Special Ops is a first person shooter by Mumbai based GameEon, a gaming company that boasts of 16 games in its war-chest prior to this. Founded in 2011 the company is the brainchild of Nikhil Malankar along with co-founder Prasad Kajarekar.
Special Ops is the story of Robert Cain, a Special Forces officer, who loses his team members on a secret mission and it is now up to him to rebuild his team for completing his assignment only to later discover the dark secret of his higher authorities which led to the death of his former team members.
Speaking to AnimationXpress.com, Nikhil explains: “The game is a first person shooter with story laced around the game where the players experience the game in ten parts. Each level will lead to the climax that has plenty of thrills and moments of suspense. The game offers a lot of customisable options, right from the upgradeable attributes like health, player’s speed and the armour; which this will help the player going forward in each level.”
The studio took inspiration from Epic Citadel – a fantasy setting from Epic Games showing the might of Unreal Engine 3 running on smartphones. Nikhil adds: “We were blown away by the Unreal Engine’s power and the quality of work that it could produce. We decide to do away with Unity and start work on our next game on Unreal Engine and it took about 4 months for the game to take shape.”
GameEon recently announced that an MTV independent artist Rob Spaz will do the music for the game and the soundtrack will consist of raps that will further engage the audience in the gameplay. “The association with Rob Spaz happened through an Android software named CyberDust where I contacted him and he was more than happy to work on a game and too an Indian game. The music is mostly lyrical rap to go with the storyline.” Prasad Kajarekar has designed the cool artwork of the game.
A lot of games have multiplayer engagement and that is what drives the download numbers on the play store, speaking about the multiplayer options, he reveals: “We are currently working out the singleplayer gameplay which should be out by February 2015 and then we will work out the multiplayer angle, but certainly the multiplayer is on our mind. Ours is a small team and since we don’t have the expertise to carry out multiplayer right away, we will cross that bridge when the time is right.”
Exploring platforms the game will have a release on iOS and Android initially with the plans to release the game on PCs and consoles going forward. “We are currently busy with the mobile phone version of the game and will first submit the game for iOS approval and then on Android. We want to do the PC and console version too but that will happen at our very own sweet time, as the quality needs to be much better on the consoles and PCs as against smaller screens.”
The game will have two versions with one available for premium value where the users can experience all the ten levels and this will be complimented with a free version that will have only a few levels to play with.
Console gaming culture in India is not something one can really scream from the rooftops about, thus leading to many developers easily backing-off after seeing there isn’t really an audience for consoles. “Console gaming in India has not been that great but nobody has tried to bring it up. We want to give it a shot, someone has to take the plunge and there’s no harm trying,” reasons Nikhil.
The game being developed in the Unreal Engine will only be available on high-end smartphones that can handle such performance oriented games. Nikhil states: “Unreal engine itself restricts us to target the low end devices; the game that we are developing will not support the low-end devices.”
But, the road hasn’t been too rosy for this young team. Recently when they put up a post on the NASSCOM gaming forum – that was ridiculed by the industry and a few taking pot shots at the game – claiming to have developed a AAA quality game for the first time in the country with ‘Special Ops’. Nikhil chuckles, “Such small issues don’t matter. People will talk; we’ll keep doing our work. Majority of game developers are developing clones but quite a few of them in the scene are doing real good work. So things will only improve from here on.”