India’s independent video game development industry is experiencing a remarkable rise. For many years, Indian games were associated with failed Bollywood cash-ins and cricket simulators of dubious quality. By the mid-2010s, however, the landscape began to shift. Developers Arvind Raja Yadav (Pyrodactyl Games), Zainuddin Fahad (Ogre Head Studio), and Shailesh Prabhu (Yellow Monkey Studios) created projects that captured the attention of a global audience. Their games — Unrest, Asura, Socioball, as well as Lovely Planet and Good Robot — demonstrated that India is capable of generating original concepts far beyond the familiar genre clichés.
From Bollywood Cash-Ins to Original Concepts
India’s mobile market long remained hostage to two pop-culture magnets: cinema and cricket. The vast majority of studios produced cookie-cutter titles aimed at quick local demand rather than long-term reputation. The very phrase “Indian game” tended to provoke a smirk from international audiences rather than curiosity.
Today the palette is far more diverse. Puzzle shooters, RPGs with branching narratives, and procedurally generated action games have appeared on global storefronts. These projects have begun to shape a new image of India as a source of quality indie games, where creativity is on par with technical execution.
Pyrodactyl Games and Unrest: An RPG Set in Ancient India Without Heroic Grandeur
Arvind Raja Yadav combines the roles of director, programmer, and game designer at Pyrodactyl Games. His flagship project Unrest is an RPG set in ancient India, where instead of epic heroes the player follows “ordinary” people: a peasant girl Tanya, a former priest Bali, an heiress to the throne reduced to a destitute wanderer. Every decision the player makes shapes the course of the story.
On his path into the profession: back in tenth grade, Arvind wrote a small game in C++ for a school project, and the dream never let go. In college he joined international teams working remotely on mods for Half-Life 2, and then founded his own studio without waiting for his degree.
On funding: in 2013, a modest goal of $3,000 was set on Kickstarter. Within a month the project raised $36,251. Arvind emphasized that without a publisher every dollar had to be spent with extreme care, and a detailed plan existed before the campaign even launched. His creative credo is simple: make games from what personally inspires, without confining oneself to any particular genre or aesthetic.
Other Studio Projects
Following Unrest, the studio released the RPG-fighting game hybrid Will Fight For Food: Super Actual Sellout: Game of the Hour (2015) and Good Robot, a roguelike shoot ’em up featuring procedurally generated urban levels and battles against swarms of robots.
Ogre Head Studio and Asura: Mythology as a Source of New Fantasy
While Pyrodactyl turned to history, Ogre Head Studio went further, reinterpreting Indian mythology and attempting to build an original fantasy universe. Zainuddin Fahad, co-founder of the studio, had been passionate about games from early childhood, discovering the classics of the 1990s on his father’s PC. In pursuit of his dream he abandoned a management degree, became an artist, and landed his first industry contract at the age of 19.
On the motivation to found the studio: according to Zainuddin, most Indian companies operated under a sweatshop-style service model that left no room for creativity. He called his friend Niraj, pitched the idea, and the next day both of them quit their jobs. That was how Ogre Head Studio was born, with the ambition to create “epic” original IPs.
On mythology: Zainuddin is convinced that one cannot simply transplant historical narratives from a textbook into a game. Instead, the studio used mythology as inspiration, building its own world populated by the races of Rakshasas and Devas, deliberately rejecting Western tropes such as orcs and elves. Asura, a top-down hack and slash with permadeath mechanics — where a character’s death restarts the run — plays on the idea of reincarnation: when the demon dies, he is reborn with a new set of abilities.
Yellow Monkey Studios and the Global Market Without Illusions
Not every Indian developer bets on “Indian-ness.” Shailesh Prabhu, founder of Yellow Monkey Studios and now creative director at the Danish studio Cape Copenhagen, targeted the broadest possible international audience from the very start.
On the market and monetization: Shailesh openly stated that he never believed in the Indian local market, where games generate nothing close to the interest commanded by cinema or cricket. In his observation, the ecosystem is corroded by card and gambling projects, while investment is built on speculation. Of all Indian developers, he named only around ten people whose work sparks genuine professional curiosity in him. At the same time, Shailesh is convinced that the industry is global and that it is possible to break through from anywhere in the world.
Studio Games
Yellow Monkey Studios’ portfolio includes the puzzle game Socioball, the arcade title One More Pass, the logic puzzle HUEBRIX, and Sky Sutra, which carries distinct Indian motifs. All projects share an emphasis on accessibility for a broad audience.
Why Making Games in India Is Still Difficult
Despite these bright examples, the industry remains in its infancy. The main barriers identified by developers include:
- The dominance of the service-based model, in which studios fulfill orders for Western companies instead of building their own IPs.
- The prioritization of business logic over design: cricket and Bollywood titles generate quick revenue but do not build reputation.
- A shortage of original projects and an unwillingness to take risks.
- Investment built on speculation rather than product evaluation.
Zainuddin called on the industry to “become artists and designers rather than merely serving Western markets.” Arvind, by contrast, is optimistic: studios like Oleomingus and Ogre Head have already proven that quality concepts can emerge from India.
A Parallel Universe of Indian Game Development
While indie studios compete for the attention of a global audience, another part of the Indian gaming market is developing by its own rules. Online gambling in the country is growing rapidly: according to KPMG data, by 2025 the volume of this segment exceeded $3 billion. The titles that have gained the greatest popularity among Indian users are crash games such as Aviator, Spaceman, and JetX. The latter has become so sought-after that hundreds of thousands of players across the country pursue the Jet X app download. Indian developers are also trying their hand in this space, creating their own crash game projects. They are still far from matching the name recognition of established genre hits, yet the first attempts show that local teams are ready to compete here as well. Notably, the experience accumulated in the gambling segment frequently feeds back into traditional game development: studios are mastering server architecture, payment systems, and user behavior analytics.
That said, it is original indie projects that shape the reputation of Indian game development abroad, and the path to them still runs through perseverance and a willingness to take risks.
The Price of the Profession: Crunch, Risk, and Endless Testing
Game development means long hours away from loved ones, crunch with no guarantee of reward, and exhausting bug testing. These conditions make passion for the craft a necessary but far from sufficient resource. Without discipline, financial planning, and a clear-eyed understanding of risk, enthusiasm burns out faster than the first build ever appears.
Zainuddin frames the entry criterion succinctly: before going into game development, one should honestly ask whether they truly love playing games. If the answer is yes, “99% of the problem is solved.” Making what you love, staying honest, and treating colleagues with respect — in his view, that is the formula that eventually delivers results. The stories of all three developers show, however, that motivation alone is not enough: behind every successful release lie years of hard work and a well-considered strategy.