The word ‘gaming’ is normally associated with having a good time, and the word ‘killing’ is a criminal offence; but when you get to kill people for having a good time, that’s like the ultimate fantasy for a gamer. DSK Green Ice Games’ debutant game Death God University gives you the opportunity for having this sinful pleasure.
DSK Green Ice Games, the studio which has been operational since August last year, is a fairly new studio steered by an industry veteran Alexis Madinier, who hasover 20 years of vast experience on games like Twinsen’s Adventure(Little Big Adventure), Need for Speed V-Rally 2, Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed and many more.
“I was heading DSKSupinfogame (one of India’s premier video game development schools) for three years and have been in India since 2008. In beginning of 2014, I decided to leave the school and work on this game development studio within the DSK group,” Alexis states.
Death God University(DGU) – a puzzle adventure game was initially started as a concept by the students. The studio then started working on the concept, keeping only the Chibi art style. The game has you playing a student who wants to become an assistant to ‘Death God’. The main premise comes straight out of a dark Hollywood movie wherein you collect souls by killing people.
You’ll have to set traps, combine items and roam to find your targets,before you solve all kinds of puzzles to graduate, killing off people who deserve it whilst making the deaths look like accidents.
“Killing people on behalf of death god – is a very dark premise; to neutralise this theme we wanted a contradictory art form to support the idea of the game. Something that is light and funny. Thus, the Chibi art style was visually fitting to what we had conceptualised. Chibi art form was something that the students had done with the concept game and we kept the art form since it can lead to very funny animation,” he explains on using Chibi art style for the characters.
The trailer has references from the pop culture with characters like Harry Potter, Miley Cyrus and Spock being executed in a way that may not go down well with their respective fans, and could either have them lining outside DSK Green Ice Games with flaming torches in hand or lead to a lot of hate comments. But, the studio has managed to give a comical twist to their ‘horrifyingly humourous’ deaths.
“The trailer is a real-time sequence we put together,” he adds. “There’s not too much gameplay shown as we don’t want to spoil the elements of comedy that feature heavily in the game. Aside from combining items, we have purposely kept things minimalistic.”
Alexis mentions that using the characters from pop culture added to the craziness of the game.
“Working on pop culture helped us a lot. We can play on what people do in real life but in a ‘parodical’ way so it’s helping the game targeting real people/ characters in a very ‘parodical’ way. It helped us to make more crazy puzzles and crazy situations but it all makes sense because players know how the real characters behave in real life.”
The studio has gone out of its way to ensure that the people working on the game are talents from all around the country and not just from the school.
And while India is saturated with most studios working on mobile games, this was something that Alexis never had in mind. He mentions the studio was much focussed on making games that they would like to play.
Probing Alexis about the current market trends where the mobile phone games have had more footprints in the recent past, he begs to differ, “According to a Gartner report of 2014 worldwide, PC market currently sits at 19.7 per cent; mobile is at 16.87 per cent and consoles still lead the way with 48 per cent. But, these numbers are irrelevant here in India,where almost 99 per cent of the game developers are creating mobile games.” He further went onto say that the Indian market is only about $300 million, which is 0.3 per cent of the worldwide revenue. “Mobile is big, mobile is important but it is not the dominating market.”
The game which was launched on Steam Greenlight – a usual route for the developers these days to get their games noticed among the gamers -where it received an amazing response from the community with the game being greenlit in the first five days itself. Also the game is making waves on Twitch as it was featured on Unreal’s channel – the engine which Alexis mentions allows for quick prototyping and ease of use and currently the best in the market.
As far as the Steam element is concerned, Alexis is quick to respond: “It is the matter of money simply. If we go the publisher path, then the publisher will take the bigger chunk of the revenue. The publisher will then lend us money that we have to reimburse our royalties every time. And I have worked in the industry since 1992, and no company that I have worked with has generated revenues on royalties the first year after releasing the game.”
Drawing inspiration from DGU, Alexis believes the time is right for the Indian ecosystem to explore the PC/console platforms in an already saturated mobile market. “In five years, we want to be the PC and console studio in India,” he ends.