Happy Holi from the Indus Team — And a Surprise Character Reveal

By
Rishi Alwani
Posted on
2022-03-18

Holi is a major festival in India and Indus is a game with a heavy focus on Indian culture with a futuristic twist. It only made sense to combine the two. Also known as the Festival of Colours, the Indus Team felt that celebrating Holi with rangoli would be apt.

Originally, rangoli adorned untiled entrances to Indian homes. It represents happiness and positivity of the household along with welcoming good fortune. Aside from being a festival staple, rangoli has also been around since the time of the Indus Valley Civilisation.

With that in mind, Holi marks the best reason to reveal one of Indus’ characters, Mor.Ni as rangoli. While we’re holding back on details regarding her backstory, motivations, and role in the game for a later date, that didn’t stop the rest of the team to drop hints on what to expect when the game is finally playable (including some additional characters). You can check out the full video right here, featuring the fine art from rangoli world record holder Sachin N. Avasare.

Considering our current games — MaskGun and Silly Royale, celebrate Indian festivals with events and skins, you can definitely expect the same from Indus when it’s finally playable. More so considering that one of its core themes is Indo-futurism.

To us, Indo-futurism is the balance between representing India’s glorious past with a hopeful future. From the perspective of Indus and its lore, it all started with the questions: ‘What if instead of going extinct the Indus Valley civilisation advanced to the space age? And what if we extrapolated that to an entire planet rather than just a river valley?’

So how does this guide us? Well, it aids in being able to extract elements from Indian arts and culture and create a fictional world using them to convey the feeling of being Indian at the same time as being futuristic. For instance, the island of Virlok, where the game takes place, mixes up ancient architecture and culture with futuristic technology.

We’ll be expanding on Indo-futurism in a future post. For now though, we hope you have a great Holi.