Mumbai based Runestone Studios has recently released its 2D gaming app Saving Iza on iOs and Android Platforms.This single player free gaming app follows the story of Xonkie whose beloved planet Iza has been overrun with waste.
In the overall game play, Xonkie’s mission in the game is to not let his planet Iza, be destroyed and the player will have to help him switch and sort through waste – matching 3 similar waste objects in a row or column to make it disappear. Matching 4 or 5 items create recycled objects that help you clear waste faster and more efficiently.
Each level of the game is packed with a limited number of moves or time. You need to achieve the highest score possible to collect up to 3 candies for Xonkie in each level. There are completely optional power ups that you can either purchase or get some of them free by logging into Facebook. Both the Android and iOS versions of this game have Achievements and Leaderboards.
Speaking to AnimationXpress.com about the factors that went behind choosing this story line, Rushabh Shah, Founder of Runestone, says, “We wanted to create a game that would be fun to play and one that propagates a message for eco-friendliness at the same time.”
The team that worked on this game was led by Rushabh Shah who was the Team Lead and Game Designer along with Neti Shah as the Concept, Story Creator and Design Lead, Abdul Rahim Malik as the Game Developer, Alika Gupta and Janki Soni as the Concept and Game Artists.
Once the team finalized the concept, they then started to work on rough prototypes of the game, Rushabh adds, “With the prototypes in place, we play tested them and chose the one which got the most number of votes.”
It did happen that the team at Runestone wasn’t happy with the aesthetics of the game and they went on to change the entire look and feel of the game during the concept art stage.
A vibrant look and feel is instilled in the game to match with the liveliness of Xonkie. Also, a blend of showing trash and alien world together was a challenge for the team.
Neti adds, “We did not want to portray the trash as filthy but strike a balance between the alien environment and human trash.”
Putting light on the technologies used for this game, the team has made use of the Adobe Suite for executing concept art, 2D animation and also GIMP was used by the developers for quick resizing and scaling.
“We used the GameMaker: Studio Game Engine and used its inbuilt scripting language, GameMaker Language for coding the game”, highlights Rushabh.
For testing the game, the team created a private and public Beta set up that allowed a select group of users to play the game and report bugs and feedback. “One bug that had cropped up that caused the elements on screen to fly out for no apparent reason and it took us a fair amount of time to pin down the cause. We managed to fix it with some sorcery!”, informs Rushabh.
Runestone wants to keep creating games with fun intuitive gameplay at their core and when possible spread out a positive message, “We are constantly tweaking the game and new levels will be added regularly with newer game play elements”, concludes Rushabh.