Game development is not that huge in India as it is in Japan or North America. However, there have been companies in India who have started to develop games. Trine Games is one of them. GameGuru.in (GG) met Sangam Gutpa (SG), who is the CEO of Trine Games at his plush office in the western suburb of Malad in Mumbai. We had a chat with him where he spoke about himself, his company and much more. Here is how the whole conversation went:
GG: Can you tell us something about yourself?
SG: I got by Bachelor’s in Game Development degree from a School called Full Sail, a leading game development school. After which I joined Electronic Arts, where I worked there for a couple of months. Then I came to India for a vacation and decided to stay back because, in the newspapers, everywhere I was seeing that gaming in India is going to be big.
Then I started researching as to who is actually going to do gaming in India? Yes there are some publishers but who is actually making games for the Indian market ‘cause they all were saying, ‘”gaming is going to be big in India” and things like that. But if you go to Korea and China, what game is selling there is the Korean and Chinese games. So it is the local games which are selling there. Who is going to do that for India? Who is going to make them sell for India? So that is the reason basically Trine was set up to start a game development house here and make some games.
GG: So that’s the reason you came up with Trine…
SG: That’s how the idea came and it was just an idea in the head and we pitched it to family and friends to raise some funds. So that’s how it all came about.
GG: What is the strength of Trine Games ?
SG: Right now, we have over a 190 people in the company and we are growing. We are expanding. We have already got a new place in Mumbai and are looking to expand our team quite soon in Mumbai only. Right now, gaming is not an IT thing. We require hundreds of thousands of people. And basically I look at the projects myself, so I spent a lot of time with my team everyday, which is very important. I try to keep everything in Mumbai for more convenience enabling me to personally talk to my team on a daily basis.
GG: What game are you developing presently? Can you elaborate on them?
SG: Currently we are working on these two games – one is Streets of Mumbai, a racing game based in Mumbai which is for the PC platform right now. We are exploring opportunities of putting it into PlayStation 2 platform as well. The game is completely Multiplayer Supported, you can log in from Delhi, I can log in from Mumbai and we can play the game together. We mapped out all the streets of Mumbai. So all the major areas of Mumbai are mapped out in this 3D world, with the accurate location, roads etc. We also had a lot of Indian cars in to the game. Gamers can actually customize things, enabling them Indian gamers to relate to it. We have played racing games before, but we are not familiar with either the street or the cars. For example, you have Tata Indica; in the game you can customize your car to the Indica. It is a dream of every gamer to customize the car he drives. You can do the same thing in the game and as one would do in real life. So that’s the whole point about the Streets of Mumbai.
The next title we are working on is a sports game. It is for the PC, Xbox 360 and Wii. Unfortunately, I cannot talk about the name of the publisher. Legends of Great India is our baby project. We have been working on it for already a year now. So that is something, which we want to take our time on. We want to spend a lot of time, because we are getting the Indian IP to the world. And we want to do it right this time. We have spent almost 9 months in pre-production only. It is a franchise project. You could make an RTS game, an MMORPG or even a third person action out of it. The reason why we have taken so much time is to set the content right. Sometimes when you are playing the game, it gets repetitive. When you keep playing RPG games and RTS games, they get very repetitive after the first two hours of the gameplay. So we don’t want to do something like that. Legends of Great India has over 500 unique characters. Everytime a player is completing his quest and stories, he will meet someone new, whom he hasn’t met before. That is what Legends of Great India is all about.
Then the other game is Wings of Control, an airplane shooter game that we have already finished but have put it on a hold right now, because we were planning to add multiplayer like MMO content to it, going completely online. As you know, the sports project just came up and Streets of Mumbai’s priority came up. So we kind of put it on hold for a moment, but let us finish these two games first and then we will go back to it and polish it completely. Because there is no point in rushing a title. When a company like Trine is on the verge of getting some of its few games in the market, we want to do it right. If the games do not sell or are not up to the mark, who is going to love Trine?
GG: Can you elaborate on the technology that was used in your games?
SG: Technology-wise, we took a completely different approach from the other studios. We actually made our own technology for our games, except for the sports title which is a cross platform for Wii and the Xbox 360. For Streets of Mumbai, it is completely our own in-house technology, which we have been writing for over a year and a half now. And again for Wings of Control, it is our own technology as well. Why our own technology? Here’s why, Streets of Mumbai has been made specifically for the Indian audience. And you know how the Indian audience is, the hardware the Indian audience has is nowhere close to what the American guys or the Europeans have. Why spend so much money on an engine, when you will have to strip a lot of features out of it. All these Indian machines have onboard graphic cards or very minimum, 32 or 64MB video cards. Why spend so much money on an engine, when you can write your own!
