Let the games begin

It is an exciting time for developers in India,where video games have never been the chosen form of escapism and where the market not to mention disapproving parents has been anything but conducive to original game creation and publishing. Even as console companies Sony and Microsoft continue to retain stringent control over games created for their ever-new,unwaveringly expensive devices,the smartphone-and-tablet revolution and the online app store democracy have spawned small,independent studios that are refusing to toe the outsourced line. Take Hashstash hash is a programming data structure used in algorithms and encryption,a 10-month-old Noida-and-Bangalore-based studio of five passionate designers and programmers,which has turned down half a dozen investors for fear of losing its creative spirit. In a messy two-bedroom apartment in Yeshwanthpur,north Bangalore,lead designer Kinshuk Sunil outlines the studios three in-development projects: an Android game called Zap the Knight featuring a chameleon who must rid the town of a serious pestilence; an ambitious stock market simulation game for Facebook that aims to tie in real-life interests with in-game investment choices,and a game prototyping engine he calls Trivial. The rest of his team young,restless men in cool tee-shirts quickly pulls out phones and laptops to run the demos.

The number of studios today could not have existed five years ago. A lot has changed, Sunil says. According to the National Association of Software and Services Companies Nasscom Gaming Forum,there are now over 100 studios across India that take on outsourced game development work or make their own games. Startups are probably sprouting even as we speak, says Purnima Iyer,who runs a game design consultancy,Pinaka Interactive,along with Deepti Raavi,in Navi Mumbai. With mobile game development becoming so easy,everyone I know seems to be starting their own company.

A little studio in Mumbai,which found itself in the international spotlight last year,is a fitting example of this change. On a breezy September evening at the quaint Alhondiga Bilbao an old wine factory refurbished into a cultural centre in the picturesque city of Bilbao,Spain,close to a hundred game developers had converged at the 2011 awards night by hoPlay,Bilbaos annual gaming festival that presents,promotes and awards video game producers for their originality and innovation. Seated among the lot,Shailesh Prabhu mostly got by the evening on euphoria. The indie developer,the only Indian at the festival,was nominated in six categories for an iPhone and iPad game,Its Just a Thought. I had to take a loan to travel to Spain. But it was a reaffirmation of my belief that I had chosen the right path by going indie, says the founder-director of Yellow Monkey Studios,who eventually bagged the award for Best Original Idea at hoPlay.

Prabhu represents both the possibilities and the challenges of the indie game development scene in India. The 29-year-olds stint with gaming began quite typically,while he was still at school,with his love for Nintendo games. After a stint as a game designer at Level Up,a Philippines company setting up shop in India,and then another at Bangalore-based Dhruva Interactive one of the largest gaming companies in India,it primarily provides development services to third parties,Prabhu quit to start his own studio in 2007 with a friend. For a year,the two designed a console game,Mortley: A Stitch in Time,a humorous take on Frankenstein. We pitched it to various international game publishers,such as Eidos Interactive now Square Enix London and Dreamcatcher Games,in hope of development support. While they all showed interest,they wanted us to finish the product before they would pick it up. It required funding of close to Rs 40 lakh,which made us shelve the game, Prabhu says.

Fortuitously,the iPhone India launch was round the corner and the casual gaming market was taking off. Prabhu realised his studio needed a shift in scale and platform to carry on. The approach was to stay lean,design quality games on a budget,release them independently and take the festival route to marketing them. Today,the company operates from Prabhus living room-turned-office in Santacruz. His friend has quit and three others have joined,working on a project-based revenue-sharing model that lends them a certain amount of ownership towards the company and the games they design. The companys game roster is,for the most part,peppered with end-to-end development for several local and international clients a necessary compromise to fund its indie projects. Apart from its original award-winning game,priced at 0.99,Yellow Monkey also designed Finger Footie,which launched at Apples app store during the 2010 soccer World Cup. 8220;Priced at 5,it still sells one or two copies a day. We are now working on our next game,informally titled Seqwins,which releases next month,8221; Prabhu says.

While much of the Indian gaming industry thrives on contractual work from companies in India and abroad,big global players like Ubisoft,Zynga and Electronic Arts have,in the last few years,set up studios in Pune,Bangalore and Hyderabad,respectively,to leverage the cost advantage and hire promising talent. Animation and gaming schools like the Pune-based DSK Supinfocom,which has impressive international partnerships,are infusing better-trained talent into the industry,and with US-educated graphics designers returning home,India could get a much-needed power-up. The quality bar has gone up quite a bit,whether in outsourced work or in original games coming out of India, says Pallab Nawani,an avid gamer and former software professional who started a gaming studio in Noida in 2009 with his brother,Gaurav. In true geek fashion,Nawani wrote a programme in Perl which combined several words fed by the team to come up with a name for the studio. The team liked the sound of Ironcode and the domain name was available,so that became their identity.

Today,the three-member studio is best known for Pahelika,a for-PC puzzle game a genre Indian developers seem to be favouring at the moment where you explore a well-rendered fantasy world. The game,which costs between 6.99 and 9.99,sold around one lakh copies.

