Charlie’s House and Indus Battle Royale Development

By
Rishi Alwani
Posted on
2022-04-08

If you’re wondering why we’ve not had an update in awhile, well it’s because we’ve been adding a new studio. Yes, the team working on Indus has got its own office. The new studio is home to development of Indus on all platforms. Our first studio is still operational, it's home to MaskGun, Silly Royale, and well, our Indus rangoli art.

When we set out to build our studio, called Charlie’s House (you can check out why here), the objective was to craft a space that would true to four key values that we believe are the pillars of our game development philosophy: Creation, Cooperation, Community, and Craft.

Creation
In order to have our team in the best mental space to develop Indus, we made it a necessity to double-tint our windows and sound-proof our walls along with opting for Ikea ROG chairs for all to create in comfort. Our is also filled with art and life-sized props from the game to align with the ambitious world being built. After all, you can’t design shooting with an assault rifle accurately if you don’t have a true to scale, life-size version to refer to on hand right? There’s ample couch space and a terrace with a view too for the moments you just don’t want to look at a screen.

Cooperation
That said, game development is as much a collaborative process as it is creative. In order to foster a cooperative work environment, we’ve opted for an open office space with shared desk space between team members in order to allow for greater communication. It’s easier to make decisions when there are no nasty dull cubicle walls in the way of a good idea and executing it in-game. In fact we’ve taken it a step further. There are no wires on our desks either, with cabling hidden from plain view to allow for a frictionless work environment.

Community

At SuperGaming we believe great teams make great games. And much like FIFA Ultimate Team, you can’t have a great team without chemistry and social links to eventually forge a feeling of communal responsibility. To build that we’ve thoughtfully considered and engineered spaces for team members to relax and unwind at. From our lounge complete with table tennis tables, a PS5 and a state-of-the-art 75-inch TV to our terrace with a gym and a filter coffee machine, Indus developers are spoiled for choice on how to spend their time at work away from work all while strengthening those crucial bonds to make India’s most ambitious game.

As you can tell, we’ve painstakingly considered each detail no matter how big or small. Suffice to say this also includes our tech and tools, including our motion capture gear.

Crafted

And speaking of details, that also extends to things some might think are invisible. For instance, we've designed our wireless network with seamless use and reliability in mind, handpicking Ubiquiti for our routers and the company's tech has been labelled as the Apple of WiFi. This ensures that there's always access to the Internet to get tasks done. We could've opted for a more economical set up, but the objective here is a dependable network that's fast and easy to use with as little friction as possible.

Furthermore, our table tops were crafted with intent too. They sport a resin designed to show off the convergence of the river Indus which inspired our game. It's a subtle yet powerful way to remind us why we do what we do — and who we're doing it for. You the player.

So, why move and what did we learn?

While our first studio is awesome in every way, there simply wasn’t enough room to host development on Indus in addition to our teams working on MaskGun, Silly Royale, and our soon to be announced web3 game. This made our Indus studio a necessity. And along the way it became somewhat of a learning experience.

Somewhere between deciding what kind of resin to use for our tables to deliberating between keeping the PS5 or Xbox Series X in our recreation room, we realised that designing the Indus studio is a lot like building out Virlok, our a battle royale map. Every single aspect of it is crafted with intent.

In fact a lot of the discussions for our office reminded us of what we’d be wondering about on Indus. Such as our drop sequence.

While making Indus we constantly asked ourselves ‘what do we want our players to experience?’. The drop sequence on the map is the beginning of any battle royale and in a way sets the tone for what's to come and what kind of adventure players will expect. We designed our drop sequence to be unique from all other games.

It's designed to make the players feel powerful and have a heroic entrance to the battle royale. Players don't slow down to soften the landing when they reach closer to the land, they slam into it like the heroes they are meant to be.

And while the intent of Indus is to make a game that’s fun to play, the intent of Indus studio is to let our developers build a better battle royale. The space we’ve crafted will hopefully allow us to build Indus at the scale and grandeur that is worthy of your time.