Games developed in India have definitely come a long way ahead; from a time when developers were pretty much restricted to 2D games or unpolished 3D games has been replaced by games which actually look good with diverse storylines and provide players with great experiences that stays fresh.
Today, we take a look at one of the upcoming indigenous games created by Kerala based studio, Method to Madness. The company has just released the first announcement trailer of their upcoming horror, survival game, ‘Dear Charlotte’ EP1. From the two and a half minute trailer, it is clear that the first person game manages to create the eerie ambiance by the help of its narrative prowess and creepy visuals.
To get further insights about the game, AnimationXpress spoke to Method to Madness, narrative designer, Joel Zachariah.
“Dear Charlotte EP1 is a survival horror game inspired by the works of famous studios such as Frictional games and Red Barrels. The game happens within the ruins of ‘Quantic Medical Research Facility’ wherein an outbreak takes place at the facility and you are rescued by one of the research scientists, named Dr. Kremlin. He’s a mad scientist who is believed to be the cause of the predicament you are in; however, using his guidance the player must discover clues as to how can he manage to escape the facility. ‘EP1’ describes the events of how the player manages to escape this facility with the help of an unknown force.”
What catches one’s attention is the interesting story that it revolves around. The story tries to portray the efforts of “a troubled and broken father who wanted to reunite with his daughter” and hence the title.
Originally, the game was conceptualised by Jeffy Zachariah, who happens to be the director of the project in 2012. The original team consisted of nine people, although many of them departed the team eventually over the years, the director continued with their sound designer and character artist. In 2014, Joel joined the team and the company made some tweaks in the concept and they both have been working day and night since the past one year to make this game a reality. The game was built by using standard industry softwares like Maya, 3ds Max, Substance etc and will run on Unreal Engine 4.
Why Unreal Engine 4?
Joel explains, “The engine is a fancy tool for prototyping ideas relatively quicker using blue-print visual scripting. This is not something new but it has been a huge boon for us. As our game is primarily a narrative driven game, using blue-prints helps us prototype our ideas without writing a line a code and see for ourselves what works and what doesn’t.”
As Joel informs us, they plan to release Dear Charlotte EP1 over PC in the next two years and as the game is pretty much still in the early development phase, the budget is still an intangible figure to describe. A console port is also on their mind, but nothing concrete has been decided as of now. For more feedback, the company plans to enter Square Enix Collective sometime this year with their project.
The game will not have any in-app purchases as the makers believe the model has already reached a saturation point owing to its overuse throughout the mobile market. Thus it will not be a pay-to-win game.
The company does not have any other projects to their name right now, but they seem to have a lot of “pet projects” which they hope will see the light of the day sometime in the future. Apart from this, they are also prioritising on laying down the framework for EP:2 of the game.
It’s good to see that an indigenous, indie studio is coming up with a quite polished, first person game which has a gripping storyline for the players to experience. We hope the release of this project as well as the future ones from this company are as promising as this trailer.