digiKhel

Factsheet

Developer:
digiKhel
Based in Bangalore, India

Founding date:
September 22, 2012

Website:
digikhel.com

Press / Business Contact:
soapbox@digikhel.com

Social:
facebook.com/digiKhel
twitter.com/digiKhel
LinkedIn
Skype

Releases:
Orions Gold

Address:
Will be provided
on request.

Phone:
+91 96633 75213

Description

digiKhel is an indie game studio from Bangalore. Their games are a collaborative effort between like minded indies from India. They play with what games can do to you, and for you. Let them know if they're doing something right. Or wrong. Don't hold back, they can take it.

History

Last year

After seven years of working on games and interactive tech for set top boxes with NDS (now a part of Cisco), Joel decided to start digiKhel. He felt there was something missing from many mobile games of today. He'd start playing one, and after a few hours there was this inevitable question - why am I still playing this? The game is fun, but so what? He nodded his head when everyone told him that games just need to be fun, it's all in the mechanic, but he thought the player deserved more. And that's what he's trying to figure out as digiKhel.

Comikaze Coptaah!

Comikaze was an amateur attempt by Joel back in 2010 to figure out if he had what it took to make games by himself. A product of two days of work, it was his lucky charm game. He made that game on every new game tech he was trying to learn. It was his hello world for gaming. The music was provided by a couple of musician friends, Dheerendra Doss and Kinshuk Sunil. It may have been just two days, but Joel felt the sting of player indifference, and learnt just how demanding the playing audience could be. It had less than 5000 plays for the first two years.

Orion's Gold

Born in the Global Game Jam of 2013 as RestLess, Joel thought it'd be a great pilot project for the Appstore. He was to release it in a month's time, but something in it kept him coming back. Niroop and his team at Ironjaw Studios, and Santosh and Allen at 3Quavers thought there was *something* in it too. The actual development of the game took a couple of months, but the constant user testing with players on the streets of Bangalore, and the iterating took well over another eight months. A game about balancing your greed with the health of your space ship, Orion's Gold has you mining in space for precious metals in an increasingly harmful environment.

Recent tinkering

There are a couple of games on the table. One is in development, and the other still in the concept stage. The good news with the first is that whoever sees it finds it as having great promise. The bad news is that we're not fulfilling that promise. We're struggling with the decision of whether to fail quickly, release and reiterate; as against choosing to get it right at first release. We hope we make the right one. Let us know if you have any advice.

Projects

• Orions Gold

Team & Repeating Collaborators

Joel Johnson
Programming, Design, Marketing

Contact

Inquiries
contact@digikhel.com

Facebook
facebook.com/digiKhel

Twitter
twitter.com/digiKhel

Web
digiKhel.com