‘Mobile Gaming is the Future of Gaming’ believes Nautilus Mobile, a 7 month old gaming studio which is launching its debut game ‘Song of Swords’ this August.
The Team at Nautilus currently has 6 members on board and is spearheaded by Nicolas Beuvin and they believe that they have all the punch to bring in new game play, new ways to immerse the player into the game, to narrate the story, and to make the players communicate with each other.
Other team members at Nautilus are Anuj Mankar, who is the creative director and looks after the production area along with adding and implementing new aspects to the company’s vision along with Ashutosh K . Jha and Pratik Prajapati, who are the mainstay programmers of the team and their responsibilities range from creating the prototype to bringing it through programmatically to the final shipped product, Vikram provides the team with all the necessary art assets required and also works on the niche requirements of the game such as special effects and Bharat Raj S, who is the our sole animator at Nautilus.
Song of Swords, is a single player, dynamic casual role playing game, targeted at mass auds and brings in a kind of game play that can maximize the use of touch screen and can be enjoyed by a non gamer too.
Speaking to AnimationXpress.com’s Zeenia Boatwala about Song of Swords, Nicolas Beuvin, Managing Director at Nautilus, shares, “We want the game to be fun, and yet, we will include enough difficulty to focus the player’s attention enough, so every win would feel like an epic one.”
Nautilus will release the game as a paid app blackberry app in the month of August
Adds more, “We have chosen to go in first for BB10 and the Blackberry Z10 is our primary target .If things go well, we will consider porting our game to other platforms.”
The concept of this game centers on the dwarf queen, who is a tank, and is wielding double-hand hammers and axes and as they game progresses she is joined by a various number of other heroes including a priest, a samurai, a pirate.
Nicolas adds to this, “We have kept the story line to a minimum, in order to adapt the game to the use of mobile gaming and I believe that it always a good idea to avoid complex scenario and narration on mobile games.”
Initially, the team wanted to rope in a turn based strategic RPG, but after the analysis of their prototype, they decided to settle for a dynamic casual action RPG Game, Nicolas , asserts, “ We decided to go with this as we wanted a game that would be easy to play in terms of controls, have depth and not scare the casual players.”
Games such as Warcraft and Final Fantasy have been the main force and influencing factors for the team to create this game and Nicolas adds more to this by saying, “Movies such as Lord of the Rings have been a source of inspiration to the conceptualization of the characters. And Manga such as Dragonball and Naruto have been the inspiration for the style of some of the special effects used in the game.”
The team has spent around three months in prototyping before choosing the final design of the game and in this game you will experience cutout style of animation, in which Nautilus has created a 2d looking mesh in a 3d software.
Informs more, “We have focused to bring more smoothness and fluidity to the characters and the advantage of this technique is that is save us a lot of time, without reducing the quality.”
On the programming front, the team has chosen component based model and used C++ to deliver the codings and they are also making use of cocos2dx with their personalized rendering system to render the characters
Highlights more, “Our preferred language has been native C++ as it gives us a boost for supporting multiple platforms and it gives us even the advantage of tweaking stuff as per our need as opposed to work in restricted environment.”
The toughest area that the team is dealing with for creating the game is instilling special effects. “Since the base game play was relatively straightforward and simple, the special effects were what we are going to add the extra “zing” and “beauty” to the screen.”, Nicolas, adds further.
But, creating a game is not that easy and game balancing is one more challenge that the team has encountered, but they choose to strive hard to get this in place, Nicolas shares, “We set the game mechanics and rules in place, once this was done, we then tweak the values of the characters and enemies until we find a balance. After we think we are confident with the balance, we allow the game to be played by our friends of different age groups and gender and take some feedback on their thoughts regarding playability and difficulty. On studying the results, if we feel that more tweaking is required, we do so and repeat the process till we are satisfied.”
Nautilus is already planning a sequel of Song of Swords and we would wait for its revelation.
Till then, Nicolas shares his final closing comments by saying, “Gaming will become more common than cinema is today. I am sure of it. Also, I am convinced that India will be the leader of the sector for the next 20 years.”