netanel (24:59)
Any kind of like I I I so don't I'm so unfamiliar with how do you reach new audiences with content like the way the way that that you and I advertised our previous podcast was advertised on the local Facebook groups advertised on LinkedIn. That's it, like we don't know how to how to reach new people. At least I don't.

Andreas Gielov (25:01)
Okay. Well that's...

Yuri Sokolov (25:13)
We didn't.

Andreas Gielov (25:20)
That's it. No, and this is where I think... ⁓ Especially with YouTube, right? ⁓ I think it goes a lot more into organic marketing as you're talking about there. I've never experienced with any paid marketing for YouTube or anything like that. I also did join when we already had quite a big following ⁓ and all of the clients that I've worked with were also large YouTubers already had that following. the goal has never really been for me to...

Yuri Sokolov (25:31)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Andreas Gielov (25:57)
like reach new audiences or stuff like that, like on a marketing, ⁓ in a marketing way, I want to say. But that's where YouTube is a fantastic platform and also a very, very platform that can punish you a lot. Because if you do great content, like good quality, if you keep consistency,

Yuri Sokolov (25:59)
Yeah.

Andreas Gielov (26:22)
⁓ and, and the third pillar that, that I could probably mention is stick, stick, stick to what people expect from you. Right. If, if you're, if you're doing content on, I don't know, ⁓ Unity one day and the next day you're, you're doing, I don't know, let's play. And the, the, the other day you're, you're sharing about some, I don't know, ⁓ AI tools or like you have to pick like three to four different formats. stick to them because people will be a lot more likely to subscribe if they actually know exactly what to expect from your channel.

Amit Netanel (27:00)
Is

Yuri Sokolov (27:00)
Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (27:02)
that why all the youtubers now have ⁓ two three channels with different purposes? Yeah, we're trending the other way now

Yuri Sokolov (27:08)
I think they started to merge things. this, I.

Andreas Gielov (27:15)
You know, I don't know about the extra channels. I've never really under well, if you're extremely big, right? I have like, I don't know, 50 million subscribers, I kind of get it that you can do stuff like that. for I never really understood why that is. ⁓ I guess you can do some cross promotion there. if you want to go off brand, then I get it. Is that what you mean? If you want to do some... Yeah.

Amit Netanel (27:44)
Kind of, kind of like,

Yuri Sokolov (27:44)
Yeah.

Amit Netanel (27:46)
yeah, because usually what I see now ⁓ from the content creators I actually follow is that they have their exactly as you said, you do game dev videos and maybe life updates or the game I'm working on that updates and everything like extra goes into the second channel, like all the live updates, all the shorts, ⁓ weird experiments, stuff like that.

Andreas Gielov (28:02)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (28:10)
Do not confuse

Andreas Gielov (28:10)
Yes.

Yuri Sokolov (28:11)
the algorithm. Yeah, it's understandable. But going back to your work at Wreck-Ease, how many people were you? How many people were behind the scenes?

Andreas Gielov (28:14)
Yes.

Amit Netanel (28:15)
Okay.

Andreas Gielov (28:18)
Mm-hmm. Well, ⁓ me and Ashburn full time and partners in the company. And then we had four to five part time people. ⁓ Just the last year of me being there, we hired a more full time person actually writing videos as well, ⁓ which was... ⁓

Yuri Sokolov (28:48)
Mm-hmm.

Andreas Gielov (28:50)
That was amazing. Well, some of it, right? Because we did a lot of different, ⁓ we had some different formats, the tutorials, then we did some, ⁓ it's this many years ago, then we did some, what do you call them?

Yuri Sokolov (28:52)
writing the the the writing process Mm-hmm.

Andreas Gielov (29:14)
either updates or let's build like a highlight of a game jam or something like that. But then we also did some more ⁓ broader ⁓ video topics like ⁓ one that I wrote was the basic principles of game design, for example. That's something that by just doing your research, you could get a really good idea of it and it didn't really ⁓ require all of... ⁓

Yuri Sokolov (29:18)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Andreas Gielov (29:44)
experience like very ingenuity knowledge per se was more general topics. I remember our writer did absolutely fantastic video on post processing as well. And all of these so we had, ⁓ it was all a joint effort. I mean, even though I wasn't technically meant to be creating that much content, I still ended up, know, pitching in here and there, I was always the guy behind the camera and whatnot, right? So it was

Yuri Sokolov (29:49)
Mm-hmm.

Andreas Gielov (30:12)
It was small enough team so that everyone still had something to do with each video. then we had, yeah, exactly. And then we had a couple of part-time video editors as well, which who were all our friends. So it was, it was some very fun years. It was, it was good.

Yuri Sokolov (30:18)
It's like a startup.

Amit Netanel (30:20)
Yep, many hats.

Yuri Sokolov (30:33)
Yeah, yeah, I assume working with with best friends on the on shared passion. It's it's awesome

Andreas Gielov (30:39)
Yes, and we had a little office right in the middle of the city and right next to a park and it was just good.

Amit Netanel (30:47)
I got to tell you, ⁓ that period of breakies is something that's still, I guess, the number side, is still generating views. But it's something that struck a chord with many, ⁓ I dislike that word, but aspiring game developers or juniors. Let's say juniors. I like it way more. ⁓ So it really ⁓ talked to them on a very personal

Yuri Sokolov (30:48)
Yeah.

Andreas Gielov (31:08)
Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (31:16)
level that you can do this okay let's let's go step by step and then scale it up it's not immediately like hitting you in the on the head with of the jargon and all the complexities and that's i think one of the main factors that break is became like a kind of a household name in the industry like when when when you restarted people asked him are you going to do a break is like they they used it as a noun okay

Andreas Gielov (31:19)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (31:37)
Yeah, yeah, I have to say that.

Andreas Gielov (31:37)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (31:46)
Actually,

Andreas Gielov (31:46)
that's funny.

Yuri Sokolov (31:47)
I myself, I come from traditional development. Initially, I worked a couple of years as a developer and then I discovered that there is game dev environment, right? So you can actually build games, something I dreamt about since being a child. And I decided to kind of quit my job, take... my savings and start learning Unity. And Brekkies was one of the channels that led me through those years, like for many people ⁓ out there. So yeah, first of all, thank you from me to you and to Asbjorn. ⁓

Andreas Gielov (32:31)
You have to thank Ashburn a little bit more on that, I think. But you're welcome.

Yuri Sokolov (32:35)
Yeah, yeah, I assume. I assume it is by the way, they. So at the end, when you joined and maybe later towards the end. It was already a company, right? You were your it was a business. So were there KPIs involved? Were you putting any KPIs on on a new video or how much videos you're planning to release or?

Andreas Gielov (33:04)
No, not. Not necessarily. mean, we were doing well enough to not having to really be afraid of not being able to pay salaries or something like that. So we weren't kind of living on the edge like that. So what we mostly focused on was just generating great quality content and being innovative. Because that was, I think, what we kind of identified as the key to success for us, right? We wanted to bring good content to people. ⁓ And then if we manage to succeed there, then the rest kind of came together all by itself, right? And I think that's what a lot of people starting YouTube miss. They're like so focused on the numbers, like how do we game the system? How do I game the algorithm? That they kind of lose track of why they're doing it, right?

Yuri Sokolov (33:41)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Andreas Gielov (34:07)
Like they're doing it to, connect with people and, and it obviously depends what kind of, can only speak to the, to the kind of learning side of YouTube, because that's what I'm most familiar with. Uh, but, but you're, it is, it is, it is a very different thing. Um, yeah. So everything I say here, if you're a, uh, a streamer that plays games or anything and don't know what I'm talking about, that might be why.

