How the Indian Air Force got its game

Guardians of the Skies, the official game of the Indian Air Force was launched about two years ago, and has gone on to be downloaded more than 3 million times, and won a couple of awards. Here is looking back at its story, which not only captures how it came into being and what went behind the scenes, but also a brief 'coming-of-age' of the small team which made it. 

You can get the game for Android, iOS and Windows. 

Why do we make games ?

​Games are supposed to be an escape from the reality, in a world of dreams. Where we can be what we wanted to be before we got caught up in the daily grind. 

When we started to make games, we had to ask ourselves - what do we make games about ?

If our players were to escape and role-play as some ideal character.. who could those be ? 

• Who are our role models ?
• Who safeguards our existense from external threats ? That our institutions are preserved and fundamental rights not under danger. 
• Who are our Heroes ?

The answer was simple - the soldiers. And so we decided to make games on Indian military history. 

Intial efforts

As the first few of us got together in early 2013, we had limited experience in even basic 3D modeling, forget about making a full fledged game with all its programming challenges. We didn't even have an office, and weren't even located in the same cities. We anyway decided to learn things as we go along, and started with some smaller projects initially. 

1. Rockets Away
Rockets away was an animated short about the Kargil war of 1999, and a story about helicopter units assaulting enemy entrenched on the icy mountains, being well aware of their vulnerability to enemy's heat seeking missiles. Sameer wrote the script, and Bharat and Anurag did the modeling, texturing and animation. 

Everything was made in Blender - an open source 3D software. Blender's new GPU based rendering engine - Cycles was put to test by purchasing a second hand cycles compatible GPU installed in an old PC. Many shots were left to render overnight. The entire effort took about a month, and was released on 28th May 2013, the anniversary of the attack.

The short was received very favorably, gathering about 100,000 views quickly, and we got great feedback from audience, and comments from veterans as well - and we decided to now combine 3D modeling with programming - and create an interactive game, where you not only see the story, but get to live it. ​

2. Operation Morning Glory
By now we had sort of an office, a makeshift place, where for furniture we had few chairs, beanbags and a table, which also doubled up for meals during lunch. We had walls with newspaper stuck with tapes, so that we can put post-it notes on top as we generated ideas. Operation Morning glory was conceived during a meeting held over a mattress, where Sameer elaborated the concept and Bharat and Anurag digested with some samosas. 

OMG, was designed as a PC based game on a fictional scenario with about 5 levels, where you flew an IAF mirage (something which Sameer had himself flown, and knew its operational capabilities) deep into enemy territory. Bharat was to handle all graphics, and Anurag will do the programming. The game took about 3 months to finish and was released on private defence forums as a PC download.

We got good feedback, and requests for a mobile game, so we decided to do a mobile port. The game proved quite demandeing on performance and was barely playable. We spent about another month tweaking the inputs, and optimizing the graphics, and finally made it playable on mobile.
We decided to just release it for android, and see what we could learn out of it. With no marketing budget, the game on its own, pulled about 100,000 downlaods quickly. We realized we were on to something now. You can get the game here: Operation Morning Glory. ​

Arrival of the Indian Air Force

And then, just as we were getting warmed and learning how to to make games, the Indian Air Force came out with a requirement inviting game developers to bid to make its official mobile game - for us, that was a dream come true and promptly turned up to present our case. So did 120 other developers. 

Some of the heavy weights which participated included Disney-UTV and Reliance. The dogfight to win the IAF bid lasted over 8 months, with participants reducing after every round. And finally, the last man standing.. was yours truly. We had won. 

The real challenge started after that. 

The making of Guardians of the Skies

Once the contract was awarded, after that it was literally lying taking off in a jet. The throttle was opened full blast, and it was not held back for the next 9 months till which the production lasted. 
By now the team had expanded to include more members, and immediately, the lead developers/designers became 'Centurions' - those who were putting in more than 100 hours a week - i.e, 7 days a week, 14 hours a day, notably Bharat, Joshua and Anurag. 

While the prototyping was taking place regarding flight physics etc, the main story line was conceived. The major challenges were

• How to showcase various fleet elements of the IAF, namely fighters, transports, bombers and helicopters in a single campaign
• Showcase various terrains like sea, mountains, cities, deserts etc
• And embed all this in a realistic and enjoyable plot where the excitement grew along the levels and culminated in a climax

A fictional kingdom of Zaruzia was conceptualized, and a plot made and approved which mixed and matched all the above elements in a balanced and approachable manner. 

