Xaxist Arts, an indie game development studio in Nashik, established by Anup Sarode in August 2011, believes that games are the best form of expressing creative arts. Keeping this thought in mind they are now working on their first 3D gaming app ‘Rolling Doobie’.
The studio that was set up with the intention of developing awesome causal games, till date has created games Coupon Monster, RoboCleanz, Pizza Mania and the Idiots Brain .Also created social applications for reputed brands like Vaseline, Ponds and brand logo designs for Kites and Konark Tours and Travels.
Currently in production stage, ‘Rolling Doobie’ is targeted at game player’s aged 17 and above, the game play follows the story of game characters named Bongdroids inspired from Bongs and Android phones in a fun-loving way.
Bongdroids who live on the planet Bongetron, once visited planet earth and tasted the special ‘Wisdom Leaves’ grown by Doobie, the farmer kid. They fell in love with those leaves and took them all to Bongetron. Every time, they fell short of wisdom leaves, they would come to planet earth and rob all of the Doobie’s fields. One fine day, when Bongdroids were left with last pot of wisdom leaves, the King Bongdroid gets frustrated and thinks of growing these leaves on their own planet. He orders Bongdroids to bring Doobie to Bongetron. The game falls into the genre of an unlimited runner where Bongdroids are after Doobie and he runs jumps, slides and flies.
To know the detailed information about Rolling Doobie, AnimationXpress.com’s Nicole Fernandes asked Anup Sarode, CEO, Xaxist Arts about this game and he says, “The game is named ‘Rolling Doobie’ as it is set in different rolling worlds based on different environment themes.”
For creating a strong game, Xaxist undertook in depth research which helped them to conceptualize Rolling Doobie. They explored the culture of people interested in the use of Marijuana, followed fan pages on Facebook about Cannabis, interacted with people from various countries, learned about their lifestyle and smoking habits, did detailed research on the effects of Marijuana on human brain. They even took the initiative to listen to Psychedelic music and learnt about the Psychedelic art style through various blogs.
Adding more on the usage of 3D models, Anup Sarode mentions, “We wanted the final assets to be in pre rendered 3D images format, so we explored the low poly design area with Blender for modeling and making it livelier through use of various colors with GIMP”.
The color textures of this game were decided in advance to bring a suitable, elite but simple look and feel at the same time. As this game is in its production stage, Music, Sound FX and its marketing is yet to be done.
Speaking more on the challenges faced, Parahuram Korade, Art Director mentions, “We chose Blender and GIMP because of its licensing which suits well for indie developers. I would like to point out that the rigging and animation for Doobie was one of the most difficult tasks to crack as our team was new to using Blender.”
Four team members have worked on ideating this game. Parahuram Korade and Anup Sarode were an integral part of ideation and art direction. Nilesh Muwar took charge of Character Modeling / Animation and Sandeep Jadhav was responsible for UI and Asset Coloring. Environment Modeling, Game Design Programming were taken up by Anup Sarode himself.
Once this studio succeeds in convincing Apple to accept this game proposal, the game will be available in USA, Canada and other European countries on iPod, iPhone and iPad. At its later stages, it will also be accessible on Macintosh and Android as well.
“We might succeed, we might not, but at the end of the day, what really matters to our studio is that we tried.”, concludes, Anup Sarode.