Established in 2010 and based out of Pune, Rolocule Games is an independent game development studio focused towards creating high quality console-like interactive entertainment soft wares for next generation platforms like tablets, smart phones etc. Rolocule has set its presence in the hearts of gamers with games like Flick Tennis: College Wars, Super Badminton 2010 and Touch Squash the World of Championship.
At the 4th Nasscom Gaming Developers Conference, Anuj Tandon- Co- Founder of Rolocule took the audience through the making of their game Flick Tennis College Wars,which has been featured worldwide by Apple on the App Store and has won the International Mobile Gaming Award (IMGA) in the People’s Choice Category at Mobile World Congress, Barcelona in March 2012.
Anuj, in his session, focused on the kind of techniques used to create Flick Tennis: College Wars, challenges of the game with informing about the release and post- release scenario. Also, Anuj spoke about the flick and tap technique used in this game and shared that for the making of Flick Tennis: College Wars, the team of Rolocule studied various tennis playing styles, various gestures and reactions, which a tennis player experiences as the tennis ball is approaching the player.
Speaking to Animationxpress.com’s Zeenia Boatwala about the vision behind Flick Tennis: College Wars, Anuj, shares, “After creating a squash game and badminton game we felt we were ready to create a tennis game (a logical step) but we did not just wanted to create any tennis game it had to be different than any tennis game out there in the market and so we focused on creating a unique concept of adding story and creating characters for a tennis game.
Flick Tennis: College Wars is composed with the modes Head to Head Multiplayer, Doubles, Story mode through a Comic Book, 12 difficulty variations, 11 tennis courts and 10 unique players Varied tennis playing styles in the game including Defensive Baseliner, Aggressive Baseliner, All Court Player, and Serve & Vollyer were also explained to the audience with speaking about three opponent levels of the game being the Beginner, Amateur and Professional. For understanding the flow of the entire game, the team designed a 36 pages comic strip.
Expressing more on the research front, Anuj, highlights, “We initially researched and play tested a lot of mechanics before finalizing on “Flick” also we studied a lot of tennis matches and talked to players to understand their psyche before designing the AI.”
Anuj also acquainted the audiences with the failure of Flick Tennis: College Wars, which was the heavy tutorial, which was displayed at the start of the game. It has taken around 8 months in the making of this game with 7 artists working on it. Initially Flick Tennis: College Wars didn’t have the multiplayer mode, which was the biggest lacking aspect of the game.
Rolocule team wanted to launch this game with the launch of Wimbledon, but it couldn’t happen and the game was finally launched August 12, 2011. Flick Tennis: College Wars was initially released on IPAD and later converted for the IPHONE users. You can download Flick Tennis from the ITunes store and the IPad version costs $3.99 and iPhone version $2.99 with a Free Lite version of the game also available.
Informing more on the future ventures of Rolocule, Anuj, adds, “We have plans to embrace the freemium business model of gaming and also make android games.”
