January has been an action packed month for the Indian game developers with Socioball, Splash Damage: Survive if you can, Heroes of India, Bowling Central and now Puppet Punch. Developed by Mech Mocha, a studio based out of Ahmedabad; Puppet Punch is an action game where you take on the creepy puppets with a boy named Pablo inside a puppet theatre.
Speaking to AnimationXpress.com, Chief Mech at Mech Mocha, Mohit Rangaraju describes, “Puppet Punch as the name suggest is about Puppets. When we started Puppet Punch we wanted to make an action game with all the classic action elements like punches, lasers and bombs. So we were thinking about what an enemy would be and we thought why not have puppets as we can go very local with the puppets of each cultural and at the same time have some fun. Puppets move weird and can lead to some fun and it turned out that way.”
The game’s character Pablo is situated inside a puppet theatre with different clans of puppets ranging from Indian, Oriental and European puppets coming and attacking Pablo where he is equipped to defend himself with different weapons and also throw different punches.
The game was developed in Coco Studio 2dx with a very polished 2D art with a lot of work happening on the different puppets that appear from above.
“We started developing the game when we were students and developed it part time for six months. We started working full time on the game last summer, so the development took one and half years to complete,” adds Mohit. “We were working on a different look for the game and we wanted to stand out from the crowd. So when we were looking at creating the enemies, we thought of not using robots or witches – that have been done to death – so we landed on an idea of using puppets.”
The puppets have been given a local touch with puppets coming in from a lot of different regions. Mohit explains, “For puppets we took reference from Rajasthani puppets and Kerala puppets, Oriental puppets consist of Chinese, Indonesian and Thai characters so we can connect to the audiences from these countries and draw parallels with their culture. In future we plan to introduce more puppets from different nationalities like the Russian puppets and German puppets and reach out to a wider audience and keep the engagement going.”
The studio being a start-up did not have enough funds to give out to the developers and opted for the part salary/part revenue model, where some of the developers and designers were part of the game’s revenue system. “So as a small indie studio what we did was instead of paying them off in salaries; we gave some of the developers and designers revenue share. We had a part salary and part revenue sharing model so each of the team member has a kin in the game and they can go out of their way and do well for the game. Harry Mack, who is a very experienced sound designer, worked on a number of projects prior to this also agreed to the part revenue share model. He generally works on pixel games and strategy games and this was a different experience for him too. He had to incorporate a lot of cultural elements in the game with sounds coming from India, different parts of Europe, China and varied countries. Since the game is an actioner it needed a lot of sound effects like: bombs and lasers and he has done a wonderful job.”
The game is being published by Kedoo Entertainment, a Dubai based start-up, started by ex-Glu employees. Mohit adds: “When we started out, we were just students and wanted someone who already had experience of the international market. We were looking for publishers that would publish our games well. Everyone suggested that publishers don’t put much effort into the game and generally publish the game and cross promote it and get it over with. We wanted a publisher who’ll be as involved as we are in the game and Kedoo was the perfect choice. People at Kedoo were willing to spend time and put in effort and also gave us some development funds which meant they had a stake in the game and helped us in a lot of game work.”
Games are a risky business and no one can predict that it will be a profitable venture and one cannot overlook certain markets as there is a dire need to change this. “Since we now have investors and everyone on board, we need to be a profitable venture. If not in term of money coming in then in terms of value that we need to create which we can exploit afterwards. So what is important for us is that we need to get as many players as possible who love the game and will spend good time playing it,” he adds.
The soft launch has been one of the things that developers across the globe are resorting to, in an effort to get users to test their games and point out the bugs in certain markets before launching the game globally. Mech Mocha too had soft launched the game across various markets like – India, Canada, New Zealand, Indonesia and Sweden. This helped them tweak the game a little and chuck out the bugs before the big release.
“We soft launched the game in five markets and our target was spread awareness of the game and test it too. We iterated over the game and improved every aspect in terms of tutorial and balancing, so as a company what is important is we create a value that a lot of people play our game and create a large user base to enable us to monetise through the game better. We currently have video ads and in-app purchases already incorporated in the game.”
Premium vs Freemium – A debate
“Puppet Punch was intended to be a freemium game right from the development stage. If the next project demands to be premium and the free-to-play mechanics don’t help much then we definitely take the premium route. I don’t think Mech Mocha would restrict itself from this market. Right now from what we’ve learnt from the game; that it is leaning towards F2P and we would be developing another free to play game soon,” Mohit reveals.
YouTube has become a major player in user acquisition and popular channels like Pewdewpie can generate lot of buzz on the channel before the release. “YouTube is playing a critical role as it is not biased and anyone can sit in front of the computer and play the game and review it. The platform also helps in getting a lot of download numbers as the guy who recently did our game review had close to 30,000 subscribers and a lot the subscribers wanted to play the game so it generated a lot of buzz around the game, which is yet to hit the app store,” ends Mohit.