PC and online games account for the second largest share,over 25 per cent,in the Indian gaming industry,next only to mobile games around 70 per cent,says Rajat Ojha,president,Version2Games,a two-year-old Hyderabad-based studio that recently became the first in India to launch an original game on Sony PlayStation 3 intended for the international market. Smash N Survive,a graphic-intensive racing combat game set to a heavy metal soundtrack,hit stores earlier this year and is priced at 9.99. The game topped the charts within days and became very popular, says Ojha,adding that console games are a miniscule part of the Indian industry,primarily because development takes almost two years and involves a high cost.

While Microsoft is yet to permit an Indian studio to develop a game for its Xbox console,Sony,whose focus in India has been exclusively on promoting localised content,is often accused of condescension towards the Indian developer and consumer. Shailendra Sharma,a 23-year-old Bangalore-based techie and gamer who owns three consoles,says,The development kits for PS3 cost thousands of dollars,but since the PS2 is outdated and no one wants to make games for it abroad,the company gives them away to Indian studios so they can continue making games for this platform. The games that have been made on them are very poor in quality and content. No real gamer will ever play them. Among the localised games for PS2 are Hanuman: The Boy Warrior by Immersive Games,Kabaddi and Gilli Danda by Gameshastra,and Cart Racing,a bullock cart racing game featuring Tinkle characters like Shikari Shambhu and Tantri the Mantri. Ra.One,based on the Shahrukh Khan-starrer,by Trine Technologies,Mumbai,was the first Indian game on the PS3 platform. Atindriya Bose,country manager,Sony Computer Entertainment,says bundling localised games with the console helps sell both. Storylines like that in Hanuman are easily accepted by parents and help the game do well in the eight-to-16 age group, he says.

Ironically,even as PS3 and Xbox game development is still nascent in India,console gaming accounted for the largest revenue share from game hardware and software sales in the country in 2011 Rs 7.3 billion of the total revenue of Rs 13 billion,according to a Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry-KPMG study published last month. Mobile games generated sales worth Rs 4.3 billion in India in the same year,growing 55 per cent from the year before.

There is no doubt that smartphones and the curated distribution channels associated with them have made it easier to make money from games,says Anuj Tandon,CEO,Rolocule Game Design Studios,Pune,a three-year-old company of seven working out of an inconspicuous 900 sq ft office that overlooks the bustling ITI road in Aundh. Back in 2009,Tandon founded the company along with fellow gaming enthusiast Rohit Gupta,whose father gave them Rs 1 lakh for the setup. All we could procure for the amount was an iPhone and an iMac, says Gupta. Three sports-based games later,Tandon says they may not be a rags-to-riches story,but they are definitely a rags to better clothes story. Rolocule the name is derived from the words colour and molecule made its iTunes store debut in July 2009 with Touch Squash,for which they roped in Dunlop Sport as a sponsor and broke even.

The second game,Super Badminton,was more ambitious: there was no game on the iTunes store for badminton and the team set about programming the complex physics behind shuttlecock movements from Guptas cramped house in Baner. Being perpetually unsure of how we were going to pay our bills was a big driving force, says Tandon. As it happened,they hit problems. In March 2010,they realised the characters did not look real. We had to go back to the drawing board and start over, says Gupta. Rejecting a buyout offer from a keen investor,the team completed the game by July 2010. We recovered our entire investment of Rs 3 lakh within the first week of Super Badminton coming on the app store. It was priced at 2.99, Gupta says. A month later,in August,they launched an HD version of the game for the iPad,priced at 4.99.

A year after that,Rolocule launched Flick Tennis,a game that fared moderately in terms of revenue,but won the studio the Peoples Choice Award at the World Mobile Congress held in Barcelona. Flick Tennis was like an art film. We realised brilliant reviews inspired us more than commercial value. Barcelona,in fact,was an eye opener. It showed us how far we had come, says Tandon. Rolocules games have had 1.5 million downloads in 100 countries and the studio is now developing two new games,one of which will be an RPG.

Internationally,especially in the US,the largest market for both game developers as well as end users,crowd financing platforms such as Kickstarter and 8bit Funding have emerged to aid indie developers. In India,things are far from idyllic,with such public funding almost nonexistent. Yellow Monkey desperately needs artists but they come expensive. As a result,the studio designs games that use art minimally. Its Just A Thought,a game that takes you through the neural network where the outcomes directly depend on your moods,relied heavily on colours and a catchy background score composed by a Mumbai-based indie musician duo. Expanding to multiple platforms,such as Android and Windows 8,will boost sales,but it also means investing in testing equipment. While it was a matter of pride to attend the hoPlay awards,the truth is Prabhu was also keenly eyeing the 6,000 prize booty.

The hardest part for any newbie developer is marketing,says Arvind Yadav,a 21-year-old developer from Jaipur. Yadavs studio is called Pyrodactyl and his second game,Will Fight for Food,an RPG about a washed-up wrestler who must work his way up the ladder,launched on online stores last week. It is priced at Rs 258 and can be played on Windows and Linux. The indie community is very close-knit. We have regular meets and brainstorming sessions, he says. In fact,as this magazine went to press,Hashstash was busy organising the Build Your Own Game BYOG 48-hour online sprint,expected to draw 100-500 indie developers building prototypes of games that tie in with the overall theme of the event. These prototypes could then be used as funding pitches by developers who want to continue working on the game. The first BYOG happened in July 2010 and saw only a handful of participants. We are drawing bigger crowds with each event ever since, Sunil says. Avid gamers would say woot to that.