Yuri Sokolov (34:20)
Yeah, because it's a different thing, right?

Andreas Gielov (34:36)
But no, I think... ⁓ some people who are so obsessed with just getting the views and getting the subscribers, they can lose track of what's actually going to get them there, which are some of the things that I've already touched on. And not only, you know, researching what are the best thumbnails to get me more clicks or I mean, those are obviously things that you have to consider too. I mean, sometimes you would spend an entire workday on a thumbnail because it's, it's important.

Yuri Sokolov (34:50)
Mm-hmm. ⁓ don't get me started on that. do a whole day, I do thumbnails and they all look like ass.

Andreas Gielov (35:10)
Yes, it's... ⁓

Amit Netanel (35:11)
Hahaha

Andreas Gielov (35:18)
Yep. No, no, no, I haven't. I think your thumbnails are pretty good.

Amit Netanel (35:20)
Aren't they supposed to be? You're supposed to be surprised by something, right? Or intrigued.

Yuri Sokolov (35:25)
That's the thing, it doesn't

Andreas Gielov (35:25)
Jen.

Yuri Sokolov (35:27)
feel natural in this niche. In this niche it doesn't feel natural to start with the surprise phase.

Andreas Gielov (35:34)
No. And,

Amit Netanel (35:34)
You

Andreas Gielov (35:36)
and that's, that's, ⁓ I think that's a turn that YouTube has taken, ⁓ the past couple of years, you know, it's, it's become a lot less forgiving, ⁓ if you don't follow the meta, I want to say like, because now apparently every, every single thumbnail needs to have a face in it, like over to the side like that, or like, it wasn't like that.

Yuri Sokolov (35:57)
Yeah.

Andreas Gielov (36:01)
always. So that seems to be, you have to do that right now. I haven't created videos that and uploaded to YouTube. Obviously, I've done some with Cyrenics and all of that. we're going to put phases in it. That's just it because it's learning material, right? Like in documentation and stuff like that. we're not trying to game the algorithm like that.

Yuri Sokolov (36:14)
Mm-hmm. I think there's still place for faceless channels. Like for example, there's a great, great channel in our niche, Gitamand. So I forgot the name of the guy. And here's the thing, I don't even remember the name of the host of the channel because it's a faceless channel. He starts without a face, just his voice in the background and he does stuff. And same with the thumbnail. So a little bit.

Andreas Gielov (36:40)
you

Yuri Sokolov (36:56)
AI background, I don't know, he takes it from somewhere, puts a text in there, but he already has a solid following. So you see his, for example, if you compare, he has, I think 30,000 subscribers and yeah, and each his, his video performs usually better than, for example, if you take videos by code monkey,

Andreas Gielov (37:07)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (37:15)
Well, actually close to 40 right now. Grew recently.

Yuri Sokolov (37:26)
who has half a million subscribers 700,000 subscribers Git amend

Andreas Gielov (37:26)
Peace. Who's this? yeah. Yes.

Yuri Sokolov (37:37)
So I don't remember if in bare numbers he is performing better, I think he is, but in percentage he is performing better. So he has a solid following and at this point it doesn't really matter if he has a face, doesn't have a face, if his thumbnails are the top of the line. It's kind of... people want to hear what he has to say and...

Andreas Gielov (37:44)
Mm-hmm. Yep. yeah, for sure. Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (38:06)
In my channel, I decided that I put my face out there. I don't know if it was a good decision, not a good decision, but I generally try to do stuff that I enjoy. So I enjoyed, for example, brekkies. I enjoyed the face there. It felt personal to me. So that's what I'm doing, why I'm doing it. I'm taking 20 seconds at the start, 20 seconds at the end to talk directly to the viewers.

Andreas Gielov (38:18)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (38:35)
Some will appreciate it, some will not.

Amit Netanel (38:37)
Yeah, think if I really address I really like the term meta, like the meta build for YouTube video nowadays is to grab the attention through like some something relatable and something human. OK, and that goes against something I wanted to ask about, which might segue us into the next part of your career. But I'll start with the story.

Andreas Gielov (38:44)
Yeah. Yeah. Mm hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (39:06)
OK, it's going to be a bit of a tangent, but I have the structure. Yuri, don't worry. ⁓ Yuri, when we used to do our previous podcast, ⁓ we talked a lot about why are we doing this. We tried to improve and raise the overall proficiency level, ⁓ technical proficiency level, of game developers around us. Because we felt many ⁓ new.

Andreas Gielov (39:06)
Mm-hmm. you

Amit Netanel (39:34)
junior game developers are approaching from the game design side and treat code more of a hurdle to go through. And something to be, ⁓ know, something they need to survive and not something to be. Yeah, not something that they should hone as a craft and that it will pay dividends to them. And we talked about how to how to.

Yuri Sokolov (39:51)
Something like an afterthought.

Andreas Gielov (39:53)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (40:03)
in highlight this idea through, you know, both through technical knowledge and also like ⁓ stories about things we had to encounter in our work. Okay. And why our knowledge was helpful in that scenario or why the lack of advanced tools created ⁓ sorry states. Okay. We mean, you already have

Andreas Gielov (40:10)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (40:30)
Lots of stories about projects that failed because of technical reasons and not because of a lack of passion or foresight or whatever. So we talked a lot about how to actually pass this idea and everything we managed to think of at the time ⁓ was not really marketable. Like I remember saying to Yuri, well, You had to live through my last year to really understand the topic I'm talking about. So I can't really make ⁓ a one hour lecture about it. won't deliver the impact of why the I is necessary. Okay.

Andreas Gielov (41:10)
And what can you just sum up? exactly was it that you're trying to get across?

Amit Netanel (41:17)
What I'm trying to get across, the most of the game dev content I see nowadays on YouTube has nothing to do with being a better developer. It has more to do with ⁓ I would classify like two things like challenges. OK, you have Blackthorn prod what is doing with the chain letter of a game developed by 100 people, which is entertaining, but it has no technical value, it's more of entertainment. And you have ⁓ overviews of either new stuff that comes out. For example, this week you're going to have a ⁓ Unity AI is going to be the highlight. Every time I refresh the front page, there's a new video about it. And it's nothing ⁓ I would classify high-browly and the

Andreas Gielov (41:48)
Mm-mm. Yes.

Yuri Sokolov (41:59)
Unity AI everywhere.

Andreas Gielov (42:01)
yeah, that's all over the place.

Amit Netanel (42:16)
⁓ risking myself as a to put myself as a as a I don't know I can think of something family-friendly to say never mind it's it's not it's shallow okay the content feels shallow and it feels that it's not delivering what I would want out of a video but

Andreas Gielov (42:26)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (42:35)
because deep

Andreas Gielov (42:36)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (42:36)
content doesn't pay the bills.

Amit Netanel (42:39)
That's right. That's

Andreas Gielov (42:40)
And it takes...

Amit Netanel (42:40)
the problem. And that's why every time Yuri said, OK, we should develop the podcast into a YouTube channel, I said, never mind. Too much work. Too much work for me and not as much as a pay as I would want. And how do you even do deep content nowadays on YouTube? Is that possible?

Andreas Gielov (42:48)
Hahaha

Amit Netanel (43:08)
And I tell you why I ask you this. I don't want ⁓ to ask something that you guys don't have any input on, because Sirenix, and specifically Pangui, is a product for pros. It's not for small scale projects. It's for big projects that need lots of editor tools.

Andreas Gielov (43:11)
huh. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well... Well, back to Differ a little bit, but sure, it definitely thrives very well in big projects too. But yes, you're right to some extent.

Amit Netanel (43:35)
Okay. So how?

