An interview with the creators of Unrest, an Indian RPG like no other

Pyrodactyl Games is what happens when a studio decides to make games for itself rather than chase what’s trending.

Forged from the heady fever than encapsulated many a ’90s kid with an aptitude for code and games; Arvind Yadav, founder of Pyrodactyl, cut his teeth by working on Half-Life 2 mods such as Dystopia.

On discovering that licensing the Source engine was cost-prohibitive, he decided to go ahead and make his own game engine. The Source isn’t exactly suited for 2D games anyway, and making his own engine also enabled him to learn a lot of programming fundamentals.

This resulted in Pyrodactyl’s debut effort, A.Typical RPG. In his words, it was a game on “how much college sucks and my god, aren’t adults annoying!?”.

Following this was Will Fight For Food, a quirky role-playing brawler and now, Unrest, an RPG set in ancient India. I managed to have a conversation with Yadav on what makes Pyrodactyl different, why Unrest isn’t your usual RPG, and the social issues prevalent in his latest effort.

I started making games when I was in college. Pyrodactyl is a studio that makes role-playing games and [they] usually have very different conversation mechanics. My first game had you choosing tone and emotions instead of replies. The second one allowed for over 48 different responses to a query in some case. And Unrest has a different way of judging an NPCs opinion of the player by using three variables: friendship, respect and fear.

(See: Unrest preview: an unexpected game from India about India)

One of the rare PC-only developers

In a country where mobile game developers are in the majority, it’s rare to see someone develop for PC. Reason being, for most it doesn’t make commercial sense despite the humungous install-base and new found profitability. Yadav seems to be cut from a different cloth. He doesn’t throw statistics, numbers or jargon around. Rather, his reasons for sticking to the PC as a development platform revolve around personal interest:

I think part of it is that I always wanted to make games that I would play. When I was growing up the games I played were on PC. I’m a huge fan of the Prince of Persia trilogy, and my brother and I played a lot of Virtua Fighter 2 on PC as well. I never really got into mobile games growing up. People when given the freedom make games that they want to play. I guess if someone grew up playing mobile games, they’d gravitate to that.

What makes a game “Indian”?

While it’s admirable for him to follow his passion, it was odd to see a game from India, steeped in Indian culture. His reasons for making Unrest were, in his words: “To see Indian stories and Indian protagonists in video games, which is super rare”. His goal was to make something holistic and organic that wouldn’t seem like a force-fit by any stretch: