This is the concluding part of the three-part interview with Sangam Gupta, who is the chief executive officer of Trine Games.
GG: What about mobile gaming? It’s a big thing in India. Will Trine make mobile games?
SG: No No No…That is something, which requires a completely different manpower, complete different knowledge of the business. It is something that I haven’t focused at all on. I don’t think so we are going to make any mobile games or flash games at all. Maybe in the future, when we setup a separate division but not right now. Right now, we just work on the PC and the console development.
GG: Any mergers and acquisitions…
SG: We are talking to a company, but that’s about it. We are in talks with a game development company for its acquisition. Let’s see, right now nothing has been put on paper.
GG: Besides gaming, Trine is also in animation, right?
SG: Yes, we are in animation too, but at quite a smaller level. We just started off last year. We have been working on a Bollywood movie project with a movie production house in India for quite a while. So that’s about it. We are currently talking to movie publishing houses in India for doing a big project, like a bigger scale animation movie, because what we do at Trine here prevented dependency on other companies. Like for animation, gaming, we require motion capture equipments. In motion capture, you basically just shoot the character, but what do you do about the animation, movements…the computer would record your movements.
So that’s something that Indian studios have right now and that’s something that brings down your time and costs to a substantial amount. That is what we did. For gaming, making sports games has been very easy for us. Initially people had to keyframe the animation, spend months on making animation. Now we have got all those animations in a day. So we have the animation team, very, very powerful rendering farm facility here. They have 800 CPU Quad Core Xenon Processors. That actually allows them to rapidly render CG movies in a short time. The CG rendering takes forever. I have seen the guys sit here and rendering the frame takes 15-20 minutes. Rendering allows us to cut the time and increase our development efficiency and reduce our time and budgets.
GG: Would you be holding tournaments for your games?
SG: Of course. Intel has picked up the Streets of Mumbai game and showcased it in Bangalore at the Intel Innovation Zone. It is an honor for us to be on that Intel Innovation Zone. We have a lot of plans for tournaments and racing events for Streets of Mumbai. We just have to time it correctly with the release of the released. Like I mentioned, now the game is expected to be finished in March. After that, we will start all our PR activities etc only post that.
GG: What kind of games can the gamers expect from Trine in the future? And where do you see Trine in the next 5 years? What are your long term and short term goals?
SG: Games, I was a gamer too and have grown up playing games and going to forums and stuff. What I do is before starting a project, I visit a lot of gaming forums from India or abroad. I actually see what people would like and be interested in. For instance, for Streets of Mumbai, I saw Need For Speed since it’s a game which is frequently played by males and females in India. The idea behind Streets of Mumbai was that how about giving Indians hem a game, which is a genre they have been playing but now they can actually relate to it too. They can actually see their day to day places in games now. So that’s what we did for Streets of Mumbai.
Again for sports title, I go to a lot of forums. I see what people are missing from those games, the current games which are out in the market. Then we try to enhance those features, add them on the request of people. So we are starting up this thing, an audience poll that will be started soon. Once we start making a project, we are going to start a forum for the project and actively involve the developers who would actually talk to the gamers and consumers and would talk to those guys about what should be improved in the game. We are starting a beta program for all our games. For Streets of Mumbai, we are going to start a beta program next month for 100 people. Indian players will come to our website and will register for the beta program. We can actually listen to them and see ways in which the game can be enhanced further.
I feel consumers are the only people who are going to buy our games, so why should we not listen to them, why should you not learn from them about what they want, because consumers, in my opinion have excellent ideas. Infact whilst making something possibly even we guys wont’ possibly come up with such innovative ideas. So why not listen to them, this is what I say to myself. I have seen a lot happening to some sports games, every time they get released. The company just re-skins it or adds some more graphics to it, but it is nothing close to how the sport should be actually played. We have been talking quite a lot the developers and the mod community. We already have 10 people from the mod community, and 5 of them are from India only.
I want to make all my games modding friendly because mods add a lot of life to your games. For example, there is a game called Brian Lara 99 from Codemasters, which is selling even now. The mod community has completely revamped the game, added new kits, new teams, new gameplay, new features, which the developer didn’t add. Same is the case for FIFA games too. Game comes out, people completely mod it. Racing games like Need for Speed come out and people add new cars to it. That’s what keeps the game going. RTS games like Age of Empire III have a lot of mods to it. In the Command and Conquer series people make a lot of mods to it. And the same thing will be done to our games too. We are going to make it open for the mod community so that they can customize it, because there is development time here, like a 1-year development time to finish the game, so much so little in 1-year of development for the game, so we cant tweak those gameplay values, which can be tweaked for the best, optimum gameplay. That’s why we con only put it up for the gameplay. They are going to be customized.
In the next 5 years I see Trine making some more good games. I don’t want people to have two thoughts about where the game was developed. The quality shouldn’t be compromised on. It should just adjust into the current catalog of games, which are out in the market. We are going to remain committed developers for a long time, continue to make games and provide entertainment to the global audience. We are also planning an MMO-based on the Legends of Great India series, but that is something just on paper, maybe in 2-3 years, we will finish the MMO in India as well.
GG: What kind of a gamer are you?
SG: I play all games. I play a lot of sports, racing and RPG games.Since I am in the gaming business now, I shouldn’t prefer one genre more than the other, as you never know what genre you would be making next. This is a funny incident. Our games designer is from West Indies. He really, really hates racing games. We put him on Streets of Mumbai. He felt it was horrible as he didn’t know how to play racing games. We actually put him in our gaming room for a week and didn’t let him work at all. All he had to do was play racing games. We sent him to Mumbai streets and drive around the city. And guess what, after that he started liking racing.
Genre-wise, we are open to all genres because I believe you know all gamers are very important and equally important from all genres. What India hasn’t played much is the RPG genre. We guys have been playing racing games, sports games, probably some action games like Prince of Persia style, but haven’t played many RPG games. There are quite a lot of good RPG games out there in the market. Games like Gothic 3, Oblivion and Neverwinter Nights are available. So these are some very good games that I haven’t seen many people play them. Basically the reason for this is that these games require a lot of your time. And you know how a life of an Indian student in a school or college or perhaps even at work is. There is so much pressure on him. He has to go to tuition classes; he has to study for his entrance exams. When he is into college he has to study for the next entrance exams for MBAs, Masters. And work has its own frills attached. So it basically just never ends. That’s why I believe RPGs haven’t picked up yet.
However, the coming generation in India, the ones who are still in their 8th or 9th grade are getting very comfortable with the Asian culture. For example, Animax wasn’t a big hit when we were in school and college. But it is a big hit amongst the current kids. People are watching a lot of animes in India now. Pokeman has become quite popular here. I am not into anime, but I am just saying that how the Indian consumer is growing. Anime has an emotion attached to it and when that emotion factor gets into the consumer, he would start enjoying role playing games. So in role playing games you become a part of the game. I want to see what will happen in around 2-3 years time when gamers start playing role playing games. They would start to fill the emotions attached to it through character in the game. We had this girl working in the US, who was playing a final fantasy game. She was crying when she was playing the game. When we asked her the reason, she replied that the character in the game died. And I thought that was an awesome attachment that had been developed.
GG: Thanks so much for your time…
SG: Not a problem. Thanks.
(We also have a small footage of the interview with Mr. Gupta from Trine. Keep watching this space…)