All of us sometime or the other must have imagined slaying a dragon in our mythical dreams, but with ‘Urban Viking’ one can actually get the experience of slaying dragons on their Android devices.
Custom Technologies creative engineer Saurabh Sameer expounds: “Most people in their lives have someone who is itchy and nagging, sometimes it’s the insensitive boss, or the demanding wife, or an over jealous colleague. So this sort of gamifies those ‘dragons’ and gives us an opportunity to slay them for having troubled us, by not really harming anyone (chuckles).”
The studio ran a contest called ‘Hatch’ with ZICA students pan India, where students were asked to design a simple dragon depicting the person they may not like, many of them shared the dragons of their life and nearly 90 entries were received for the competition. This was won by Ayush Bajoria for his ‘Snakey Dragon’.
And the journey for ‘Urban Viking’ doesn’t just stop there, the makers happened to be in a script reading session, where in a discussion with Krupa Sagar and Reshu Nath who were directing a film called ‘Stupid Cupid’ for MTV Films project, this is an initiative wherein six acclaimed young directors mentor six first time directors to create six short feature films for MTV Indies and Viacom18 channels, which will also be published on the YouTube channel of MTV Indies after the first telecast.
“The film is a fun-filled entertainer which breaks down the barriers between forms -Cinema, Comics and Gaming. The hero of the film is a game developer who makes a game which becomes popular; we were prompt to suggest why not show him making ‘Urban Vikings’ they loved the idea, that way the game players get to know about the movie and movie audience get to play the game, it is a win-win situation for both parties,” says Saurabh.
The gameplay for this game is somewhat inspired by the mechanics that were used for the viral ‘Fruit Ninja’, where one has to strike or cut as many fruits flew across their mobile screens. The game took nearly four months in development with a team of six working on the programming and art along with the game design. Priya Desai is the programming lead for the game and Amit Prajapati is the lead of design. The game is primarily created using Unity as a game engine and Adobe Photoshop for creating the game art.
He adds: “We chose to release the game at Comic Con Bangalore because we wanted people to connect with the game and also try out the game at the stall itself. We managed to gather the attention of quite a few enthusiasts, though we would have liked to see a bigger turn-out.”
The game released on 13 September on Google Play Store, and takes up nearly 23 MB of installation space, taking into consideration the graphic motion comic feel and also heavy game art it’s rather reasonable. Till date it’s estimated to have nearly 350 plus installs with a 4.7 rating from 52 users.
“We want to create a cult following for ‘Urban Viking’, and we also have plans of launching merchandise around the game to create that much more buzz around the IP. We would be strategically looking at launching the game on iOS and Windows platform by Mumbai Comic Con,” he ends.