How a bunch of students turned their game jam entry into a world-class mobile game

Roto is a game on Android that made its mark earlier in the year as being one of the more polished pieces of entertainment out of India. Sporting a minimal aesthetic that reminds one of a well-designed iOS or OS X app, and gameplay mechanics similar to Super Meat Boy, it is a slick slice of digital goodness.

However, you can’t download Roto anymore. It’s been pulled from the Play Store. For a very good reason. You see, Lucid Labs, the studio responsible for it, has found a publisher. It will be relaunched by Malaysia-based Weraku Games. The company would foot development costs to make this platformer even better, and allow for an iOS release as well.

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It’s a remarkable turn of events for a game that began its life as a result of a game jam. We spoke to Lucid Labs founder Chirag Chopra to find out how the studio managed to turn a mere student game jam entry into something that’s being prepped for full commercial release.

Game jam goodness

While it might look the part of a highly-polished game from a seasoned studio, Roto is actually the efforts of students who took part in the Global Game Developer Competition 2013. It was originally a browser game entry called Black Sun.

Roto was designed in 24 hours for the Global Game Developer Competition. The theme for our category was to create a game using the Sun and a flag. So we thought, why not have a small ball jumping across bigger balls?

The end result was an honourable mention award and a cash prize of $1000.

Going pro without a publisher

After rounds of feedback and testing which suggested that the game should be ported to mobile, Lucid Labs felt it had something special.