"Developers should be okay to scrap games"

Yellow Monkey Studios is one of the few Indian indie game developers to have gained international prominence. Nearing its five year anniversary, the studio is hard at work finishing up its unannounced upcoming game, but the four-member team took some time out to talk about their journey over the years and their views on the Indian game development scene.

A lot of people are not okay with cancelling projects. They feel like, ‘We’ve created a prototype, so let’s get it out there’. But if it’s not good enough, you probably shouldn’t put it out,” says founder Shailesh Prabhu (pictured, centre) when talking about the mind-set among Indian game developers.

In fact, we recently scrapped a project. It’s a concept that works and it could be a good game someday, but it’s something we can’t manage at this time. So we’ve scrapped it, and I think more developers should be okay to scrap games for whatever reason – if it’s not good enough, if they can’t do justice to it,” he added.

But make sure you scrap it while it’s still in the prototype stage, and not once the game is in production,” cautions Krishna Israney (pictured, right), who along with Prabhu forms the studio’s creative think tank.

Prabhu went on to reveal that they came very close to cancelling their last game – It’s Just a Thought, which eventually went on to win the award for best original idea at the hoPlay ’11 video game festival in Spain.

It (It’s Just a Thought) had its drawbacks, but we had put too much time and effort into it, and there were some good elements that worked – the idea, the art, the music –which people eventually liked,” said Prabhu, who presented a post-mortem of the award-winning game at the NASSCOM Gaming Forum’s recent Mumbai developer meet-up.

Yellow Monkey Studios is set to announce its new game soon, and MCV India will have an in-depth interview with the chief chimps” soon after the reveal.

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