Seven Summits Studio, the game development studio behind many games like Pigment, Petite and Picto is one of the many indie setups that has been one of the torch-bearers for the Indian gaming industry across different international festivals and winning accolades for its games. The studio recently tied up with another one man gaming studio TeaPOT Games for the new flight simulator game Avion Flight Simulator 2015.
We got chatting with founder Asar Dhandala about the new game and the association with TeaPOT Games.
“Founder of TeaPOT Games, Satish Chandra is a very good friend of mine and is also a solo member studio like mine. He is a programmer and I am usually on a lookout for good collaborations like I did for my previous projects Pigment and Picto. It was of mutual interest for aviation that made the collaboration possible and make Avion come to life.”
Avion Flight Simulator 2015 is currently a 12 aircraft flight simulator, which contains a number of missions that has to finish to unveil all aircrafts; each of these have been modeled with immense details using Maya. The environment in the game has been done using Unity Terrain and the airports have been developed using Blender. The game contains 9 airports in total that’s divided into 5 commercial airports, 2 seaports and 2 small airports. The game currently boasts of aircrafts like Boeing 777, Sukhoi Su-33 and Canadair CL415 and 9 other commercial aircrafts.
The game was developed in a span of one month, currently out on Android and will be made available on iOS come September. The studio is also planning a Windows port for the game but the team has been waiting for a go ahead from the Developer Relation Team at Microsoft to make the port possible.
Asar explains, “Avion will not have in-app-purchases ever. If you look at different aircraft simulation games that are out in the market currently, most of them have only one aircraft which is free and for the rest of them you have to pay with real money or game money. We have 12 different aircrafts in the game and all of them would be free. Each aircraft has certain mission one has to complete and the last one is free playing mode where you can fly around for as long as you want. But to unlock that mode you just have to watch a video and that is it.”
India for one has been an ad-heavy market and it is very easy for developers to get carried away and use a lot of in-app-monetisation methods within the game that eventually hampers the gameplay and frustrating the user. It is encouraging to see that developers nowadays are paying more attention to best practices when it comes to monetisation methods in freemium games and also keeping gameplay as uninterrupted as possible.
“So for 12 aircrafts there are 12 video ads to watch. We would also be showing full screen ads like everyone does, but that would not be after every mission as we have designed a special metric which would calculate successful landing or crashes player has gone through and it changes according to how the player plays and we would be showing the full screen ad accordingly,” expounds Asar.
Asar and Satish have expansion plans and are certainly looking to make Avion a flight simulator franchise which will later feature military aircrafts and warfares along with a number of other aircrafts in this game.
“We have 12 aircrafts that are all commercial. Later, we are planning to introduce Airbus A380, the largest airliner in the world currently and also Boeing 747-8, Boeing’s largest version of 747s and the largest passenger aircraft currently available.”
“The way we have designed Avion is that we are looking forward to make it a franchise. The entire code process is written in such a way that it can be modified and expanded later. We soon want to work on creating a War Fighter simulator where we introduce military aircrafts and warships.”
Asar’s recently visited Casual Connect Asia 2015 and he is now heading to the USA edition taking along with him his games Picto and Avion of which Picto has been shortlisted for Indie Prize showcase.
