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The gaming industry around the world has hit an all-time peak, blurring the lines between art and games. In a similar vein, countries like India are producing and creating some brilliant indie gems and commercial games alike.
Today, the current market split boils down to mobile-centric gaming and traditional gaming. Surprisingly, some of the more interesting projects from the country come from the mobile gaming industry, with gems such as SuperGaming's Silly Royale, among others.
Similarly, one particular game that caught my eye very recently was Bigfatphoenix's Fairside Stories, a conversational RPG, effectively blending the age-old Role-Playing and Visual Novel genre.
What makes me more curious about this game is that both these genres are not something you generally hear a lot about in our country, hence, it made me ask some questions as to why and what made the studio go the route of blending these two genres to make the game.
Anand Ramachandran, co-founder of Bigfatphoenix On Teaching Values through Fairside Stories
After a few back and forth with my point of contact from the studio (and one I know from my cosplay days), I got in touch with the co-founder of Bigfatphoenix, Anand Ramachandran, to ask him some questions about their studio, the game they are working on, and what it is like to develop a game in this country.
Q) First of all, thank you so much for agreeing to do this interview. Can we start by letting you people introduce themselves and the studio?
Ramachandran: Sure, I’m Anand Ramachandran, and the co-founder of Bigfatphoenix Interactive. I’ve been making games for over 15 years now. I’ve been with large companies like Zynga, Hike Messenger, and BYJU’S, as well as a few smaller ones.
Along with me at BFP are a whole bunch of amazingly talented folks who have worked at BYJU’S, Sesame Street, Disney, IBM, Dhruva Interactive, and Zynga. We’re unique in that we have really strong learning designers, game designers, engineers, artists, and product folks in one cohesive team.
Q) India is arguably one of the fastest-growing video-game markets in both mobile and other platforms. At the same time, the development of homegrown games in the country is still something a lot of studios struggle with. How would you people describe the journey of Bigfatphoenix till now?
Ramachandran: India has always had great artistic talent and, to a slightly lesser degree, engineering talent. However, the challenge has been, until recently, the lack of a steady supply of world-class design talent. That’s changing really fast, and we’re seeing a lot of great game designs coming through these days.
At BFP, we’ve been lucky to have a great team with a strong design core (for both game design and learning design) in addition to art and engineering skills, so we haven’t had to struggle too much on the development side of things.
Work culture is by far the most critical factor in how we operate. From the very start, we’ve been adamant about maintaining a 4-day work week, an unlimited leave policy, active investment in training and skill development, and believe in nurturing strong friendships within the team. Genuinely caring about one another is the only way we want to grow the company.
Q) This is one question I always ask the Indian game studios. Personally, is there any tech or engine out there that you guys are interested in using to build your game?
Ramachandran: Unity is and continues to be our go-to engine. It’s what we are the most familiar with and currently use for building Fairside Stories. Of course, it’s also very prominent in our rapid-prototyping process.
Q) Let us move on to the game that the studio has made, Fairside Stories. What made me curious is the decision to make it an RPG game. Tell us a little bit about it, and why RPG felt like the best genre for this game to follow.
Ramachandran: We’re building games to help kids learn about values through decision-making. RPG stories, at their core, are about decisions and consequences, making them a natural fit for the kind of learning outcomes we’re driving at.
The challenge has been to identify core elements of interactive stories and RPGs to create games that are widely playable by 9-12-year-olds.
For example, Fairside Stories has kids making interesting decisions where there are no simple, black-and-white answers. By having kids consider value-based dilemmas such as ‘Truth vs Kindness’ or ‘Good for Me vs Good for Others’ in gameplay, we aim to deliver a thought-provoking experience where kids can learn about the consequences of their decisions and relate them to real-world situations.
These games draw from themes that are both familiar (Become class president, get people to come to your birthday party) and larger-than-life (Negotiate with aliens) so kids have a wide variety of experiences to learn from.
We have two kinds of interactive story formats in Fairside Stories, with a more traditional Japanese-RPG style format coming soon.
Q) Every game out there in some shape or form has been inspired by something, be it minor or major. Where did the inspiration for creating Fairside Stories come from?
Ramachandran: As far as game design goes, the inspirations for Fairside Stories are numerous; from elements of decision-making from Nerial’s Reigns to storytelling techniques used in popular visual novels like the Ace Attorney series and Toby Fox’s Undertale.
There’s also fiction and art influences from our favorite cartoons, such as Gravity Falls, Dexter's Laboratory, and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power - just to name a few.
Q) Another thing that made me curious is the game’s leaning towards education. It is a no-brainer that India is a huge market for education for kids and adults alike.
Amidst all that, where does the studio sees the game? Is it considered as an education-aid tool for kids, or is it a video game for kids? Since the studio wants to help children develop their critical social and emotional learning skills.
Ramachandran: We’ll let others worry about categorization. When you’re creating something new, people will always try to categorize your product as X or Y, depending on what they’re most familiar with.
We see ourselves as building powerful play-based experiences that make for powerful learning experiences as well. They’re games, but with a layer that gives you direct insight into what you’re learning.
We’ve seen equally good levels of excitement around Fairside Stories from kids who simply see it as a game, and from parents and educators who perceive it as a learning product. So I guess it’s working well from both angles.
Q) To wrap up the interview, what are the plans for Bigfatphoenix and Fairside Stories in the future? How is the studio planning to support the game and what is the studio looking forward to working on next?
Ramachandran: In the coming months, we’ll be adding more content to Fairside Stories, and some new game formats as well. We’re also super excited about the Fairside Squad, our global community of kids who actually help us develop the stories for our games while learning game design and social-emotional skills along the way.
Be sure to look out for our upcoming release on iOS in March 2022!
Curious to know what the team is currently doing, then head over to their Twitter account to see what awesome things they have been working on! Alternatively, they are pretty active over at their website.
Fairside Stories is currently available for download on Android smartphones, and is slated to launch on iOS sometime later this month.