Yuri Sokolov (43:45)
I think it would be harder to put it... Okay, so I'll talk as a, ⁓ let's say, technical founder. If I have a team of 10, 20, 30 people, it would be a lot harder to convince me to jump on the bandwagon and take a new, ⁓ brand new technology. On the other hand, if I'm a small indie studio, if I'm a solo developer, it would be...

Andreas Gielov (44:07)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (44:14)
a lot easier to convince me that here's an awesome shiny tool that you should take. Right? So it's, don't think that Pangooie is directed towards, at least not currently towards the broader audience, right? Correct me if I'm wrong. I mean, not broader audience, big companies. Yeah.

Andreas Gielov (44:20)
Mm-hmm. We're talking about a lot of different things right now. We're talking about both Odin and we're also talking about Pankui. So maybe we should take one at a time. I mean, we're developing both, because I think a lot of what has made Odin so widely adopted. Now we're talking about Odin has made Odin so

Yuri Sokolov (44:40)
Yeah, yeah, I also think...

Amit Netanel (44:40)
Yeah, take us, take us away. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (44:55)
Yeah, yeah, we kind of jumped there.

Andreas Gielov (44:58)
So, so, so widely adopted and also larger corporations and like 10,000 of studios out there. Right. ⁓ It's also the fact that a lot of people started using it as a sole developer when they came into the company, they were like, I can't, I don't want to use unity without it. Right. And then, you know, that's, that's also, have a, we have a completely free, ⁓ like literally

Amit Netanel (45:22)
Sounds familiar.

Andreas Gielov (45:27)
completely free student license with full features and everything. So if you're a student, you can just go and download it and use it for free as long as you're a student. And so a lot of universities also have curriculums teaching Oden out there, actually built into their coding courses or game development courses, it would probably be.

Yuri Sokolov (45:51)
Mm-hmm.

Andreas Gielov (45:55)
I have a feeling that that's also a lot of the times how it's being brought into two companies. And that's also on a marketing side. That's a, that's something that we're focused on, right? you know, you know, all of the advocates out there, ⁓ cause they, that's you. There's, there's never ⁓ what.

Yuri Sokolov (46:15)
Do you have one? Do you have one? Developer advocate at Cyrenics?

Amit Netanel (46:21)
We have a developer advocate program in the Sirenix.

Andreas Gielov (46:25)
not like that. was just talking about all of the, like the users who also advocate for, yeah, out there. I think that's been, at least in our early years also, a huge part of how Odin became as popular as it is. Right. And we also want to, we want to try and do things a little bit different. We don't just want to be throwing money at ads and throwing it in front of people.

Yuri Sokolov (46:29)
⁓ okay.

Andreas Gielov (46:51)
And I think there's a lot more value to get something recommended by a friend than seeing it on your Facebook front page.

Yuri Sokolov (46:56)
Mm-hmm. I have a fun story about Odin in a professional environment. So me and Amid here, we worked at a company called, and I'll say the name Jelly Button. It was an amazing company. I don't know if you were familiar with it. Mobile games, we developed games like Pirate Kings, Board Kings, I don't know. Basically the company that created the genre of Monopoly Go and Coin Master.

Andreas Gielov (47:03)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (47:30)
So we were working there and the company had the license for Odeon, the old one, the Odeon used to be only on asset store and the license were not per seat basis at some point. And then you kind of switch. and when, when Serenic switched to per seat licenses, they said that anyone who has the old version can keep using it. And at that time,

Andreas Gielov (47:57)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (48:00)
Jelly Button was bought by Platica, that is this huge ⁓ corporate system and you can't really ⁓ and you don't really want to go through all the circles of hell to get an approval or to purchase something and people kind of felt that okay the last version that we can use is good enough and so a couple of years later

Andreas Gielov (48:20)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (48:30)
I'm working in the company, I'm working as a tech lead and leading the development of one of our games. And we need to update Unity version. And the new Unity version does not play well with the old Odin version. So...

Andreas Gielov (48:49)
Interesting. You must have had a very old Unity version then, because I think we support still to this day back to like, I don't want to be hung up on this, but I think we support all the way back to like, Unity 17 or something like that, like 2017.

Amit Netanel (48:54)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (49:07)
Yeah, yeah, I'm talking with you. Let me say.

Amit Netanel (49:09)
I think we upgraded from 2020 to 2019. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (49:14)
No, 2 2020. The best case scenario, 2 2020.

Andreas Gielov (49:17)
⁓ wait, I'm also talking about backwards compatibility. You're talking about an old build in a newer Unity. Yeah, of course, that makes a difference, obviously. Yes.

Yuri Sokolov (49:23)
Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's right. We have an old build that we

Amit Netanel (49:24)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (49:29)
can't update because it's an old license. And we have an old build and we're upgrading to Unity 2020, if I'm not mistaken, and it breaks something and it doesn't work. And we already had a lot of tooling built with Odin, a lot of tools that our game designers used. we had the...

Andreas Gielov (49:31)
Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (49:49)
If I'm not mistaken, like six or seven game designers, game level slash level designers that worked on levels. And a lot of people were kind of.

Andreas Gielov (49:54)
Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (49:57)
Basically their whole day was made of ⁓ working with tools that were created with Odin. It was critical. It was critical.

Andreas Gielov (50:04)
I'd love to hear it.

Yuri Sokolov (50:06)
Yeah, so I'm standing there in a situation that I have to update Unity because Google Play Store forces me to. And on the other hand, if I upgrade, I need to find a way to develop all of the tools from scratch. And I'm talking 2020 with Dawn 2021. I don't remember exactly.

Andreas Gielov (50:21)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (50:35)
We don't have AI yet to rewrite everything. So I went through all the circles of hell in a corporate environment to go and find us. If I remember correctly, we needed something like 60 or 70 licenses. Because the terms and conditions told us that anyone who opens Unity, so we had

Andreas Gielov (50:55)
Yeah.

Amit Netanel (50:57)
Tall order.

Yuri Sokolov (51:04)
QA Open Unity, we had artists Open Unity. Anyone who opened Unity has to have a license except for build machines. So, okay, build machines excluded. We needed something like 60, 70 licenses. I went through all the circles of hell. I got us approval. We bought all the licenses. I got an admin to your website to manage the licenses, to distribute throughout the company. Fast forward. one or two months, the company was closed. They closed our games. They fired all of us. Hundred people left. So I just, we just bought, upgraded it and that's it. So that's my story with Odin.

Andreas Gielov (51:38)
No. No.

Amit Netanel (51:41)
Not because of the spend on Odin. different reasons.

Andreas Gielov (51:50)
Yeah. Yeah, that's your story. Well, I'm, it sounds like you're an advocate out there. So thank you very much. We appreciate that. I just do want to make it

Amit Netanel (52:01)
Yeah. ⁓ the advocate angle

Yuri Sokolov (52:03)
Ha

Amit Netanel (52:06)
is really like it hits on the spot because during that time period like 2021-ish, I took Odin into every single like ⁓ indie project that I was involved in. I started consulting back then and I also

Andreas Gielov (52:16)
Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (52:28)
At the top of the list of plugins to get day one was Odin and that's a good strategy, I think.

Andreas Gielov (52:34)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (52:37)
Yeah, I think people say, people say even when I released the video about Odin recently, I have comments in the YouTube and on other places from friends and WhatsApp groups that Odin cost a lot of money. So say kind of like, wait a second. I pulled, I pulled my receipt for Odin. It was

Andreas Gielov (52:37)
Jeff. Yeah. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (53:02)
six years ago, if I'm not mistaken, six years ago, I bought Audient six years ago with a 50 % discount that now I see that this discount always exists. At least not always, but six years ago I bought with this discount. It was what, 25 bucks, something like this, 26 bucks and 26 bucks investment for six years that I worked in and used it.

