IronCode Gaming is a global game developer and publisher focusing on development of innovative and entertaining games for smartphones and PC platforms.
Headquartered in Noida, New Delhi, IronCode develops games of various genres ranging from casino, casual and adventure, to puzzle-solving and strategy.
IronCode founder and CEO Pallav Nawani spoke exclusively to Animation Xpress, divulging the upcoming gaming projects, the story behind the name ‘IronCode’ and his take on the gaming industry of India.
Can you introduce your company to our readers?
Ironcode gaming was founded in 2009 by brothers Pallav and Gaurav Nawani. Ironcode focuses on developing fun adventure games for an audience that loves storytelling and solving fun puzzles.
What are your upcoming projects?
Our next project is tentatively titled Kaya Joshi: The Magic Detective. The titular character, Kaya, is trying hard to establish a detective agency. The few cases she’s had so far have been boring but successful, and she is raring to take on a more challenging assignment. Unfortunately, her wishes come true – suddenly, she finds herself in the deep end, trying to outwit a formidable supernatural opponent.
What follows is a dangerous and thrilling game of hide and seek that begins in Miami and ends in an ancient Mayan temple.
Magic Detective is an adventure game with hidden object elements. The game focuses on storytelling, and in puzzles that naturally arise from the story. The puzzles are not a foreign, arcane construct that obstruct storytelling, but a fun little diversion that unexpectedly turns out to have more depth, and even unveils more of the story.
The main objective we want to achieve with this game is to tell a good story and design puzzles that meld into the story itself, like moss on stones.
Who will be your target audience?
Our target audience is everyone who enjoys a good story. Hopefully that includes everyone! We plan to release the game on the desktop platforms (PC, Mac and Linux) as well as smartphones (Android and iOS). We are aiming for as wide a distribution as possible.
What’s your take on the gaming industry?
By and large the gaming industry is seeing an exponential rise, both in terms of the revenues as well as the players. Indian gaming industry is projected to be worth Rs. 1.1 billion by year 2020. At this rate, Indian gaming industry will soon surpass Bollywood in terms of revenue! And this is when gaming revenues from smartphones are mostly from ads only.
The only thing we would like to see more in India is people willing to put money on games, to allow an ecosystem to flourish where good games prosper and developers who make them prosper as well. You can’t have good things unless you make money off them!
We also need investors who are willing to bet on people who aren’t making free to play games. There are many roads to success in game development, and not all of them need to pass through free to play land. People have found success developing premium games, and investors also need to realise that. It is far easier to make money on platforms like Steam where you develop a full-fledged game for a targeted audience.
Why did you name it IronCode gaming?
We are often asked this question, and it is an interesting anecdote. When we started the company, we spent a lot of time brainstorming the name, but we couldn’t come up with a good one. Ultimately, I wrote a small perl script. The script would take words from a list, and combine them in various ways, and then write them to a file. We then went through the list to find if there was something that we could use.
Our first few trials were done without finding anything good, but then one day, we finally found an interesting name – Ironcode.