While the first day of NASSCOM Game Developer Conference was packed with workshops, the second day had a lot more in store. With the registrations booths queued up with long lines, you could make out that nobody wanted to miss on the sessions, events and networking opportunities.
The sessions began with Roach Interactive’s Rahul Sehgal taking on the stage. He went on to describe how he created a game for mobile and ended up publishing it for PC. He spoke about his IP titled, Bird of Light, which is a puzzle runner. While sharing excerpts from his dev journey and how he received feedback when searching for publishers for his game, he spoke about some points which indie developers should definitely keep in mind. According to him, the mobile game publishers were hesitant to take up the game because of reasons like: The protagonist was a girl (Yes), the core mechanics were completely new and took time and effort to understand, the game had 21 levels with around 15 hours of gameplay which was deemed to less for a mobile game.
Soon, he found support from indie design and sound studio, who helped him in polishing his game and made it more presentable. As the mobile release did not work out for them, they turned towards PC as they felt the game made more sense there. The creators started looking out for PC publishers and got tremendous response. While five to six out of 50 publishers showed interest in their game, they were reverted by almost all the PC publishers they had approached. They tied up with Black Shell Media to launched their game over Steam with in beta, which he emphasised was extremely crucial to polish the game even more. Out of the odd 100 to 200 people who played the beta, around 60 per cent of them gave it a seven out of ten, which is considered quite good. Now, as they were ready to launch the game, it was tweaked keeping in mind the PC perspective. The difficulty was increased, the monetisation methods were overhauled. Finally, the game was released on 15 July at a price of $4.99 and reportedly achieved 95 per cent positive reviews. The studio plans to launch the game over other platforms soon.
An interesting thing that the developers explained was “first make the game, then choose the platform”. While it might sound whimsical and not something most developers would like to pursue, it made a lot of sense in this case. Maybe, they had indeed created the game keeping PC as a platform on the back of their minds.
After the session, the stage was lit once again for the welcome remarks and was graced by IT minister of Telangana, K.T. Rama Rao. The event was moderated by Dhruva Interactive CEO Rajesh Rao. The agenda was initiated by putting gaming statistics into perspective. He specified on how the number of developers are on a rise in India and how the country is now in top five in terms of downloads on mobile. It was also predicted that the download figure would reach 1.6 billion in 2016 and how it has grown by 116 per cent since 2015. It was also stressed upon how Indian game creators are doing by giving the example of Train Simulator by Hyderabad based Timuz Games which took the number four spot worldwide in terms of game downloads on the Google Play Store.
K.T. Rama Rao also shared his visions for providing opportunities in the multimedia and gaming sector in the newly formed state and how NGDC’s presence in Hyderabad should help boost the initiative and attract more people. Lakshya Digital’s Anondo Banerjee took on the stage next and shared his views about the event and passed on to the ambassador of the Netherlands to India Alphonsus Stoelinga who went on to explain how the developers from Netherlands (which is also the partner country for NGDC this year) should work with the Indian counterparts because of the robust ecosystem for gaming that India provides and welcomed the Indian developers to collaborate with their Dutch counterparts.
Soon after the hunger pangs had been satisfied by a scrumptious lunch and a fruitful networking opportunity, the sessions resumed.
The expo section was absolutely dominated by Virtual Reality offerings, from VR Indies to Zabuza Labs and Aptech Technologies, everyone had their own property in VR to display.
One of the most intriguing (and downright hilarious) sessions was the NGDC Evil Game design challenge 2016. Three developers namely Anand Ramachandran from Hike, Rahul Sehgal from Roach Interactive and Yadu Rajeev were asked to transform Super Mario Bros. into an Indian, free-to-play game and they let their strategies go wild. Ramachandran took up the stage and displayed his views on how to make the iconic game into an Indian, free-to-play game, his concept was basically, ‘Mario + KLPD = Profits’ and he explained it with a quirky presentation, which reflected the Indian state of games.
Rahul Sehgal turned it into ‘Mogambo wala Mario: A freemium story’ where he planned to make the game free and port it to mobile, while keeping the core essence of the game intact as that is which will bring people in. Finally, Rajeev put forth his ideas with a few points like, a giant map, localisation in all languages possible, character customisation, daily gifts and brag rights, while also touching on the daily reward category and the best one by far, topical updates on daily issues happening in the country. While each one of them managed to tickle the funny bones, Ramachandran took home the prize for the best ideas.
Soon it was time for the gaming awards of the year and the hall was full in a jiffy as no one wanted to miss out on it.
Here are the list of winners:
Indie Game of the year:
Winner: Missing: Game for a cause
Runner up: The light inside us
Student game of the year:
Winner: Proximity
Runner up: Duratron
BYOG:
Winner: Identity Rush
Runner up: Hypnobot
Gamesbond Pitch:
Winner: Jalebi
First runner up: Ultimate parking simulator
Second runner up: Tic Tac Toe multiplayer by NG Studios
Upcoming Game of the year:
Winner: Ultimate parking simulator
Runner up: Tanken
The winners were gratified with Unity Pro licenses, cash prizes, mementos and publishing deals.
With the awards, second day of NGDC concluded, but not before the attendees were treated with the famous Hyderabadi Biriyani and the live performance from the band, Antariksh.