Andreas Gielov (53:04)
You Not always, but, but yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (53:33)
Even my channel, my YouTube channel, currently now I'm more towards towards working more in Premiere and After Effects. I dislike After Effects. but when I started every, every, every animation in my, on my channel was made in Unity. So I created myself an animation ⁓ framework based on Odin. It's

Andreas Gielov (53:43)
Mm-hmm. you

Yuri Sokolov (54:03)
If you'll take any animator out there, he'll look at it and he'll say it's awful, it doesn't look good. But it's working for me and I built it with Odin.

Andreas Gielov (54:03)
I'm pissed. I would love to see that someday. It's odd and that this makes me happy because that's I think that captures what Odin is perfectly. Because it's I mean, who knew that you would want to use Unity in that way, right? And that's that's that's I've said it before, but Unity is such a versatile platform, right? Like you can literally do basically anything in any industry, whatever. But that also means that all the projects that are inside of Unity are so extremely different. So having a way which Odin allows you to a lot easier to customize the engine to fit your specific workflow and kind of make Unity adapt to exactly what you need it to do, just like you did with the animation workflow. just think it can be so valuable.

Yuri Sokolov (54:51)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Andreas Gielov (55:12)
Cause cause cause you don't kind of have to, to force your own workflow onto the editor. And that's very cool that you, that you created a tool like that. I think that's a, yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (55:25)
Actually, if you're talking about the success of Odin, for example, I think it connects a lot to success on YouTube, for example. So the market is saturated with poorly made content. And I'm talking about the asset store in this example. there's, there's, let's say, let's put, let's put it like this. You won't find a lot of developers that selling stuff on asset store.

Amit Netanel (55:42)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (55:53)
that would go and develop things on the level of Pangui, for example, or I'm not talking even about Odin, right? And there's not a lot of developers out there that are actually developers. You would go and see all the tools available and usually it's kind of a couple of pieces just put together, no engineering whatsoever. It works.

Andreas Gielov (56:01)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (56:21)
only in specific scenario if your project configured a certain way it will work for you if you use something else it won't so that's I think I attribute the success of Audient2 to the craftsmanship behind it by the way how many people are in Sirenix?

Andreas Gielov (56:42)
We're around 10 people at the moment. ⁓ Yep.

Yuri Sokolov (56:46)
at the moment. Awesome. How did it start? Yeah, yeah.

Amit Netanel (56:50)
So not a lot, by the way, not a lot.

Andreas Gielov (56:52)
So not that many. mean, we're compared to how many users we have. would say that, but we're also working on lot of, know, Pankoo is also a very big priority for us now. But if people, don't know if your audience is familiar with Pankooey, but it's, yeah, it's a, it's, and I'll come back to why we're developing it. Cause that.

Amit Netanel (57:12)
I think we should say a couple of words about it to expose it.

Andreas Gielov (57:21)
that kind of touches on some of the stuff that you just said, Juri. It's a brand new UI library, extremely performant. It has zero dependencies whatsoever. And it's gonna be language agnostic, which means that it's gonna be transpiled to the different languages. So you can actually work with it in the language that you're writing in. So you don't have to... to write all of your UI in separate languages and you deal with all the abstractions, like no abstraction layers.

Yuri Sokolov (57:56)
It's basically non- it's I'm GUI, right? It's... It's so... Yeah, why? Why is that?

Andreas Gielov (58:01)
Haha, it's funny that you bring that up. ⁓ It's well, had it's immediate mode plus retained mode at the same time. You can do both, not just, can't just use it for one thing for, for some of your UI or, or one thing for the other. ⁓ you can literally mix and match it. Which is why we, we, we kind of want to say that it's, it's something new. It's, ⁓ it's, it's, it's both.

Yuri Sokolov (58:16)
Mm-hmm.

Andreas Gielov (58:38)
And neither at the same time, if that makes sense. promise once we launch the open beta, I'll have a better explanation. That's my job to be able to convey that properly. no, yes, ⁓ working in it is very much like writing immediate mode. But it has all the benefits of retained as well. It's basically just...

Yuri Sokolov (59:00)
Mm-hmm.

Andreas Gielov (59:07)
Now we're getting into the technical terms.

Yuri Sokolov (59:11)
But it's called

Amit Netanel (59:11)
Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (59:12)
code first. It's not a markup language. You're writing code and functional code, functional programming. And so when you're saying, I'm just trying to explain it to somebody who isn't familiar with it, because I browsed the Deepangui's website since it was first launched and waited until I forgot about this ⁓ completely.

Andreas Gielov (59:14)
Yes. Yes. Yes. ⁓

Yuri Sokolov (59:41)
How many years was it in the development?

Andreas Gielov (59:45)
⁓ Like, including... Like around five years now, I think it's been, and that's.

Yuri Sokolov (59:53)
Yeah, it's a lot of time. basically

Amit Netanel (59:56)
Less than GTA 6. Less than...

Yuri Sokolov (59:57)
for those who isn't familiar with it, I strongly advise go look at the demos that you have at your website at pangui.com if I'm not mistaken.

Andreas Gielov (1:00:06)
Yeah. Yes. The Rio Pankawi the Rio P A N G U I.

Yuri Sokolov (1:00:11)
.io. So basically you're writing code like I'm GUI in Unity and with with fluent APIs and

Andreas Gielov (1:00:23)
wherever you want, it's going to be completely cross platform. ⁓

Amit Netanel (1:00:25)
yeah it's going to be cross cross engine like Godot, Unreal

Yuri Sokolov (1:00:27)
Yeah. Not Engine, cross-language. can go write your, instead of Windows Forms application, you can write a custom desktop application without a game engine. You can use it with C++, with Rust or whatever, right?

Andreas Gielov (1:00:32)
Yes. Yep. Yes.

Amit Netanel (1:00:39)
Mmm.

Andreas Gielov (1:00:44)
Yes, I mean down the line, right? Right now, it's written in C sharp. And the first other language that we're going to target is C++, because that's going to open it up for very, very broad range of ⁓ use cases out there. And that means that then we could go in and target Unreal, Godot. And that's just in the gaming space, right? You can also do it's going to run on

Amit Netanel (1:00:45)
That's cool.

Yuri Sokolov (1:00:47)
down the line, C sharp first. Naturally.

Andreas Gielov (1:01:14)
all embedded devices. It's going to be, you know, WebAssembly. I mean, I could just continue name-driving. Basically, it's going to be a UI library for everywhere in all of the languages. And then, yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (1:01:30)
It's kind of, it's kind of an ambitious project to, target all of, all of the possible scenarios. How, how's the team handling it? What is, what is the plan there? Because I'm thinking if I were to develop something like this, I'm automatically start thinking in terms of big companies, you need QA, you need, you need huge teams to, manage all the stuff you're saying you're

Andreas Gielov (1:01:34)
Shoot. Dude. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:01:59)
10 people and I guess it's not 10 developers, right?

Andreas Gielov (1:02:03)
That is correct. I have to say that these people are some of the most brilliant people I've ever worked with. And I understand your skepticism because we get it a lot. It's yeah. Okay. Curiosity because we get it a lot like, ⁓ well, this seems to be true from reading on your website. Like how are you going to solve this? And

Amit Netanel (1:02:05)
At least one that we know of.

Yuri Sokolov (1:02:06)
So, how? It's not skepticism, it's awe. Mm-hmm.

Andreas Gielov (1:02:34)
We have an answer for all of it basically. And even the transpiler, we've proved that it can be done. And that's progressing very rapidly right now. And all of these different concepts where people are like, well, have you thought of that? I mean, the developers always go and we have a very active Discord community, right? Of people who have signed up for the beta. And every single time someone asks a question, they come in there and they answer it and have already come up with a solution for it. We've just started scaling the alpha. Well, just scaling it, but still slowly, right? We've started pulling more people into the alpha and are going to continue doing so all the way towards an open beta.

