Meet our new CRYENGINE evangelist! A familiar face to many of you, our very own Roman Perezogin talks about plans for the community in our interview!

Roman has been a vital member of the team here at Crytek for some time, and his background and insights as an indie developer before joining us has been invaluable. He's already brought his experience as a solo game maker to our program of tutorials. In his new role as an evangelist for CRYENGINE, Roman will be further expanding his presence on channels like Discord, Twitch, and when it's safe to do so again, at events. Find out more as we catch up with Roman.

Hey Roman! For those who don't know your background, how long have you been working at Crytek and with CRYENGINE?

Oh, it feels like forever, but in a hugely positive way! Why? Well, as maybe some of you already know, I was working on a little CRYENGINE game on my own for a few years. The people working here supported me back then, so I kinda knew a few folk before I even started to work here at Crytek. You can check out the game I was developing, Darkness Anomaly, on YouTube. I've been at Crytek now for about two and a half years! It's been an amazing ride.

How did your role as an evangelist come about?

In a way, I've been doing it for a long time anyway, even during my previous role as a technical designer. I've created tutorials for the community, and I've hosted events on our Twitch channel. When we used to be able to attend real events, I loved talking to our community members in person! It's just awesome, and now I can focus even more on doing exactly these kinds of things.

Honestly, to say it's a lot of fun is an understatement. During my time as a technical designer, I had a lot of really cool and fun tasks to do, but I missed the interaction with our community. I love finding out what's new. What are people working on? What cool projects are they developing? So, I really wanted to get into that area. For instance, I feel so inspired every time I see a great showcase on our official Discord channel. By the way, if you haven't signed up already, our Discord channel is the best place to show your stuff and connect with people talking about your favorite engine.

^One of Roman's recent works with CRYENGINE.

What will be your main focus now?

I want to expand our relationship with our users and all of the new members who join us in the amazing world of CRYENGINE. It's all about getting even closer to our community, understanding their needs, and expanding my knowledge about almost everything! I want to use my experience as an indie developer and as a developer at Crytek to help serve the community and look at new possibilities. I'm super excited about hosting more live streams on Twitch, introducing new features in the engine, having guests on, and talking about the things that you guys are interested in.  I love Twitch as it's so much fun to interact with the community.

What are you most excited about working on in the next few months?

The specific thing I am most excited about, I cannot tell you about it! Yet. You'll have to stay tuned. But generally, I'm just super excited to be interacting more with everyone using CRYENGINE. I'm ready to evangelize our engine super hard! In fact, dear community, I'm ready to take it to the next step and take an arrow in the knee. Are you?!

Cheers, Roman! If you want to survey our new Junior Evangelist in his natural habitat, you can tune in tomorrow, Sunday, January 24th, 2021 at 6 pm GMT+1, right here on our Twitch channel, where he's going to immerse himself in the CRYENGINE Indie Game of the Year nominated game, ColdSide. Not sure what game to vote for? Tune in and get an idea of the game that will make your decision easier!

As ever, we look forward to your feedback in the comments, on the forum, or via Facebook and Twitter. Join Roman, pick up tips and tricks, ask questions, and more by joining our community and the CRYENGINE development team over on our official CRYENGINE Discord channel. If you find a bug in the engine, please report it directly on GitHub, which helps us to process the issue quickly and efficiently. Don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel, where we host a range of content, including tutorials covering all aspects of the engine and game design.

Are you looking for your next career move? At Crytek, we value diversity, and we actively encourage people from all kinds of backgrounds and experience levels to apply to our open positions, so join us over at LinkedIn and check out our careers page.