About us… But a little more

Hello! This post will be about us – the company Signum Games. You might be wondering who is behind all these figures, who invents the factions and develops the game.

We started in 2015, when Konstantin Glebov (our creative director) together with a team of modelers and artists began to create the world of Signum. Then we had only one office and less than a dozen people in the team, but now our staff has increased by more than two times, and along with us has grown and Signum.

Our office is located in the city of Kharkiv, it’s in eastern Ukraine. And it is not only one of the largest cities in the country, but a cultural and youth center. Kharkiv is known for its active communities of creative people, board game players, role-players and representatives of various subcultures. And all thanks to the fact that our city, among other things, is a city of universities, there are the whole 69 institutions of higher education. Many students, when they leave the walls of their alma mater, leave room in their hearts for unusual hobbies, such as wargaming.

No wonder the world of Signum was born here, in the city of youth, geeks, and nerds of all stripes.

If you look in our office, you’ll see that there’s more than just work going on. Sometimes our employees bring here works that they have made in their free time just for themselves. That’s how we once had a wolfen warrior figure IN NATURAL SIZE! And we also have a couple of board game cabinets that we enjoy playing in our spare time.

As for the work, in our Kharkiv office we think up new characters, draw concept arts, convert them into three-dimensional models. We also do production of the models themselves. We have to order all the polygraphic stuff separately. We also do photo and video shooting in the office.

In general, the process of creating a new character looks like this:

• birth of an idea, development of a concept;
• creation of a concept art in 2D;
• creation of a three-dimensional model;
• test print of the model.

About the last point it is worth telling in more detail. The point is that sometimes, after printing the first version of the figure, we have to make changes of varying degrees of complexity to it. Somewhere it is necessary to change the proportions of limbs, somewhere – to change the scale of the whole figure, somewhere the pose or the location of weapons. It’s not always the case that what looks good on the screen looks so good in plastic. So we always try to bring the final product to perfection.

Once we are sure that the model is perfect, the next steps are follows:

• replicating the model;
• ordering the character card and box from the print shop;
• an exclusive photo and video session for the most successful, in our opinion, models. For such models we specially order painting;
• kit assembly (forming a blister of model parts and character cards, packing the kit);
• moving ready blisters with models to the warehouse.

We test the changes and gameplay innovations here in our Kharkiv office. This way we put ourselves in the shoes of future players, which means that we see all the imperfections and flaws of the game balance. And, of course, we fix them before finalizing the product.

Just Kharkiv alone, the geography of our company is not limited, though, the reason for this is very sad. Some of our employees had to leave because of Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine, and they are in Europe and Canada. And those who have returned to their native Kharkiv from temporary exile regularly hear explosions and warnings of rocket fire. Alas, for us now there is war not only in the fictional world of Signum, but also in the surrounding reality.

We have regular online meetings with our remote employees, during which not only work issues are often resolved, but also unexpected original ideas are born.

All of the people we’ve written about above are constantly working to bring you new characters and events from the world of Signum as often as possible.