Yuri Sokolov (1:03:17)
Mm-hmm.

Andreas Gielov (1:03:34)
The amount of positive feedback have honestly been a little overwhelming. you know, there's always that kind of little, it could be a little nerve wracking, you know, starting to pull outside people into something that you've been developing for five years. But it's just, it's been really good. No real aha or bad aha moments or anything. it's going extremely well and development is progressing.

Yuri Sokolov (1:03:50)
Yeah.

Andreas Gielov (1:04:04)
very rapidly. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (1:04:06)
Awesome. What happened in the recent years? mean, it's been in development for five years without any real news. And suddenly I see a lot of stuff happening in the last year, I think.

Andreas Gielov (1:04:22)
Yeah. Well, first of all, I joined the team and started building the marketing department. So that would be why you've heard a little bit more from us. No, also ⁓ it's getting to a very, very good stage where we can actually start sharing more. are now building as much with Pangooie as we are building Pangooie itself. So that also makes it a lot easier to actually show something, obviously.

Yuri Sokolov (1:04:26)
Ha ha.

Amit Netanel (1:04:26)
Yeah. Mmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:04:46)
Mm-hmm. What are you building with Pangoy? Just demos or actual products?

Andreas Gielov (1:04:52)
and demos, ⁓ actual ⁓ projects, ⁓ but also a big part of the ⁓ QA. ⁓ So kind of creating this loop and just trying to find all the different edge cases. And then also, mean, I think the developers are having a lot of fun as well, because you can literally build anything with it ⁓ in the UI space, obviously.

Yuri Sokolov (1:05:07)
Mm-hmm.

Andreas Gielov (1:05:25)
Can't build a rocket ship.

Yuri Sokolov (1:05:25)
I'll tell you this, in Unity, ⁓ in the mobile industry, ⁓ all of those huge, huge, huge mobile games are mostly built in UI, right? So it's UI game. take one of the ⁓ top games in the mobile industry is Coin Master. It's all UI. It's a canvas. So yeah, basically... Maybe people don't need Unity and they can use libraries like PNGui or something like this.

Andreas Gielov (1:05:57)
Well, we've built some small game demos.

Amit Netanel (1:06:00)
And I know many, many, many Unity developers that would love something more flexible than what they already have with ⁓ Canvas, at least.

Yuri Sokolov (1:06:09)
No, but Unity kind of... No, those who would love, they're not the target audience for what I'm saying. Because those people who are willing to learn new things would not develop a new game on a canvas, if you understand my meaning. So, there's two separate castes of people.

Andreas Gielov (1:06:17)
Yeah.

Amit Netanel (1:06:18)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, well, actually, you're raising something ⁓ I wanted to talk about ever since we started talking about Pangui. So Sirenix is ⁓ well-connected and well-loved amongst ⁓ Unity developers. As you said, you have advocates that use your product on their indie games, and then they come to their tech lead and say, hey, check this out.

Andreas Gielov (1:06:42)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (1:07:03)
Suddenly, a whole 60-seat company subscribes ⁓ to Odin. But now you have a product that is more general use, not just for gaming, as you say, which caught me off guard because I didn't really even thought about it. How do you like you can't leverage the crowd of game developers to other types of products? Even amongst game developers?

Andreas Gielov (1:07:13)
Mm-hmm. Mm-mm.

Amit Netanel (1:07:32)
There's a strong tribalism. People love unity. People hate unity and love Godot. People hate Godot and love Unreal. And suddenly you want to cater to all of them. It's how do you bring the tribes together, your product.

Andreas Gielov (1:07:39)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. ⁓ Huh, that's a very interesting question. think, can I bring it back a little bit and start with something Yuri said before, because you talked about over-saturation and in the market before and all of these people just pushing things out there. That's both in terms of content.

Amit Netanel (1:07:57)
Sure. Sure.

Yuri Sokolov (1:07:58)
Sure, you can do whatever you want.

Andreas Gielov (1:08:16)
But I would argue definitely also in terms of projects, right? And then after you followed up with why haven't we heard anything until, you know, just within the last year about Pankui, if you've been developing it for five years. Well, one of the reasons is that we think there is a big problem in the software industry. First of all, the tech stack is becoming unbelievably unsustainable.

Yuri Sokolov (1:08:24)
Mm-hmm.

Andreas Gielov (1:08:41)
Like you're downloading some UI library or some other library out there, right? And you're downloading, I don't know, five gigabytes worth of data to create a And that's just, know, it's... Yes.

Yuri Sokolov (1:08:54)
That's JavaScript.

Amit Netanel (1:08:56)
Yeah, especially true for full stack developers.

Andreas Gielov (1:09:00)
Yeah. So, Pangu is kind of our contribution towards trying to fix that problem within the UI space. I'm not saying that we can fix the entirety of software, right? Because a lot of different parts go into that. But that's also why... When you're building foundational software ⁓ that hopefully millions of people and their products are gonna depend on, then you really need to get it right. So we took a lot of steps back, because I feel like the whole abstraction problem and the tech stack, the reason why it's become so bloated and... basically unsustainable is because the needs have just, you know, grown over the years as our computers have gotten stronger and whatever. And people have just taken what's there and just been like, ⁓ we need this. Let's just, let's just slap it on, slap it on. Right. And then suddenly you have like, I don't know, a thousand abstract abstraction layers. so we kind of dialed all the way back to zero and looked at what is it actually.

Yuri Sokolov (1:09:57)
Yeah.

Andreas Gielov (1:10:21)
A UI library, UI system, framework, whatever you want to call it actually needs to solve. And when you do that, you find completely new ways of doing things that no one has done before, but actually, but that actually solves all the problems out there. And even to, ⁓ extends what you can, what you can do with, Panko compared to a lot of the systems out there.

Yuri Sokolov (1:10:23)
Mm-hmm.

Andreas Gielov (1:10:50)
⁓ cause essentially you're just communicating with the hardware, right? That's, that's basically what you're doing. Cause we are, we're the only, or we're the, there are no layers that we have to, to, to circumvent basically. back to my point, that was a bit of a tangent. ⁓ but that's also why it's taking a long time. Cause we really want to, ⁓

Yuri Sokolov (1:11:05)
Mm-hmm.

Andreas Gielov (1:11:17)
built quality tools. That's always been our philosophy with ⁓ Odin as well. We don't just ship and then fix problems later. ⁓ Obviously, whenever you open up for an alpha or beta, there are going to be smaller bucks. But I think a lot, ⁓ we really take shipping quality products very seriously. ⁓

Yuri Sokolov (1:11:43)
Mm-hmm.

Andreas Gielov (1:11:44)
That's kind of in our DNA. And I think a lot of people just rush, you you see all the hyper scaling companies with AI. You know, they get, I don't know, $50 million investment, and then they scale something over three months, and then they, they ship it out, right. And I think that's, that's a big, that's that's a big part of why the market is becoming over saturated. And if we keep doing all of this, and we don't think about all the foundationals,

Amit Netanel (1:12:03)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (1:12:04)
Don't get me started on this.

Andreas Gielov (1:12:14)
then that tech stack, tech tower is gonna tip over at some point. Yeah, collapse, thank you. So that is part of the reason why it's been five years, because we had to do things that has never been done before and reinvent how you do UI basically.