Learning to fly
While Sameer off course was a veteran of the IAF, and Anurag knew how to fly as well, the lead designer - Bharat had never flown, and he was in charge of designing the entire look and feel of the game, so it was important that he got a perspective from the air. So he was made to sit in a cockpit, and bounced around till he had enough. When he got out, he’d never appeared happier to have his feet planted firmly on the ground !

The Design and user-interface 
The design had to be a mix of ergonomics (on the cramped space of a mobile – where screen real estate is always limited) and great look and feel. 

​On the screen-flow side, the design was to be derived from design guidelines of the IAF.  We decided to make the main menu screen looking like a pilot’s uniform – and the IAF guidelines for the uniform were very-very stringent – detailing to the point of mentioning the distance in millimeter regarding spacing between a uniforms buttons – which were followed to the Tee. 

​And in the HUD, there had to be a lot of controls and information, similar to what a pilot might be seeing, but it should not clutter the scene and not come in the in the way of the player. This was additionally compounded by the accuracy of flight controls – since the game was being made for a person who might have never flown before, yet the game was being testing for accuracy by fighter pilots who always demanded more and more accuracy of the flight envelope. It was a tight rope walk where flight controls were kept as a good balance between approachability and accuracy. 

Optimizations
​An added level of optimization which was required was keeping the target hardware in mind. The game was aimed at an Indian Audience, who had a budget phone and was vary of large download sizes as well. So that game had to be rich in graphics, without being heavy on download size or RAM and CPU consumption. A lot of optimization techniques were used, like

• LODs
• Occlusion culling
• Texture atlassing etc

And resultantly, the game was able to packaged around 60 mb, while a comparable game at that time – Storm Raiders, was around 800mb. 

​The workhorse of the entire production was Unity3D, here is a brief peek under-the-hood. 

Multiplayer version
At that time, in Unity3d the support for multiplayer gaming was very limited and the game required a multiplayer mode which could be played on the local wifi without needed an external game lobby server. For this, a local multiplayer protocol had to be implemented, where one player created a game and the game broadcasted over a specific port its IP address, which another game over the same wifi network could find at attach to – a totally custom implementation.  

Release and reception

​After a production run of about 9 months, where majority of learning was gathered by the team on the go, the game was finally ready to be released. The game was scheduled to release in December 2014, and was released by the Chief of the Air Staff – Air Marshall Arup Raha at IAF auditorium. 

​The game has been received very well. It quickly rose to the top of charts, accumulating downloads. The first store where it crossed million downloads was the Windows App store. Android came next. To date, it has been  downloaded more than 3 million times, with an average rating of about 4.3 on various app stores. Typically, games from the Scandinavian countries were featured in Indian Stores, now it was an Indian game getting featured in the Scandinavian and other app store across the world, including ahead of the games released by Disney, which had been a competitor in the IAF game’s bid. 

​The user feedback was overwhelming. Some of the most rewarding feedback points where when people talked about how they felt like a real IAF pilot flying jets for their country, or how the game became a bonding point between a father and a son, or how someone who had once been a game but left, was brought back to gaming by this game. 

Awards and features

Few of the several awards the game went on to win have been

• Best mobile application (game) in 2014 from Microsoft India.
• Features and trended as the top ‘Make-in-India’ category game on Android by Google India
• Awarded by Unity3D and Microsoft ID@Xbox 

Major learnings

• ​Don’t crunch – as mentioned above, during a major production period, the team members worked 100 hours a work-week, this was enormously full of fatigue, and un-sustainable.
• No R&D during game production – A lot of features had been planned  during game production, which the team had never worked upon, example multiplayer. These techniques had to be learnt, implemented and testing on the go, again a major stress point for the team.
• Don’t plan ‘level-wise’: Considering this was a client project, and the regular progress was needed to be shown as ‘level’ completion – a lot of code was written and code-based expanded as we finished level after level. This lead to a lot of ‘spaghetti’ code, which was been expanded and made to work with existing written code – not the most efficient way to program.
• This was an in the trenches learning experience, and the team learnt valuable lessons regarding importance of production planning and architecture designing – which are effectively being applied in the next games coming from Threye. 

Epilogue

​Why we make games ? In our case, as a tribute to the Indian Armed forces.
​Shortly after the game was released, the Indian forces launched a successful extradition of citizens stuck in the war zone in Yemen, coming to the aid of not only Indians nationals, but from other countries as well, for which they were justifiably applauded as heroes.
​Our games, are but a small acknowledgement and appreciation of our forces from a grateful citizenry.