Pallav Nawani, Managing Director, Ironcode Software

Penetration of gaming is increasing in India and this is not just in terms of more and more Indian users lapping it up as a form of entertainment but also in terms of more and more players stepping into the game development side from the B & C cities too.

One such example is Ironcode Gaming based in Dehradun. Ironcode has developed the internationally successful puzzle based PC game 'Pahelika: Secret Legends' which has a problem solving gameplay. The game was developed at a budget of just INR 2-3 lakhs over a period of 16 months. Run by brothers Pallav Nawani and Gaurav Nawani alone, the studio has generated a lot of curiosity with its work.

Pallav Nawani, MD, Ironcode Software shared, "This is our fifth game, before that we had developed some moderately successful games. This time we were looking for something that will be really commercially successful. Another feeling was that whatever game we make, it should be fun to play and fun to make. We looked at the market and saw that some of the games allowed you to interact with and make use of objects in the game. Looking at that we felt that the time for adventure puzzle games had come."

Also from their previous game Angkor they had learnt that the timing of launching a game is extremely important and decided to make a game that was a little ahead of its time. The idea was to develop a simplified adventure game.

Pallav says that they kept the user interface of the game very simple because the people who play casual games are not hard core gamers. "We wanted our game to be totally immersive and that the player should lose himself in the game. We tried to enhance the feeling of the player being out there in various ways, like having a first person view within the game. We have tried to overlay the feeling of a guy going on an adventure even in the main menu itself, which is again interaction based and doesn't have buttons," he added.

There was a lot of back and forth too. The game has the player going from one destination to another, solving puzzles at every stage. When development started Ironcode thought that casual players do not have much experience in solving puzzles and if they made puzzles that force the player to go from one room to another it might become too complicated. Hence they stuck to puzzles that were contained within one room. But later when they played the game they felt that it was too mechanical and the idea of multiple rooms was again taken up which called for a considerable amount of redevelopment. The game is designed in such a way that there are puzzles that will hold the player for some time, but if the player continues playing, the player gets hints with time so he doesn't get stuck.

Music and sound if used correctly can add value to the game. Pallav adds, "But good composers are very expensive. Also, when you are starting the game you don't know what kind of music should be there. As a designer you say this kind of music might work, but often it turns out to be wrong. Our solution was to buy off the shelf, royalty free music."

Sound was also one of the things the studio couldn't have done by themselves, as they did not have any expertise in sound design. There are sound effects available on internet websites but using them is not feasible, because they would have to be modified later, and that again requires experience with sound design. Hiring a freelance sound designer was a more feasible option.

"Similar is the problem with voiceovers. The thing with them is that they have to be really high quality - because if it's not, the players will immediately notice it. If you don't have a good voiceover, then you are better off without it. Hire professionals only," opined Pallav.

He further added, "When you are developing a 2D game there are many tools that are available, such as the PopCap Framework which is free to use and includes source code. Other game engines like PTK and the Playground SDK are also available. We used the Lua scripting language to extend the behavior of the C++ objects. After evaluating Squirrel, Angelscript and Lua, we felt that Lua was the best scripting language for the job. Initially the drawing was also done in Lua, as it is a very fast language. But when you use scripting languages you have to be careful about the performance issues. We found that although the Lua code was mostly very fast, there were some things that were slow and hence we moved back the drawing code to C++."

Ironcode also developed tools like the Particle Editor which enables you to use particles in different ways and a Jigsaw Generator which helps to cut images in different parts while developing Pahelika.

Again when it came to concept art, it was a skill set that Ironcode didn't have, so they hired a freelance concept artist. "We used to make a basic sketch of the area that needs to be done and give the list of the things that we wanted in the final sketch to the concept artist. After the concept sketch was made we used to review it and make changes."

"Localization was something we initially ignored. Once the game got successful and we were approached by people for different language versions we thought of localizing it. This involved tackling the problem of localized strings being longer than the original ones."

Overcoming all the challenges, Pahelika was eventually localized into multiple languages and has been one of the most successful casual games of recent times.