Amit Netanel (1:12:19)
collapse. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (1:12:37)
You gotta, gotta kind of admire the, the, the, I can't find the word for it, but you know, when you decide you're doing something and you spending five years without showing it to anyone and keep digging your toes into it and doing and doing and doing it's hard. It's, it's something you, you find a lot in the game game dev community when people working on their

Andreas Gielov (1:13:03)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:13:06)
games for many years and you kind of said regarding the technologies that our computers get stronger and stacked all the software stacks one on another and just two points that connecting us to Jonathan Blow here ⁓ so one point that the yeah one point is regarding people developing stuff for many years and only

Andreas Gielov (1:13:24)
Yeah.

Amit Netanel (1:13:25)
I knew, I just knew he was going to turn up here. Yeah.

Andreas Gielov (1:13:29)
Ha ha ha

Yuri Sokolov (1:13:35)
After 10 years showing what they developed and the other, has a great talk preventing the collapse of civilizations where he talks about that. I don't know if you've seen it, that the software is riding on top of hardware. It's not software, software haven't got stronger. It's, it's the hardware. So yeah, it's, we're kind of there. We're kind of there and.

Andreas Gielov (1:13:42)
Yes. I have seen that one. I have. Yes, exactly. We're reaching a point where it's not only ⁓ tedious to work with for the developers. We're reaching a point where it's also reaching the end users because of the enormous tech stack. Right. I mean, I certainly have a lot of applications on my computer and I have a MacBook Pro with an chip in it and they're fast. ⁓ I would say.

Yuri Sokolov (1:14:15)
Mm-hmm.

Andreas Gielov (1:14:30)
⁓ and just opening an app or opening whatever, like the load times and just the, the box that you run into, like you can't, you can't, almost seems that you can't avoid it. ⁓ just because there, there's, know, all of the dependencies, you know, some, know, you're depending on a library over here somewhere. Someone has been thanks, ⁓ thanks, thanklessly maintaining. One person thing that your entire stack is you know depending on and then suddenly that gets updated then it breaks out something over here you purple purple, right?

Yuri Sokolov (1:15:04)
There's a meme

Amit Netanel (1:15:04)
No, it comes up in the most...

Yuri Sokolov (1:15:05)
with the Microsoft and Google depending on some small libraries, some brick.

Andreas Gielov (1:15:09)
⁓

Amit Netanel (1:15:09)
Yeah, but it meets the end user in the most trivial stuff that you just filter out, but it ruins the experience. Like the previous time I talked about ⁓ Jonathan Blow this week was yesterday. I met a friend at the train station. OK, I commute by train. And right now, if you want to ride on the train from my town, you need to buy a ticket, but you also need to save a space on the train, OK, because it's limited.

Andreas Gielov (1:15:24)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (1:15:38)
to a certain number of people. So they have an app that they use during quarantine, and now they are reusing for that spec. So it's six years old, which is not a lot, but I don't know how many iOS versions have come out in those six years. And something broke ⁓ when you get the text message. Like you have the feature.

Andreas Gielov (1:15:54)
Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (1:16:07)
It's specifically in iOS that you get ⁓ a text message with a code and you auto fill it in a text field. And that doesn't work. So you need to go and all that is during the line for the train, mind you. Okay. In the morning rush. Okay. You need to go to the messages app. Remember six figures, go back to the app, fill it or accidentally press the button that auto fills it and it crashes the app.

Andreas Gielov (1:16:07)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:16:15)
Mm-hmm.

Andreas Gielov (1:16:17)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (1:16:38)
So that's a good way to spend your morning with the software. And my friend didn't even notice that it's bugged. OK, he just fiddled with it and he said, man, god damn it. And he tried it again. And I said, ⁓ that's Jonathan Blow moment. That's software getting too complicated and too unreliable in daily life. So it's a real issue.

Andreas Gielov (1:16:42)
That's a pretty good example. ⁓ Yeah. Yes. And that's a

Yuri Sokolov (1:17:05)
By the way, apart we've talked a lot about Pangui, but it is yet to be released. By the way, I really happy that you sorted out the licensing, how you're going to license it with the double licensing stuff. Happy to see it will be available and paid and free. It's a nice approach. I, by the way, want to advocate for ⁓ Unity to adopt this.

Andreas Gielov (1:17:18)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:17:33)
sort of licensing, the double licensing, because I think like Unity already free, right? So why not release it? And they give an access to the source code for ⁓ companies that pay a lot of money to.

Andreas Gielov (1:17:52)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:17:54)
and they have a ton of bugs. Why not make it an open source? Keep taking money from people with double licensing, let people contribute and still control the versioning. It could be awesome.

Andreas Gielov (1:17:57)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's, mean, the ultimate goal with Banggood because we, believe that. this is needed in the software industry. And we believe it's needed in a lot more categories of the software industry as well. But now we're taking the first step in the UI space. I don't want to say the first step, but at least the...

Yuri Sokolov (1:18:28)
Mm-hmm.

Andreas Gielov (1:18:39)
One of the first, I would say, ⁓ mainstream UI developments, ⁓ kind of with this, trying to tackle this problem. ⁓ Either way. ⁓

Yuri Sokolov (1:18:53)
Mm-hmm.

Andreas Gielov (1:18:58)
So obviously, we want to make it fully open source and not copy left at some point. But in order for us to solve it properly and get it there, we do need some income to obviously develop it to its full potential.

Amit Netanel (1:19:15)
Yeah, the whole part, a major part of the whole tech stack issue, in my opinion, is that most of these libraries that everyone is dependent on are open source and no one has the everyone has the incentive to make it work well, but no one owns it. So it's not the responsibility of anyone to keep maintaining it. So I don't know how you're going to solve this.

Andreas Gielov (1:19:22)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes.

Yuri Sokolov (1:19:38)
Yeah, so many great open source libraries died because the developers weren't getting paid. It's just like that. Their attention shift to something that can pay the bills and that's it. And for example, it happens right now with the library that I really like. ⁓ It's a Vcontainer that I like, I use, it's a dependency injection framework for Unity, but the maintainer is...

Andreas Gielov (1:19:57)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:20:08)
no longer maintaining it. So people kind of open PRs and even PRs with... he kind of patches the bugs. People open PRs with bugs that something really, really, really important, something that breaking changes, he patches. But I've seen that over the last six months, I think, he took the PRs but never released the version. So it's kind of attention shifts.

Andreas Gielov (1:20:10)
Mm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:20:36)
And if you're not getting paid, it will happen to your library eventually.

Andreas Gielov (1:20:40)
Mm hmm. Yeah. I mean, if you're trying to revolutionize any industry that that that takes takes money to do I think, you know, ⁓ Blender is a good example of an open source project. I think that succeeded very well, ⁓ Godot too. yes, they have funding. Yes, of course. That's definitely true. But that is ultimately the goal to get Pangoo there someday. Once we have kind of developed a tooling suite that we ⁓ can monetize around it instead.

Yuri Sokolov (1:21:02)
still they have funding.

Andreas Gielov (1:21:24)
and live off of that.

Yuri Sokolov (1:21:27)
By the way, recently you've released the visual designer and I made a video about that and connected it to AI. Can you walk us through what is the direction for audience? So when I talk to people, ⁓ everybody says to me, I said, here's audience, it's a nice tool and stuff like that. And people say, well, why do you need?

Andreas Gielov (1:21:31)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:21:57)
audience today, specifically audience back door, if you can just kind of tell Claude to generate a pretty UI. I have my answers for that, but I'd love to hear it from you.

Andreas Gielov (1:22:10)
Yeah, I think I have some answers for that as well. ⁓ So we're not blind. We're obviously following very closely what's happening in the UI. ⁓ AI, ⁓ industry movement, whatever you want to call it. ⁓ And we know that a common use case for people specifically in Unity is to have AI create tooling for them. ⁓ And that's fine. The problem is when you're creating tooling, it's typically a one-off thing, right? It's a lot harder to tweak. It's a lot harder to maintain. ⁓ And it's also a lot harder to scale, typically. ⁓

Yuri Sokolov (1:23:01)
Mm-hmm.

