
Indian game developers usually focus on Bollywood[1], cricket[2], or mythology[3] as themes for their titles. And with good reason. Despite being home to a billion people, preferences are rather homogenised, making these options safe bets. Which is why Alter Army is the exception to the rule.
It’s an upcoming fast-paced action-adventure that’s in 2D and in a style reminiscent to retro-games of yore. It’s in line with what you’d expect from the days of the Nintendo Entertainment System[4] and just as tough. As you can tell, it flies in the face of conventional business sense. No surprise since it’s being developed by Vague Pixels, a duo of 15-year-old students from Jaipur, and not “traditional" game developers.
Vague Pixels consists of Mridul Pancholi and Mridul Bansal who have teamed up to work on Alter Army for over a year. Gadgets 360 spoke to Bansal to know more.
“Before this, Mridul Pancholi was already a game developer. He used to make small games for fun and used to upload it on Game Jolt and Edge. I was a tech geek and interested in game development. I started to learn Unreal. But then I changed schools and I met Mridul. We used to talk about these things a lot. After one or two years he thought we should work on a project as practice. We thought of a one month target we have to complete this project. Obviously this expanded a lot,” Bansal says of Alter Army’s origins.
On playing Alter Army, we noticed a resemblance to the likes of a host of indie rogue likes that pepper Steam such as Dead Cells and Nuclear Throne. Bansal confirms this is no coincidence.
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