The explosion of smartphone devices has attracted a lot of developers to venture out and start a gaming studio of their own. Some start out young, direct out of college and others churn out from the experience they have. Hitesh Ramchandani falls into the latter category, who after working as product manager at Games2Win, recently started his own gaming studio, Fatang Studios. Based out in Mumbai, the studio recently came out with their first game; Mystery Factory – a fall down endless platformer game.
It’s currently available for the Android version and after taking learning from this version; the studio will capitalise more for the iOS version.
Coming to the game, it being a fall down endless platformer where one has to control the ball trying not to fall off the platforms or into the traps, is a usual play when it comes to platformers and the practice for most who want to try their hands at making games, this game is no different. But where this game stands out is the polished art that it provides and the style the studio has chosen for its first game.
In this game, the developers have made use of both the tap and tilt controls which makes for an interesting play and a switch of controls will change the style how one is playing the game thus making it less monotonous than the standard affair.
But what the studio still needs improvement on is the game’s level design. I tried my hands on this new game, and realised that the gameplay is not fluid with the ball movement lagging a bit when the ball moves from one platform to another. Furthermore, the difficulty too starts a bit early for someone to adapt to the game with too many obstacles starting right from the word ‘Go’. Before I could familiarise myself with the platforms at the early start, I had to deal with the fire, laser and sharp razers coming to get me from all directions.
Apart from that, the background music in any game plays an important factor to build the gamers enthusiasm but over here, the music required a little more attention as a single score throughout the game could be heard, making the tune monotonous. This ultimately lead to me turning the music off. There is no dearth of free music online which can be utilised over here and will be a good start for developers to add more sound to the game.
The game being a freemium has its fair share of ads but they did not hamper the playing experience by popping up in the middle of the game. The game does have in-app-purchases, where one can buy a range of balls, some of which dodge fire, laser and helps one expand their experience to go further in the game. Overall, a decent game from the first time studio but needs a bit of an overhaul and design lessons to improve on their next games/versions.
The three member studio is currently working on a number of games and has decided to create two internal verticals, where a set of games will be targeted towards the Indian audience and another will be experimental games targeting the global audience.