Andreas Gielov (1:23:02)
What I hear the most is basically, you create a tool whenever you need something new, you just create another tool, you create another tool with AI. so first of all, that pollutes your project code a AI is writing so much custom editor code. But the new visual designer, which by the way, you did a fantastic video on lately, so I just want to say thank you on that.

Yuri Sokolov (1:23:29)
Thank you, thank you.

Andreas Gielov (1:23:31)
where you implemented AI into the visual designer, it just shows how good AI is actually at understanding that format. So if you actually even choose to do, to use, to build tooling with AI through Odin, that means first of all, you're not polluting your project with tons of custom editor code. Second of all, Well, because all of the configurations lives outside of your project. think I should say that. Second of all, if you have it create some, some tool and it gets you there, let's say 80 % of the way, it's so easy to tweak. Like if, if, if you get, I don't know what 2000 lines of custom editor code written by an AI and you don't know how to do custom editor code, how are you going to go in there and get it the last 20 % right?

Yuri Sokolov (1:24:12)
Mm-hmm. Ask Claude to fix it once again. Fix it, you dumb machine.

Amit Netanel (1:24:27)
Yeah.

Andreas Gielov (1:24:28)
Yes, that is true. That is true. But that's not a very scalable ⁓ loop, would say. Filthy to disagree. ⁓

Yuri Sokolov (1:24:33)
Ha No, no, I, I do agree. I also think one of the best selling points for me actually is, ⁓ it's one thing if you're working alone. So you kind of can allow yourself to, create. Programmer art and all the ugly stuff. And even, you know, polluting your code, it's not that much of a selling point in my opinion, because

Andreas Gielov (1:24:48)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:25:11)
It's an editor code. You just drop it. It's not going into the runtime and that's okay. The real problem, in my opinion, comes when you're working in a team and you're developing tools internally that has users. So for example, if you're working with game designers, with level designers, and you're creating tools for them, it becomes the ⁓ tool that they spend their...

Andreas Gielov (1:25:31)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:25:41)
their whole day working with. And you need a good sense of UI and UX. And as developers, we have programmer art. So I've seen so many times when developers create custom editor, myself included, I have open sourced some tools that I made design inside of them and they just look...

Andreas Gielov (1:26:07)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:26:10)
awful and when you have somebody already thought things through standardized things for you and with this standard you can supply to your to your clientele let's say like this because because they're the end users to your end user something consistent so they know how the controls work regardless of the window they open

Andreas Gielov (1:26:11)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:26:39)
So this is the biggest selling point for me when I'm talking about taking Odin ⁓ instead of developing with AI something. Take AI and develop with Odin, right? You can do that. And the pricing...

Andreas Gielov (1:26:42)
Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (1:26:55)
Yeah. I can give a concrete example, by the way, on everything you just talked about, because I had the, ⁓ I should say, maybe I shouldn't say it, but pleasure of upgrading my current project to Unity 6.3 during the last month. ⁓ This is a project that has been worked on by about 20 people for four years. OK, so it has been running with a

Andreas Gielov (1:27:02)
huh. Yep.

Amit Netanel (1:27:22)
previous Vision of Unity, like 2022-3 ⁓ LTS, which is not LTS for about a year now. So we really needed to upgrade. And when I started working there, ⁓ buddy of mine, of me and Yuhi, told me, you know, we don't use Odin here. We have a great developer that knows UI Toolkit inside and out. And she spent ⁓ basically

Andreas Gielov (1:27:46)
Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (1:27:52)
a whole year of weekends developing her own UI system and framework, that all you need to do to make a new window is to inherit from a certain class and make a few tweaks, and you can create a new window. And the level of the tooling is really, high. We have people using the tools ⁓ all day. But it doesn't look. It's more like.

Andreas Gielov (1:27:55)
You

Yuri Sokolov (1:27:56)
framework.

Andreas Gielov (1:28:16)
Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (1:28:20)
more towards the programmer art side than the ⁓ like really good she's amazing in all dana we love you it's not to trash your skills but but ⁓ i upgraded to unity 6.3 and i i ⁓ created a plan okay of the things i should verify that work like i built the asset bundles and the game runs sanely and i even managed to upgrade text mesh pro

Yuri Sokolov (1:28:22)
I don't know, but she's amazing on the art side as well. I don't believe you.

Andreas Gielov (1:28:30)
Hehehehe Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (1:28:49)
which is ⁓ quite a feat when upgrading to Unity 6. then I started going through our tools. I opened the first tool and I see just a gray screen. say, okay. So I just, I went into Monday, which in which I put my, all my tasks and ⁓ subtasks and the gantt and how much time it will take. I took the adapt tools for Unity 6 and I expanded it from one day to one week immediately.

Andreas Gielov (1:28:53)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (1:29:19)
immediately because it actually didn't take a week, going through all the tools and making sure with AI because I didn't have ownership over the framework she created during the weekends and on nights and stuff like that. ⁓ So I burnt lots of tokens just to upgrade. that's for me. When I look at it as a business owner, That's something I don't want to deal with. I want to actually produce my game. I want the tools to be excellent and updated regardless. So that's one selling point for using an external library for these kind of things. But the second thing is that we flew too close to the sun. We have a tool that enables our game designer not to ⁓ edit MongoDB directly. So we built what is essentially

Andreas Gielov (1:29:49)
Yes.

Amit Netanel (1:30:08)
document viewer inside Unity with UI Toolkit ⁓ to edit the rewards. In gacha games, you get a reward for everything. You read a page of tutorial, you get a reward. Not to mention regular gameplay. So ⁓ it was already really taxing on the engine itself to actually scroll through all the information he needed. Then he found a bug.

Andreas Gielov (1:30:24)
Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (1:30:38)
like eight months after we developed that tool. And so we tried to solve it with AI. We tried to solve it with actually looking at the code, rewriting, and stuff like that. And it just struck us. He doesn't even need the UI for this kind of work. Not everything needs an UI. The next project, what we're going to do is to create a skill for managing the game's rewards.

Andreas Gielov (1:30:56)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (1:31:07)
And so that way he could work with natural language. He's not a programmer. He doesn't understand the first thing about programming. But he knows how to talk. So he will just talk to the AI. And the AI will extrapolate the basic RUD actions, like create, read, update, delete, whatever. ⁓ So that's my two takes. When you need UI, you need it to work super solidly, because it's

Andreas Gielov (1:31:31)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:31:36)
Not only UI, anything, any library.

Amit Netanel (1:31:38)
Any core dependency of your project needs to be really good.

Andreas Gielov (1:31:43)
and always

Yuri Sokolov (1:31:43)
If you can offload it to a third party company, it's awesome.

Amit Netanel (1:31:47)
Yeah, either a third party company or something you don't have to maintain as rigorously. Like maintaining a skill on Cloud is not the amount of effort as maintaining a framework of UI, which is crazy.

Andreas Gielov (1:32:01)
No. And obviously I haven't seen the tool that you're talking about. ⁓ and it's definitely not to, to neglect the person who did, who did it, because I'm sure it's amazing. but you said that she spent many weeks, like most weekends over the course of a year to develop this. I mean, just imagine the amount of time and obviously time is

Amit Netanel (1:32:22)
Mm-hmm.

Andreas Gielov (1:32:29)
essentially also means money at the end, right? When you're running a company, amount of money you could have saved if you could have digested that down to a week. Yeah, pay 25 bucks and done all of that development in a few days, right? Because right now you don't even have to code using Odin anymore. You'd literally just take the UI and drag it around like your inspectors, your whatever, right? If you want to add a button or something, you just click one of your classes, add a button.