The current generation games are not that complicated anymore. So why license the whole engine, I asked myself. Nowadays the engines cost anywhere from a hundred thousand dollars to two hundred thousand dollars. So this is what I kept asking myself. Writing our own engine is again advantage for it, for example, for the racing game, it was critical to write your own engine, because now the team knows, our team in India is very, very new. They haven’t got used to gaming, they haven’t been doing the outsourcing. They haven’t actually worked on a game project in hand. It was very important for our team to learn the tools, expertise very well themselves. If you get an external engine, it gets hard for our team to get used to the tools and how to make export lights and how to export geometry, stuff like that, but with writing our own engine, the programmers are right next to you. So if you need any help with it, the programmer can just sit with the artist and go and give him a walkthrough of the tools, or if the artist needs a new feature, the programmer can do it. They can write it there only. This is the advantage of your own engine.
But a sports title is meant for the global audience and I would say our range is not up to the quality level of how AAA titles should be. That is why we licensed an engine called Vision by Trinigy. Vision is a very popular engine worldwide. It is completely a cross-platform engine for Xbox 360, for PlayStation 3 and Wii. They support pretty much every platform. They were also rated “The Top 5 Engines” in the prestigious Game Development Front Line Awards. That is why we want them for making the sports title.
GG: What have been your experiences of running a games development company in India?
SG: They have been good and bad. It is something which we started up in India and something, which none of us had any idea about when we initially started, like what would go wrong, what would go right, because we never thought it was going to be this much pain to get people on the go, on training. Because when we got a lot of people, it was initially 5 of us who came down to India. Five included three of my colleagues from EA, so they were the programmers and they came down and I got most of the people, like my project manager from the US.
I wanted to keep my core team here; the international team like my art director is from Greece. So we tried to keep the core guys, kind of international, because they are, honestly I say, more loyal to it. In the animation industry I have myself seen how the employee poaching is happening. So I really, really don’t want that to happen, especially when we are working on long-term year-long project. Shouldn’t happen to us. So the experiences were quite good when we got into people, we expected that we would hire them and things would go just right. But it didn’t go as planned as none of the guys had any knowledge of game development.
GG: So there is a dearth of game devlopment professionals in India…
SG: Huge, huge, huge… For the past year and a half, we have been doing things ourselves and have been training our guys. What happened was that within these 2-3 years, the shift happened from current-gen to next-gen. All the game artists or the programmers, who were working here, were just working on the current-gen games. So getting them into the company wasn’t a problem, but now training them to next-gen was a big issue for us, because now everyone expects a next generation game. You can’t just make a current-gen game and make money out of it. When you are playing games like Call of Duty 4 or Need for Speed ProStreet, it doesn’t make sense for making current generation games anymore. So basically the issue was training our guys and making the next generation art assets. So that took quite a long time.
Honestly, Streets of Mumbai was supposed to finish in October 2007. But it didn’t go right. The development and art assets just took forever to come in. But now the experience is very good, from the past 4-5 months, since everyone is on pace now, it has been quite good now. The stuff is getting done on time. The publishers are quite happy with what we are doing because Indian developers basically have a reputation that they just talk and don’t deliver. Honestly, I will tell you what the reputation of an Indian company is to a US or a European company. We take projects, commit a full project and know it that we can’t deliver it on time and then later on when the project is screwed up we just stop responding to the guy And that’s basically what the Indian mentality is.
We didn’t want to do that at all, so we went completely open with the publisher, we told him, ‘Hey man, this is going to take a long time, I know it takes 2 months, instead it might take 3-3 and a half months in India. But you are getting the same deal at a much better price and we can put in much more manpower into the project than what we can do in the States.” That’s basically what is attracting a lot of publishers now.
GG: So India is still price effective for video games development…
SG: India is still price effective. We do a lot of our artwork in China. We have around 30-40 people in China already and India was price effective to be honest till last year. Nowadays after the dollar slipped, not anymore. That’s why we opened up a place in China, in Beijing and now we will send all our major artwork to China only, which is extremely cheap, almost half of the Indian salary, the Indian cost now.
(Keep watching this space for Part II & III of this interview)