Sports based videogames coming out of India are rare and most of them developed are for the cricket crazy nation. Be it in its natural form, puzzle or quiz the video games have received equal importance as the sport. With the franchise based sports getting popular in the country like Indian Premiere League (IPL), a lot of other sports have cropped up with similar setting – be it kabaddi, badminton or even the ongoing football frenzy with Indian Super League (ISL).
In wake of the second edition to the Football tourney, one such Mumbai-based game studio, GameEon has developed a Football simulation game – Indian Football League (IFL).
AnimationXpress.com spoke to Nikhil Malankar, founder GameEon, to find dig its heels deeper into the game, and to understand why the studio is releasing so many games and what is in store from the studio in the near future.
The game was developed in Unity in two months and the studio is planning to add more features and additions to the game with further updates. The game currently includes 8 teams representing different states from the country and a basic gameplay of direction, pass and shoot.
“We developed the game starting out only as experimentation but the game turned out to be better than we expected,” he said. “Now, we are putting out updates for the game on a timely basis, based on the feedback we are receiving, which has so far been positive.”
The game currently has crossed close to 7,000 downloads and the makers are expecting it to cross the 10,000 mark by next week. “We are receiving 600-700 unique daily downloads and so far we have 2 lakh gameplays,” reveals Nikhil.
Comparing IFL to other football simulation games like FIFA or PES, which have already been in the market and have large team and budget will not be judicious. The game does have certain bugs and freeze moments which needs ironing out, which Nikhil says the team is working on.
Another important aspect which disturbs fluent gameplay is the popping up of Ads in between a session, this becomes more irritable during crunch moments like when one is on the verge of scoring a goal or converting a pass to take the ball in the opposition’s half. Though the studio has cleverly introduced a feature, wherein the player can choose to watch a video before commencing a game to allow uninterrupted gameplay. The game also has social features like sharing the replay among friends and allowing one to show-off his/her footballing skills.
Talking about the past experiences and learnings, Nikhil informs, “Special Ops was a great learning experience for the team. Being a paid game, it did well on the App Store, but the game had many glitches and feedback was not enough. But with IFL, we put a lot of time on feedback and get the game right.”
The 7-member studio is currently working on a number of games just to understand how the market works to different genres and have developed more than 15 games in the last one year. Nikhil reasons, “Once we have a proper grasp of this market we will be slowing down, A LOT!”
“We are primarily focusing on self publishing games and understand that aspect too. We loved working on Special Ops a lot and would be more than happy to take time and develop top quality games once we have studied the market. Games on that big scale take a lot of experience and time, so this is our preliminary steps to gaining that experience,” ends Nikhil.