Amit Netanel (1:32:34)
Definitely.

Yuri Sokolov (1:32:38)
Pay 25 bucks. Ha

Andreas Gielov (1:32:58)
some functionality, all of that different stuff. and also just the breaking when upgrading ⁓ that that just speaks to the maintenance as well. So I think, yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (1:33:11)
just offload it to the third party. Like I said, it's when something, when a new version of Unity released, I bet you at Cyrenics or people at any other serious company that treat their products seriously already on the beta experience the bugs and trying to ship the update as fast as possible. So some companies are good with that. Some companies not so good with that.

Andreas Gielov (1:33:14)
I don't Mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah, as we're a verified solution, actually think we... Don't hang me up on that, but we fix it almost as soon as it drops. It rarely tends to get boxed in people's hands with new versions.

Yuri Sokolov (1:33:59)
Yeah. Yeah. By the way, we've talked about AI a lot and something on my mind that currently there is this thing that you can't really put into one sentence, game dev and AI. People get burned because they're used AI. So for example, somebody, think a meet you've sent or somebody else from our friends sent you a WhatsApp group. a video of a game some real from Instagram but a game that looks really nice the game's library you need to organize books in a library

Amit Netanel (1:34:34)
Mm-hmm. librarian it's called it's called librarian

Andreas Gielov (1:34:42)
Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (1:34:43)
and the the ar in librarian is means ar like augmented reality because it's a vr ar game it's a it's a cozy library management game looks really really good

Andreas Gielov (1:34:43)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:34:54)
It doesn't doesn't matter. The game looks nice. Okay, if you were to see this game five years ago, three years ago, you would say, I have to buy this even now for me. I look at this. This is a nice game. And then you see the top comment is heads up the developers using AI and people like, ⁓ no, I won't buy this game. So they don't even need not not proof.

Andreas Gielov (1:35:09)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:35:23)
Not understanding what the extent of AI usage in this game. It's enough that somebody said they use the AI and now a single developer can be burned. Don't you as a company afraid of taking, you're kind of still operating in the game dev world. Don't you afraid of saying, okay, we're working with AI, we're building with AI, we're thinking about AI.

Andreas Gielov (1:35:54)
Hmm. I'm never really afraid to speak about anything. I mean, it's there. It's a reality. So obviously we should be able to talk about it, right? I also don't think it's something that's going away. So we have to consider it in some way, right? And I think it can be a powerful tool. I think most people would agree with that. I don't want to get into all of the...

Yuri Sokolov (1:36:06)
Mm-hmm.

Andreas Gielov (1:36:21)
or touching all of the copyright lawsuits and everything that's going on out there. I don't know enough about it to really speak to that. So let's stay clear that. just as a workflow optimizer, it can obviously be a huge help. ⁓ I use it for sparring a lot, for example. I mean, think it's really sparring. ⁓

Yuri Sokolov (1:36:25)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. for sparring?

Andreas Gielov (1:36:51)
So I often said to work alone, right? Need to talk to someone, bounce ideas, brainstorming, all of that. I think it'd be very helpful for that and all these different things. So I think it's absolutely okay to provide people with the tools. I'm not telling them to use AI, but at least providing the ability is worth considering. I can't get too much into it.

Yuri Sokolov (1:36:54)
Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (1:36:55)
⁓ Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (1:36:56)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Andreas Gielov (1:37:22)
But Pengu is going to have some AI and accessibility capabilities that are pretty insane and not seen before. We're not quite ready to probably talk about that yet because it's still on the drawing board a little bit. that's why I know I can say it very briefly.

Yuri Sokolov (1:37:41)
You're reading something about this in the blog.

Amit Netanel (1:37:49)
You

Andreas Gielov (1:37:49)
⁓

Yuri Sokolov (1:37:49)
Mm-hmm.

Andreas Gielov (1:37:50)
And I think we're... ⁓ I think it's very interesting to be developing foundational tech and software in an era where we know that AI exists and know that it'll be around for a long time.

Yuri Sokolov (1:38:10)
Yeah.

Andreas Gielov (1:38:15)
then you kind of get to rethink it from the ground up, right? Like you can kind of... Yeah, let's leave it there.

Yuri Sokolov (1:38:26)
Yeah, think it's too deep for this hour at least. So if we're coming to a conclusion, first of all, was really nice meeting you and talking to you. It was really fun and educational even. ⁓

Andreas Gielov (1:38:31)
Yes, yes.

Amit Netanel (1:38:45)
I would also say inspiring because we talked about stuff that's ⁓ sometimes neglected, like the ideals of making software reliable and good and your core dependencies should be independent.

Yuri Sokolov (1:38:55)
Yeah, that's definitely neglected.

Andreas Gielov (1:38:58)
I'm glad if I got that across because it's an important topic and I definitely think it's something that people need to consider more.

Amit Netanel (1:39:03)
Yeah, at least.

Yuri Sokolov (1:39:11)
We, we, we're all for ⁓ programming as craftsmanship. We, we want to put it out there that you, you're not just for, for me personally. And I know for Amit as well, called it can be an form of art. We, we will love what we do. And that's why we, we, after 10, 15 years, we're still doing it. And, ⁓ I, it's not a thing on our podcast, but I want it to be a thing. So I'll start it here. Do you have any game, book, band, songwriter, I don't know, to recommend? Go ahead now.

Andreas Gielov (1:39:43)
Mm-hmm. Hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:39:59)
movie maybe.

Andreas Gielov (1:40:01)
I mean, I have, I have a lot of all of them. I think so. You're making me choose.

Yuri Sokolov (1:40:07)
Let's make one of each. One book, one movie and one game.

Andreas Gielov (1:40:13)
The most recent book, which was actually recommended to me by one of the company was called the Purple Cow, which was pretty interesting. It's a marketing book, but also a product book. ⁓ It's interesting. It's basically how you can think about your thing being a purple cow amongst all of the regular colored cows, right? That's kind of how to stand out. That's basically it. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (1:40:31)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (1:40:48)
it's a Seth Godin book. Okay. Should have probably guessed it from the title.

Andreas Gielov (1:40:53)
Yeah, but it was a it was pretty interesting. It's just the latest operate. ⁓ yeah, there are many. ⁓ Favorite band, can say that's definitely Queen. So go listen. you wanted to guess. not that's from the podcast as well, right? Isn't it? ⁓ You have a very good memory. That's what I said. That's what I said, what, six years ago or something.

Yuri Sokolov (1:41:07)
⁓ Queen, not red hot chili peppers anymore. Not red hot chili peppers anymore. Yeah. ⁓

Amit Netanel (1:41:22)
He did the research.

Yuri Sokolov (1:41:27)
I think but I haven't listened to it six years ago. I listened to it today. So my memory not that good. But yeah, Queen, Queen, I'm there with you. ⁓ Definitely need to read special by Brian May here in the collection.

Andreas Gielov (1:41:31)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's okay. Okay. But yes. Yeah, I haven't at all asked that many questions about you guys. You have so many interesting things and you have 3D printing going on, so many different guitars. I 3D print, I play a lot of music. I mean, we could probably go for hours here.

Yuri Sokolov (1:42:03)
Yeah, maybe we can start another podcast and or an after show. So it was really nice meeting you. ⁓ Thank you.

Andreas Gielov (1:42:13)
Thank you for having me. was really good, amazing experience. Thank you very much guys. All right, bye.

Amit Netanel (1:42:17)
It was really great, thank you for coming.

Yuri Sokolov (1:42:21)
See ya.