Last week, we released a mobile game for the Telugu film Anaganaga O Dheerudu. It’s an action-fantasy adventure from Walt Disney Pictures and A Bellyful Of Dreams Entertaiment. I’ve been involved with the film in various capacities, mainly for the design of the game and the creation of some comics, and I thought it might be of interest to some of you if I shared a part of the game development process.
With a few honourable exceptions, mobile games based on Indian films offer nothing more than the most cursory of nods to the parent material. Far too often we find that movie-based mobile games are nothing more than
titles with well-established gameplay mechanics merely ‘skinned’ with the film’s characters and backgrounds, and that too in a fairly rudimentary way.
With the Anaganaga O Dheerudu game, the mandate was to create a game that allowed players to get into the skin of the lead character of the film — a blind swordsman called Yodha. The challenge was this — how do you create gameplay which allows you to fight ‘blind’ ? How do you convey the feel of a main character who cannot see his enemies?
After discussing many design concepts to carry out such an illusion, we settled on a ‘vision bubble’ mechanic. The idea being that Yodha can ‘sense’ his surroundings so well (like the famous Marvel superhero, Daredevil, that he can practically ‘see’ them. So, in the game, we created a ‘vision bubble’ — a small circular area around Yodha, within which the player can see enemies and terrain features. Outside the bubble, the screen is completely dark — with enemies shown as red dots. Additionally, the bubble gets smaller when Yodha is running, and larger when he stands still, since standing still ostensibly increases his ability to concentrate on his surroundings.
What the mechanic achieves is a sense of claustrophobia and relative unawareness about the surroundings — the player knows that there are dangers in the distance, but yet cannot see them until they are close enough. While the rest of the game plays like a standard 2D platforming beat-em-up, this one small gameplay mechanic gives it a unique flavour. Despite the fact that the players themselves are looking at the screen with their eyes, it attempts to still maintain the deception that the hero of the game is a blind warrior.
With this one small gameplay feature, we have tried to achieve some amount of sensible and relevant ‘skinning’ of standard game mechanics to suit the movie. Whether it succeeds or not is not for me to say (I’ll leave that to people who play the game) — but what we’ve tried to do is to demonstrate that, even with budget and platform limitations, it’s possible to create games that are more than casually relevant to the films they’re based on. With a little imagination, we can create games that go beyond just incorporating graphics and sounds from a movie into completely unrelated gameplay. And that one small step goes a long way towards helping these games perform the role of promoting the film, and eventually earning significant revenue. With bad, uninspired games, the whole idea is a non-starter, which would be sad indeed.
As a greater number of film production houses taking an active interest in the ancillary content created around films (games, comics, webisodes), we’re bound to see an improvement on the quality of these products. Hollywood took a long, long time before realising that movies can indeed be made into good games. Let’s hope we don’t take anywhere close to that long.