TDC #09: Making Games in Lithuania with Rytis Jadzevičius

Rytis Jadzevičius came to games in 2019 from government work, commercials and digital marketing — not a programmer, but always surrounded by them. Seven years later his studio, Fluxo Games, has ten people, a submarine game still in early access, and Book Smugglers, a self-published game about Lithuania's 19th-century press ban that took three on-and-off years to finish. We talk about surviving on one in-house and one client project at a time, what happens when government and work-for-hire money dry up together, emailing 10,000–20,000 influencers after parting ways with a publisher, whether this downturn is AI or post-COVID overhiring, why a country of three million needs its own game awards on national TV, and porting to Switch with a dev kit you can no longer get. His lesson for everyone: kill more games before you release them. 🔹 Links:Fluxo Games: https://fluxogames.com/Book Smugglers on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2720940/Book_Smugglers/Rytis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rytis-jadzevi%C4%8Dius-5696a451/ASML EUV lithography: https://www.asml.com/en/products/euv-lithography-systems 🔹 Chapters:00:00 Intro01:29 What We've Been Playing09:23 Not a Programmer, but Always Surrounded by Them13:06 One In-House Game, One Client Game, and Why Not Mobile21:57 Bigger Than the Post-COVID Crash, and Don't Blame AI for Overhiring28:18 GTA 6, Crysis, and Why Hardware Never Gets Cheaper37:55 Plasticalypse and "We Should Have Killed More Games"45:48 Work-for-Hire Dries Up: Pivoting to QA, Porting, and Influencers50:31 Book Smugglers: A Banned Language, a Lost Publisher, and Breaking Even53:48 Free Marketing, Raid Shadow Legends, and Communities Paid in Coins01:01:25 Playing the Patriotism Card (and Kevin Bacon)01:09:31 Most Studios Would Have Killed It Three Times, and a Switch 1 Dev Kit01:14:18 A Cooking App in the Game Accelerator, and What Poland Got Right01:19:32 A Statistics Code for Game Dev, and Game Awards on National TV01:29:12 Rytis's Advice: Think Twice, the Plates Have Shifted01:31:04 One Book, One Movie, One Game, and Warcraft III Custom Maps Episode URL: https://tech-debt.club/episodes/9-tdc-09-making-games-in-lithuania-with-rytis-jadzevicius