One step for Paradox, a giant step for Indian owned IP in gaming and animation.
A glitzy do, filmstars and a fair sprinkling of the media marked the release of BattleDust: The Championship, India’s first 3D game for the PC, released by the Reliance owned Paradox Studios yesterday.
The game priced at Rs 399 is published by Cyber Multimedia, a subsidary of CMIL(Cyber Media India Ltd).
Battledust : The Championship is Paradox’s first effort at developing a game for the PC platform. The Studio has been involved in the development of games since its inception in 2001. Till date it has developed over a 100 JAVA and WAP games with new titles being added every quarter.
Some names that come to mind when talking about wireless content are Indiagames and Dhruva Interactive, both of which have been in this sector for a long time now. Indiagames has been succesfully securing licenses for the mobile platform to International brands (Hollywood) like Buffy, TDAT and Spiderman.
The launch of ‘Battledust’ is significant as barring a few Tenali Ramas and Chota Birbals in the animation sector, and the Buffy and TDAT mobile games in the gaming sector, the creation and develoment of intellectual property in the Indian animation and gaming sectors has been slow and far apart.
Marketing initiatives involving cross media promotion being the order of the day, Paradox has produced a FMV (Full Motion Video) entitled ‘Fight’ with Indian Rock band Pentagram providing the background score. The fully 3D animated FMV is currently airing on MTV.
The video features hand key-framed high resolution models – with a polygon count of up to 20,000 – animatedly enacting the story, amidst high-quality special effects.
Proudly announcing the launch of Battledust, Paradox CEO Anurag Khurana said that, ” With the launch of this game our endeavour is not only to offer the country’s gaming aficionado a product which truly meets international standards but also contributes in promoting the gaming culture in India.”
Cyber Multimedia CMD and Publisher Pradeep Gupta says,” Most of Indian expenditure in developing content for the PC has been in the field of education. As disposable incomes rise the market for games all across Asia is going to grow considerably.We expect to sell around 10,000 copies of Battledust in a year’s time.”
The launch witnessed a fair share of glamour with the entire cast of an upcoming Vikram Bhatt movie, Jurm launching the game. Also present were officials from Indian and international cellular operators, which partner with Paradox in many, a wireless content deal.
Sachin Naik, Business development manager for Milestone Interactive which is also a player in the game development space was present at the occasion.
Commenting on the camaraderie shared by the Indian gaming community, Naik said that, “We (Indian game development companies) are quite cool with each other. Though we are all in the same business, the market potential is so huge that there is space for another 40 companies.”
Battledust’ features 7 warriors, and 8 selectable levels. It boasts of high level AI (artificial intelligence) wherein if a player gets lazy and begins to rely on a certain set of moves, the oppponent gets smart to it and begins dodging them easily.
Indian character Major Veer
The game requires players to go through gruelling combats with opponents at each level. The final opponent is in true Indian fashion termed as Lord Moksha.
Indianness is also evident in the names of some characters such as Major Veer. Another interesting add-on bundled with the game is a 44 page full colour comic that explains in depth the story and the background of the characters and the motives for their fighting.
The development cycle of the game lasted for around 2 years with the pre production work taking close to 4,800 man hours. 52,687 lines of coding, 600 code files, 10,000 frames of animation are some of the game facts mentioned in the launch press release.