December 1971 signifies the year for India’s victory over Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh (then East Pakistan). Recreating the leaves of history, Neosphere Interactive designed their upcoming video game 1971: Indian Naval Front. The game has been in development for some time and after a slight delay it is now finally aiming to launch in Q4 of 2021 and exclusive demo keycodes are now available for Steam.
The game is a tactical Naval combat game based on actual events during the 1971 India Pakistan War. It will be played from the perspective of the Indian Navy. As per founder Hitesh Ramchandani, “1971: Indian Naval Front allows you to revive the history and experience the Naval clashes between India and Pakistan. You will take part in pretty much all the Indian Navy operations executed during the 1971 war including the transmission of military intel through morse codes.”
According to our initial conversation about the game, he shared that in the game, the player gets a chance to control iconic Indian Navy ships like Vikrant, Brahmaputra, Veer, Rajput and more. Besides controlling the warships and its armaments, the player can also fly jets and choppers of the Indian Navy Air Squadron which were used during the 1971 war in some missions. The game will have 12 to 15 levels with an estimate of four to five hours of gameplay which will narrate the actual war scenarios that had occurred between November to December 1971.
The development of the game started in early 2018 for PC and they were looking forward to releasing the game during the window of Q4 2019 to Q1 2020. It was during the end of 2019 when they decided to add a multiplayer version as well to target the ever growing esports industry in India.
Ramchandani shared, “A multiplayer version will come out as an update soon after the single player version is released. It will have three game modes and the gameplay is designed to have fast-paced and engaging air and sea battles.”
The game has faced slight delay with the launch as he mentioned that working on a PC multiplayer was a big challenge and they wanted fast-paced engaging game modes. “Adding the multiplayer mode had disturbed our earlier timeline but we were willing to take that risk, as we believed that it will make the game more marketable nationally and internationally. Apart from the technical challenges faced because of multiplayer, we were pretty much pushed behind due to the ongoing pandemic which started in early 2020. WFH was not working out for us, and we were desperate to work on this full time. This was another reason for the delay,” he added.
During the lockdown phase they had a positive experience as they joined hands with Design Media & Edutainment Solutions(DMES) as co-developer Sathish Narayanan is the founder director of DMES. “The team helped us to recreate the entire art assets of the game, which has made the graphics more appealing now. DMES is a design institute in Pune and offers courses on animation/VFX and game design. Seven game design students and a mentor volunteered in creating the assets of the game. This came as a win-win for everyone as students got the opportunity to work on a LIVE project and we got a strong team to build assets of the game,” he shared.
As per the current scenario they said that the single player campaign will be released in Q4 of 2021 and multiplayer will come out as an update next year. “We have released a closed beta-demo on Steam which is available for media/influencers and YouTubers to try out and share constructive feedback. The game has been intentionally designed to be a bit challenging for the players as it will give a rewarding/satisfying feeling once they clear a certain mission. Being the first ever PC game to be based on Indian war history, we expect a good response from the Indian PC gamers community,” he expressed.