New Entrant in the Indian Gaming Sphere, Bangalore Based Digikhel, that is founded and spearheaded by Joel Johnson, has released their debut Arcade, Experimental game Orion’s Gold as a p
aid app on iTunes App Store.
In a conversation with AnimationXpress.com, Joel shares the making of the game.
What is Orion’s Gold all about?
Orion’s Gold is about mining for precious metals in space. Set in a future where the Earth has no natural wealth left, you are a captain trying to bring back precious ore.
The game is a sci-fi theme based game, so it’s going to be more likely to be played by a young male audience. This was a game born in the Global Game Jam 2013, so if you’re a player that likes experimental mechanics, you might like this. It is a single player game with a set of missions, and is available on IPad
How would you describe the look and feel ?
It was supposed to be a thoughts-in-a-brain where you balance between good and bad thoughts, but the players I play tested it with thought it was way too abstract, and that other lesser mortals wouldn’t get. So I switched into a good blood, bad blood theme with the heart and arteries, which apparently was far too macabre. When I finally landed on the space theme, the players began to figure out what the game was about, and that’s when we settled on the theme.
Can we have a Credit run down?
Niroop Mohandas and Rohidas Karkera at Ironjaw Studios were the wizards behind the art. Santosh Chowgule and Allen GV at 3Quavers handled the awesome audio for the game and trailer.
Please put light on the research?
I spent days reading through articles on space travel, Orion’s belt, the mythology of Orion, and teleportation. It was when I started reading up on post-apocalyptic and post-scarcity economies, that I realized I had taken research too far. And the Moral of the story that I learnt was that don’t do too much research, focus on building the game!
Which software has been used to create the game and how did you test it?
I mainly used Adobe technologies for making the game. The testing was jointly done by me and some friends at Iron jaw, I was testing during dev, but the person who played most and got the highest scores was Santosh from 3Quavers who did the sound. I’d just be checking the dev analytics, and there’d be so many sessions by Santosh. And thank God he did, a couple of days after submitting for AppStore approval, he unearthed the craziest and most frustrating bug we’ve had. So we pulled it off, fixed it and sent it packing!
What was the biggest challenge?
User acceptance! So, the game uses an experimental mechanic, and once you see it, you’ll realize that there’s no particular past game play you can draw from. Getting the tutorial done in the best way we could, and staying motivated to finish development of the game was pretty hard. Luckily the guys at Iron jaw and 3Quavers were incredibly supportive, as where a couple of game dev pals.
