After Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February, Ms Avayan, chief operating officer of the Frogwares studio, decided to leave her small village near the city of Bucha.
She and seven family members, including her 76-year-old mother, bundled themselves into a car, driving for six days through queues of traffic and across country borders to make it to Germany. While there, her brother learned that his house had been hit by Russian artillery strikes and completely destroyed.
Ms Bilous, Frogwares' release manager, fled from Kyiv to France along with her pet cockatiel Blinchik (Pancake).
But, like many of their team members, after some weeks passed, and finding the situation around the capital to have stabilised at least to some extent, both returned to their home country, determined to carry on office life - and their latest project - as normally as possible.
While the two women have been allowed to leave Ukraine for their own safety and now to visit Gamescom, their male colleagues are mostly banned from leaving the country under martial law. Four members of the team even signed up to join the Ukrainian armed forces as the invasion began, and is still helping out with them today.
People travel to Gamescom in Cologne from all over Europe and the world to seek out the latest video game trailers and hottest new demos. The event, which is normally visited by almost 400,000 attendees over several days, doesn't just attract the casual gamer.
Its Opening Night Live evening, held at the beginning of the trade fair and hosted by Canadian presenter and games journalist Geoff Keighley, has been seen as one of the biggest nights in the video gaming calendar in recent years for games companies to reveal what they have in the pipeline.
This year, the night, also watched digitally by hundreds of thousands of fans, has been especially important considering the major US gaming conference Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) failed to appear once again as an in-person event, for the third year in a row.
With every airport in Ukraine destroyed, Ms Bilous and Ms Avayan hoped to take a train to Warsaw in Poland, then catch a flight to Frankfurt in Germany and move from there to Gamescom. But with so many people desperate to travel out of Ukraine, rail tickets from Kyiv tend to sell out in seconds.
The only solution was to take a bus and wait for 11 hours at the border between Ukraine and Poland. Luckily, the pair's flight to Frankfurt was delayed too, meaning they could still attend the event on time, despite the anxious wait in between.
On 4 August, Frogwares announced a fundraiser for the game it has been making during the invasion. Renowned for its series of adventure games based around fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, the studio's latest title isn't too far from what it knows best.
Sherlock Holmes The Awakened will be a remastered version of a previous game the studio made, and is described as "a Lovecraftian adventure into the heart of the Cthulhu Mythos" - a reference to horror writer HP Lovecraft and the world he created.
In just six hours, the fundraiser met its goal of €70,000 (£59,000). It has now raised more than €200,000 (£169,000), with over a week before it closes.
"Maybe the news annoys the public because there's a lot of news about Ukraine," says Ms Bilous, sitting in a booth passed every second by throngs of chattering Gamescom visitors. "But we want to tell people what it's like to be there, in the news. So that's why we came here."
Ms Avayan agrees: "We don't want the rest of the industry to forget about us."
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